SUBLUNAR SPACE - psychogeography

Restless Liburnian Spirits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Close Encounters with Placeness: Enter the Zone

2020-05-30T16:00:00+02:00

v.3.0

Chōromanteia

"Contingency needs place," an idea we concluded with in the second part, echoes a distant, ancient wisdom. Let's pause our discussion on Randonauting and turn to Ancient Greek philosophy, where similar concepts were explored thousands of years ago. This reverberating thought leads us to a passage from Timaeus, a philosophical dialogue by Plato.

Timaeus ponders the nature of the cosmos, distinguishing three primary constituents: the Forms, representing ideal states; the copies of these Forms, which constitute physical reality; and the receptacle or space where these copies exist:

The third type is space, which exists always and cannot be destroyed. It provides a fixed state for all things that come to be. It is itself apprehended by a kind of bastard reasoning that does not involve sense perception, and it is hardly even an object of conviction. We look at it as in a dream when we say that everything that exists must of necessity be somewhere, in some place [topos; τόπος] and occupying some space [chōra; χώρα], and that which doesn’t exist somewhere, whether on earth or in heaven, doesn’t exist at all. (Timaeus 52b)

The distinction between topos and chōra in Greek, as indicated by the bracketed terms in the English translation of Plato's Timaeus, reveals a much more nuanced understanding of 'place' that is deeply embedded in the language, offering insights into the conceptual framework through which the Ancient Greeks viewed the world around them.

Topos [τόπος] refers to a specific, physical location, a tangible point or area in space that a material object occupies at any given time. It is characterized by its independence from the entities and objects it hosts; a topos remains what it is regardless of what resides within it, focusing on the exact, measurable aspects of place as understood in a conventional sense. Several English words derive their roots from the Greek word topos: topic, topology (study of place), topography (writing about place) but also utopia (un-place) and dystopia (bad place).

In contrast, chōra [χώρα] represents a broader, more abstract concept. It is not just a location but a nurturing space or field that allows for the emergence and existence of localities. Chōra transcends mere physicality to encompass the relational and contextual dimensions that imbue places with meaning and significance. It provides the environment within which things come into being and interact, offering not just room but also a contextual framework that shapes the identity and essence of what occupies it.

While topos can be seen as the concrete coordinates where entities exist, chōra suggests a deeper, more dynamic interaction between space and the entities within it, emphasizing the entanglement of context and being. This conceptualization invites a richer, more layered understanding of place, not merely as a backdrop for action but as an active participant in the shaping of reality.

In colloquial ancient Greek the term 'chōrai' was used for countryside, rural settlements - outspread but at the same time considered central. In Ptolemaic Egypt, Alexandria was described as 'polis' while the rest of Egypt was considered 'chōra'.

Chōra is dynamically involved in a thing's being and as such is ontologically essential to what the thing is. It is 'place' as expressive, as a keeper of memory, imagination and mythic presence.

In Plato's Timaeus the term is used to mean the 'receptacle' (hypodochē) onto which ideas are in-formed or in-scribed to make their particular copies that occupy and give shape to the 'kosmos' or 'world':

Not only does it always receive all things, it has never in any way whatever taken on any form [morphē] like any of those things that enter it. For its nature is to be a matrix [ekmageion] for all things; and it is modified, shaped, and reshaped by those things that enter it. These are the things that make it appear differentat different times. (Timaeus 50b–c)

Chōra remains essentially un-determined, characterless, formless, amorphous. It is neither intelligible, nor perceptible. It is a third kind (triton genos), where order emerges from chaos, coherence from disassociation, sense from nonsense.

The Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō (西田幾多郎), a preeminent Japanese philosopher and the founder of the Kyoto School, is renowned for his pioneering work that merges Eastern philosophical traditions with Western philosophical inquiries, particularly through his exploration of concepts such as "pure experience" and the notion of "place" as a foundational element of reality.

Kitarō Nishida's philosophical inquiries led him to critically assess the ancient Greeks' conceptualization of 'place,' finding it lacking in 'logical independence' or 'agency.' Unconvinced by their treatment of place as merely passive or incidental, Nishida embarked on developing a more dynamic and foundational concept of 'place' or 'basho' (場所) in his work. Unlike Plato's understanding of place as a mere receptacle for forms and entities, Nishida envisioned 'basho' as embodying self-formative formlessness—a primordial nothingness ('mu') from which all being ('yū') emerges.¹

For terms to interrelate, there must be a place (basho) that establishes their relationship. Physical things relate within a common space or, in terms of physics, a force field. And phenomena and acts of consciousness relate within the field of consciousness (ishiki no ba 意識の場). It is within that space of basho that we see consciousness and its object co-relating. 'Basho' is the standpoint vis-à-vis reality, the most concrete entailing the non-distinction between experience and reality, before the dichotomization between subject and object or the distinction between ideal and real. At its most concrete level, presupposed by all other levels, basho envelops and encompasses all a prioris, mental acts, categories, contexts, and perspectival horizons that constitute the world of objects.⁴

Nishida's 'basho' is an active, generative void in which the apparent dichotomies of subject-object, form-matter, and predicate-subject are reconciled and coalesce. Within 'basho,' these distinctions do not precede interaction but arise together, in the very act of determination and becoming. This conception positions 'basho' as a living, creative space that underlies and gives rise to the manifest world, presenting a space where differentiation occurs not apart from but within the continuum of existence.

Building on the discussions of Plato's concept of Chora and Nishida's Basho, it's fascinating to see how Carl Gustav Jung's exploration of synchronicity intersects with these ideas. Throughout his life, Jung sought to understand the mechanics underlying the phenomenon of synchronicity, culminating in a perspective that unites the psychic and material realms:

Since psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on irrepresentable, transcendental factors, it is not only possible but fairly probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing.⁵

This 'one and the same thing' is neither 'psychic' nor 'material' but prior to their differentiation. He named it: unus mundus ('one unitary world'), borrowing the term from alchemy. He might as well have used 'chōra'.

The Bulgarian-French philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva introduced a concept to psychoanalysis known as 'the semiotic', akin to Freud's unconscious 'drives'. It encompasses bio-physiological processes and is linked to the musical, poetic, and rhythmic aspects that exist before structure and meaning. Adopting Plato's 'chōra', she termed it semiotic chōra to denote the initial phase of psychosexual development, where humans are closest to existence's pure materiality. As children learn language, they transition into the symbolic realm, yet elements of the semiotic persist within them.²

Kristeva's semiotic chōra represents a pre-linguistic, pre-Oedipal stage in human development, marked by an undifferentiated, fluid state of being. This concept draws on the notion of a primal, instinctual connection to the world, a space where the emerging subject is not yet defined by language or social structures. The semiotic chōra is characterized by its emphasis on the non-verbal aspects of human experience—emotions, sensations, and the primal ties to the mother. It is a realm rich with potentiality, where the future subject's experiences are mediated through bodily rhythms and movements rather than through symbolic language. Kristeva suggests that while the transition to language and entry into the symbolic order are necessary for socialization and identity formation, the semiotic chōra leaves a lasting imprint on the psyche. This foundational layer continues to influence how individuals relate to the world, manifesting in artistic expression, dreams, and the unconscious flows of desire and thought, underscoring the complex interplay between the biological, psychic, and cultural dimensions of human existence.

In a sense this concept mirrors similar ideas Nishida attributed to chōra:

[For Nishida] the human body, mirroring the place of the world, is itself a chōra. As a microcosm, it takes part in the self-forming of the cosmic chōra. Both world and body, as macrocosmic and microcosmic places, are chōratic. [...] For Nishida, the individual body is the place of the existential contradiction between life and death. [...] [T]he mirroring of the cosmos's self-formation in the human body is simultaneously man's own active self-doing. [...] The human body is implaced and contextualized within, and mirrors, the world of meanings and its further implacement within an ever-receding and endless amorphous chōra sinking into the earth.⁶

Dance of Matter

Let's return and try to apply this mysterious placeness of 'chōra' to our field of inquiry: randonauting. Philosophical concepts such as the one revisited might seem like mere metaphysical speculations, detached from our everyday reality. Let me show you that is actually quite real: randonaut journeys often leave us with an uncanny but familiar feeling of the world being 'alive' and places somehow 'knowing' our most private thoughts. But if we accept the fact that our epistemological construct of a duality between 'world' and 'mind' is erroneous and follow Jung, Nishida, and Plato into an 'unitary world' where a chōra ceaselessly gives birth to meaning manifesting in ideas and material reality, then synchronicities seem much less 'weird' and rather a sign of attaining a healthier and more real sense of self and place.

Anthropological accounts of human societies with an 'animist' worldview bear witness of embodied human experience and living in an 'unus mundus.' Before getting into one such account, let's quote from a research paper called Explorations in Animist Materialism by Harry Garuba to try to define more rigidly what is meant here by 'animism' in contrast to popular 'colonial' misconceptions of the term:

Perhaps the single, most important characteristic of animist thought — in contrast to the major monotheistic religions — is its almost total refusal to countenance unlocalized, unembodied, unphysicalized gods and spirits. Animism is often simply seen as belief in objects such as stones or trees or rivers for the simple reason that animist gods and spirits are located and embodied in objects: the objects are the physical and material manifestations of the gods and spirits. ... Within the phenomenal world, nature and its objects are endowed with a spiritual life both simultaneous and coterminous with their natural properties.⁷

Tim Ingold reports how the Ojibwe, an Anishinaabe First Nations people of Canada and the northern Midwestern United States engage with the world:

Mainstream Western philosophy starts from the premise that the mind is distinct from the world; it is a facility that the person, presumed human, brings to the world in order to make sense of it. When it is not busy making sense of the world, during ‘time off', it dreams. For the Ojibwa, on the other hand, the mind subsists in the very involvement of the person in the world. Rather than approaching the world from a position outside of it, the person in Ojibwa eyes can only exist as a being in the world, caught up in an ongoing set of relationships with components of the lived-in environment. And the meanings that are found in the world, instead of being superimposed upon it by the mind, are drawn from the contexts of this personal involvement. Thus the dreaming self in its nocturnal journeys, far from taking a break from the demands of coping with reality, sets out in search of meanings that will help to make sense of the experiences of waking life.⁸

In an 'animist' worldview neither 'mind' is something outside of 'the world' nor is 'meaning' added onto it, but both are immanent in the intentional engagement, in perception and action, of living beings with the constituents of their environments. Both 'the world' and 'its inhabitants', dwell in, engage with, and even embody a constantly self-forming formlessness: 'chōra'. Again paraphrasing Nishida:

Instead of simply being projectors of meaning on the world, we are born into that world of pre-given meanings receding into non-meaning. Meanings are contextualized, and these contexts are contextualized by the succession of further hidden contexts withdrawing from our grasp. In negotiation with that everreceding environment, we are also actively shaping contexts and meanings as well. But as meaning-giving and receiving subjects, we find ourselves thrown into that contextualizing environment, enveloping the flux of contextualized realities. Eventually the contexts and meanings sink into the a-meaning of nature, earth, contingency, and finitude with which we must come to terms.⁹

Randonauts constantly interact and communicate with the chōratic unconscious that connects everyone and everything, material and imaginal. I believe that using randomness from a QRNG serves as acknowledgement of the fundamental principle of contingency and by sending an intention out and getting a location back, physically moving to that location, finding meaning and perhaps requesting another location, randonauts give 'biofeedback' to the larger field of consciousness that surrounds everything. When chaining random points by going to suggested places and generating more entropy from there for a subsequent coordinate the randonaut kind of gives the 'spirit of place' co-agency in modulating our intent for generating the next point.

It feels like a dance between the individual consciousness and body and the chōratic consciousness field and its body, which is the physical world itself. It very much resembles the notion of 'place in movement' that Nicoletta Isar discussed in her analysis of the Byzantine discourse of the term chōra. The term designated the space that is the 'matrix of the Incarnation', the dwelling space of the uncontainable God, a space 'which occupies space, and does not occupy space'.

There is a sense of movement contained in the Greek word chōra, which is linked to the verb chōrēō having two senses: first, it means to withdraw (give way), to make room for another, like in the Homeric Hymns: "The earth gave way from beneath (gaia d'enerthe chōrēsen)". The sense is of withdrawing, while inscribing the space in its withdrawal. Chōrēō means also to go forward, to be in motion or in flux, like Heraclitus said when he referred that nothing in the world remains still, but rather everything moves (panta chōrei). According to the context, the word chōrēō indicates either a movement with the sense to go forward, or to retreat, withdraw or recede, in both cases having the effect to "make room for", generating a particular kind of space. [...] The discourse of the Byzantine chōra space is the discourse of its trace, which appears only in the movement (chorōs). [...] Chorōs (chōral dance) was a performative means that gave structure to the sacred space of the church, and by which the sacred mystery (the Eucharistic rite) was enacted. Chōra space is as much about movement as it is about containment; it is a contained movement or a moving container. True to its etymology, the Byzantine chōra space is a space in expansion and movement.³

Isar suggests that the chōra was a sacred space of presence and 'presencing', a verb rather than a noun. This was not a mere physical extension of space, but a living body of liturgical experience, hence the type of realization of sacred space was the dance, chorós. Whereas a space of 'sacred containment' suggests a distinction between 'contained space' and 'container', those terms actually stand in the way of sacred space that makes room to the power of creative imagination.³

Enter the Zone

In the act of randonauting, it is often the journey to the coordinate rather than the place found at the coordinate that feels 'thickened' with synchronicities and meaning. The 'sacred space' a randonaut encounters while moving about in 'diviner's time' is distributed along the contingent pathway of the randonaut journey and allows a participation of being in the wholeness of the universe and in 'Being' itself.

This reminds of the "flow" state of positive psychology, a term coined in the 1970s by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi to describe the mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by the complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting transformation in one's sense of time. Another term that is commonly used for "flow" is "being in the zone". In terms of randonauting it is even more appropriate due to its nature as a spatial descriptor.

Zone comes from the Greek word 'zōnē' which means the peripheral belt of contact between the womb of the mother and the body of the child. The womb can be seen as a symbol of chōra. The word 'zone' evokes a sense of liminality and temporality. That's also how it is mostly used: for a continuous area that differs in some respect, or is distinguished for some purpose, from adjoining areas, or within which certain distinctive circumstances exist or are established.

During the practice of randonauting one enters 'the zone' - not only in a new-agey psychological sense of 'flow' but in the very sense of the various liminal capital-Z 'Zones' that have been popularized in cultural discourse, literature and film:

It is in a way the Temporary Autonomous Zone envisioned by Hakim Bey:

It lies at the intersection of many forces, like some pagan power-spot at the junction of mysterious ley-lines, visible to the adept in seemingly unrelated bits of terrain, landscape, flows of air, water, animals. But now the lines are not all etched in time and space. Some of them exist only “within” the Web, even though they also intersect with real times and places. Perhaps some of the lines are “non-ordinary” in the sense that no convention for quantifying them exists.¹⁰

In a sense it is the same Zone that Thomas Pynchon described in his 1975 novel Gravity's Rainbow where the term is used for occupied Germany in the anarchic weeks and months immediately following the collapse of the Third Reich. Former national boundaries have been obliterated, the armies of the victorious Allies are jockeying for position, entire displaced nations are on the move, spies, black-marketeers, and free-lance adventurers dodge back and forth across the ruined landscape. But the collapse of regimes and national boundaries, it turns out, is only the outward and visible sign of the collapse of ontological boundaries.

The Zone is often the site of the ontological shifts which occur in these diegeses. [...] What the Zone permits is a collision between worlds and thus between different ontological states. In the Zone "a large number of fragmentary possible worlds coexist in an impossible space"¹¹

It is also the interzone that William Burroughs writes about in his masterpiece Naked Lunch: a vast, ramshackle structure in which all the world’s architectural styles are fused and all its races and cultures mingle, the apotheosis of the Third World shanty-town, where the edges between the wake and material world are indistinguishable from psychotic and paranoid daydreams and where it is not even clear whether is is a real place or an imagined one.

Also the "Upside Down" in the Netflix Series Stranger Things is in a way such a Zone. JF Martel wrote in his essay Reality is Analog:

The Upside Down that we experience has a subaqueous, vegetal texture. It doesn’t seem an ethereal "echo of our world" so much as an even more earthly version of it: overgrown and murky, wild and visceral. Its topography is that of [the town in which the series takes place,] Hawkins, with the same woods, houses, and swimming pools; only, this is Hawkins without its human apparel, Hawkins restored to primeval forces to which it has always belonged. It is this primal nature that is right next to us though we don’t see it, as the [Dungeons & Dragons] game manual suggests. The Upside Down is the non-human aspect of the human world—the primordial stratum of instinct and the unconscious hiding beneath the dayworld of rational subjectivity.¹²

Most of all it is the mysterious Zone from the brothers Strugatzky's novel Roadside Picnic, an area that - after some unexplainable event called 'visitation' got infested with deadly phenomena and littered with mysterious objects with various properties whose original purpose was incomprehensible by humans and so advanced that it bordered on the supernatural. The only people exploring the zone illegally are legendary freelance agents called stalkers, hunting for strange artifacts to sell.

That's the Zone for you: come back with swag, a miracle; come back alive, success; come back with a patrol bullet in your ass, good luck; and everything else—that's fate.

The story has been beautifully turned into celluloid by Andrei Tarkovsky in his epic 1979 movie Stalker. The main protagonist who is one of these explorers leads two archetypal but broken figures, the Writer and the Professor to the center of the Zone to the legendary 'Room' - entry into which, it is rumored, will grant the wayfarer the fruition of his innermost desires. It is accessible only to travelers who have survived the invisible terrors of the 'Grinder' anomaly.

Here is a scene from the movie when the protagonists enter the zone:

What is beautifully similar to randonauting is the way the stalker journeys through the zone. He cannot go in straight lines and direct paths, but has to carefully traverse the territory in circumambulions and by means of following randomly thrown metal bolts. The stunningly beautiful landscape is contrasted with the wayfarers anxiety as they wander from bolt to bolt. The stalker constantly warns his companions of the utterly contingent dangers around them and it is never quite clear how much of that paranoia is actually justified and how much of the danger is actually real or imagined. But eventually it does not matter, because it is already the the overly humble and respectful journey through the zone, combined with the the mindful hyper-awareness and paranormal expectations of the travellers that turn the zone into the zone: an enchanted living place of contingency and magic.

Just like the stalker, the randonaut traverses the zone, from random point to random point, searching for anomalies and artifacts. Randonauting is an act of re-enchantment of the world, or rather of the reality tunnel that prevented the individual to see that the world is, has always been and will always be a deeply enchanted and weird place. It also opens one's eyes to the reality that 'life' is not the 'spectacle' sold to us by 'empire', but the magic that happens everyday when we pay attention to it by going about our journeys. Tim Ingold beautifully articulated a notion of 'life as lines':

Contrary to the assumptions of cartographers and cognitive map theorists, life is not contained within things, nor is it transported about. It is rather laid down along paths of movement, of action and perception. Every living being, accordingly, grows and reaches out into the environment along the sum of its paths. To find one’s way is to advance along a line of growth, in a world which is never quite the same from one moment to the next, and whose future configuration can never be fully known. Ways of life are not therefore determined in advance, as routes to be followed, but have continually to be worked out anew. And these ways, far from being inscribed upon the surface of an inanimate world, are the very threads from which the living world is woven.¹³

It is an almost initiatory gnosis that randonauting brings about on multiple levels of reality: from the expansion of a personal reality tunnel, sudden awareness of the false dichotomy between mind and matter, to facing the contingent and ever flowing nature of life itself that will always evade predictability no matter how much we are determined to contain it in any kind of humanly constructed pattern or 'stasis field'.

Shoutouts to T & E, Dax & Occulture, the RSBerlin coven, JF & Phil, Comrade & the Randonauts, and the Nyx of the Spree

Part 1 | Part 2

Krummel, John W. M. Nishida Kitarō's Chiasmatic Chorology: Place of Dialectic, Dialectic of Place. Indiana University Press, 2015. pg. 204 ↩
Schippers, Birgit. Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought. Edinburgh University Press, 2011 ↩
Isar, Nicoletta. Chorography (Chôra, Chôros, Chorós)-A performative paradigm of creation of sacred space in Byzantium. In: Hierotopy. Radunitsa, 2004. S. 36-38. ↩↩
Ibid. pg. 25 ↩
Jung, Carl Gustav. The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. Collected Works Vol. 8. Princeton University Press, 1970. par. 418 ↩
Krummel, John W. M. Nishida Kitarō's Chiasmatic Chorology: Place of Dialectic, Dialectic of Place. Indiana University Press, 2015. pg. 205 ↩
Garuba, Harry. Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society. Project MUSE, 2003. Academia.edu ↩
Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge, 2000. pg. 101 ↩
Krummel, John W. M. Nishida Kitarō's Chiasmatic Chorology: Place of Dialectic, Dialectic of Place. Indiana University Press, 2015. pg. 205 ↩
Bey, Hakim. T.A.Z. Temporary Autonomous Zone. Ontological Anarchy. Poetic Terrorism. 2nd edition. Autonomedia, Anti-copyright, 1985, 1991. pg. 110. hermetic.com ↩
Bukutaman, Scott. Terminal Identity. The Virtual Subject in Post-Modern Science Fiction. Duke University Press, 1993. pg. 163 ↩
Martel, JF. Reality is Analog. pt. 3. metapsychosis.com] ↩
Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge, 2000. pg. 242 ↩

Close Encounters with Placeness: The Odds

2020-05-29T16:00:00+02:00

v.3.0 - 4/3/2024

Serendipity

Randonauting offers a gateway to wonder and the uncanny, allowing individuals to encounter the extraordinary just beyond their (reality tunnel's) front door. It's important not to dismiss the peculiarities and synchronicities reported by randonauts as mere psychological phenomena triggered by expectations and wishful thinking.

To clarify, 'synchronicity' refers to the occurrence of significantly related events that coincide in time, notable more for their personal meaning to the observer than their external impact. Sometimes synchronicities repeat or accumulate within a short period of time for one person, in other cases they happen to different people in the same social group.

In his forthcoming monograph Beyond Doubt: The Anthropocene and the Restoration of Faith. author, filmmaker, researcher, and co-host of the Weird Studies podcast J.F. Martel summed it up concisely:

Synchronicities differ from coincidences by the meaning they appear to contain. Often that meaning is inscrutable; once in a while, it seems clear and direct. Either way, synchronicities are marked by a sense that we are being addressed. The sense is sewn into the event. Synchronicities temporarily erase the boundary between world and mind, object and subject, chance and fate. You are free to dismiss the effect as a mere impression, a brief lapse of reason, but doing so won’t banish the synchronicity.¹

In Randonauting lore these 'synchros' can be as simple as encountering repetitive number sequences on clocks, speedometers, or street signs, in New Age circles often referred to as 'angel numbers.'. Prominent examples in Randonaut reports are 222, 333, 12:12, 4444, and so on. On other occasions such coincidences are unusual objects that are repeatedly seen by different people in different places, figurines or images of white rabbits or owls, the infamous "piss bottles", purple flowers, red doors, street pylons and so on. In some rare, extreme cases randonaut trips end up becoming encounters with 'high strangeness' events such as UFO or cryptid sightings.

// examples of randonaut trips

In a philosophical essay on the Netflix series Stranger Things, J.F. Martel explores the contentious nature of Jung's contributions to psychology, highlighting how they clashed with the prevailing scientific perspective rooted in Cartesian body-mind dualism.

it made meaning integral to the event instead of regarding it as a caprice of subjective interpretation. In other words, Jung saw the expression of meaning as a property of the natural world rather than a surface effect of human mentation. Synchronicity, for him, was a real psychophysical process, but one that the modern worldview could recognize only at the cost of abandoning certain rationalistic assumptions about how the cosmos functions.²

Considering the probabilistic odds of synchronistic occurrences, it's clear that their repeated appearances in the context of randonauting cannot be explained by mere chance, nor are they sufficiently addressed by the original Fatum Project theory of discovering novelty through randomness. Within our dualistic worldview, intersections between thoughts 'in our mind' and random events 'out in the world' are only allowed to be nothing more than highly improbable coincidences.

Having delved into the body-mind divide and acknowledged its shortcomings, as well as recognized our actual deep entanglement with the surrounding world, these insights serve little insight into accounting for the skewed odds of serendipidous encounters and synchronicities. This prompts us to question whether our current conceptions of 'randomness' and 'chance' are truly adequate.

The Odds

In his work Essay on the Foundations of Knowledge, the French philosopher and mathematician Antoin Cournot, renowned for his contributions to mathematics and philosophy, discusses the relationship between knowledge, probability, and the scientific method. In the introduction to her translation of Cournot's book, the quantum physicist and ballerina Merritt H. Moore makes an important observation about the nature of 'chance':

contingency and chance must not be equated with that which is unexpected, or with that which surprises us. What is unexpected or occasions surprise is a function of epistemological, psychological or cultural factors. Natural objects, processes and events, independent of our experience or knowledge of them, involve both order, i.e., intrinsic relatedness, and chance, i.e., intrinsic unrelatedness. Both order and chance have their foundations in the nature of things; neither stems from the conditions of our awareness and understanding however limited or extensive, incidental or necessary these conditions may be. ³

Note how both order and chance are described as two equal and fundamental principles of nature. Cournot's perspective on order revolves around the idea that the laws of nature and the patterns we observe reflect an underlying orderliness that allows scientists to predict natural phenomena with a degree of certainty. On the other hand, Cournot also emphasizes that chance events — those that appear to be random or without a discernible cause — play a crucial role in the unfolding of natural processes. This acknowledgment was particularly innovative at the time, as it challenged the deterministic view of the universe that was prevalent in the scientific community. Cournot believed that understanding the natural world requires acknowledging the interplay between these two principles. He argues that we must recognize the limits of our knowledge and the role that unpredictability and randomness play in the natural world.

The experienced derivative market trader turned philosopher Elie Ayache takes this even further and coins the phrase 'contingency as a medium'. In his works Ayache presents a profound philosophical analysis of high-speed derivative trading, exploring its relationship with our metaphysical understanding of reality. Derivative trading involves financial contracts whose value is derived from the price movements of underlying assets, such as stocks, bonds, commodities, or market indexes, allowing traders to speculate on future price changes without directly owning the asset. Ayache challenges the predominant statistical and probabilistic approaches that dominate the field, proposing instead a radical reconceptualization of contingency as a fundamental matière première.

Reality always exceeds fiction. We encounter the real without previous warning. We are made aware of the event and of the world that this event brings about, and then go looking for a partition of that world into ‘states of affairs' or ‘states of the world'. This conceptualization of the real is only a model that is derived from the real itself. Only after the states of the world are identified do we call them possibilities and retroject them into the past so as to narrate a nice story about how the event might have come about, or about the possibilities that will have led to it. By extrapolation, we project those possibilities into the future and imagine that the future world will be no more than a variation of those identified possibilities.⁴

Operating from a vantage point that perceives the observer as separate from the mechanical workings of the world, we employ probability theory as a key tool to predict the future states of the world. We assume that by analyzing existing patterns and data, we can calculate probabilities for different future scenarios, effectively turning the uncertainty of the future into a series of quantifiable risks. This approach reflects a deep-seated belief in the separability of the observer from the observed and underscores our inclination to view the future as something that can be controlled or managed through the application of scientific and mathematical principles. In light of our insufficient responses to unforeseen events, like the recent pandemic, it has become imperative to reassess and humble our confidence in our intellectual capacities to understand chance and contingency.

By elevating contingency to the status of a primary material Ayache is not merely offering a new methodological lens for understanding derivative markets. He is suggesting a paradigm shift in how we conceptualize the foundation of reality itself. This bold stance challenges readers to reconsider the basis of economic theory and the nature of market speculation and move beyond deterministic and probabilistic models to embrace the uncharted territory of pure contingency:

The real is an altogether different matter than the possible, without any possible communication or mediation between the two. What lies outside possibility or beyond the range of possibilities – literally, the im-possible, or the event – is real, because the procedure whereby we fabricate the possible out of the real is always incomplete and deficient and falls short of the real. [...] Radical contingency, or the event, shakes the range of possibilities and updates a whole new world, which may be incompatible with the previous one. Historic events are history-changing.⁵

Phenomena such as synchronicities but also 'black swan' events like the Covid-19 pandemic serve as 'smoking gun' that our current epistemological framework is essentially nothing more than a fragile construct of anthropocentric wishful thinking. Confronted by such phenomena, our conventional understandings of psychology and physics, our perceptions of self and the world, and our grasp on the fundamental principles of reality appear to be incomplete, at best.

Synchronicities are generally rare when judged from a probabilistic point of view. Yet they happen quite often when Randonauting. Why is that? How can visits to coordinates generated by randomness so frequently result in encounters of significant meaning? Could this phenomenon be linked to the coordinates' origin from a quantum random number generator (QRNG), a device that enshrines pure contingency? Embracing Cournot and Ayache's view that contingency is a fundamental and intrinsic aspect of nature, akin to a prima materia, it seems both striking and logical to consider that such mechanisms might indeed be at play.

For Ayache, a thing such as a 'random generator' doesn't exist:

What I am arguing for is precisely the superiority of contingency in terms of changing the context (or the range of possibilities) and the fact that a 'random generator' is always relative to a certain context and its perfectly identifiable states. To repeat, it is not 'random' that I am arguing against; it is 'generator'. There is no generator of contingency as such, because contingency is absolute and not relative; it is always the ultimate mover, even though we may not – almost by definition – frame it into an ultimate context. Hence the deep metaphysical challenge in overturning the ontology and putting such an 'open' category as contingency first.⁶

The absolutist, almost theological perspective on contingency of Cournot and Ayache prompts a fundamental question: does Randonauting essentially function as a form of divination? Isn't the practice of Randonauting essentially similar to consulting a form of supra-personal agency, seeking guidance, reflection, or insight from the powers of pure chance? This question reimagines the act of exploring random coordinates not just as a physical journey, but as a metaphysical engagement with forces and patterns that lie beyond the immediate grasp of human intention and understanding.

Divination

Quentin Meillassoux, known for his work in speculative realism, takes the primacy of contingency to the extreme, positing a universe defined by absolute contingency, where nothing is necessarily true or essential. His stance leads to a nihilistic interpretation of reality as fundamentally devoid of inherent meaning or purpose, thereby challenging the stability of knowledge and the possibility of a meaningful existence. Responding to Meillassoux's stark outlook, the writer Joshua Ramey introduces the concept of a 'divining cause' as addition to the four classic causes 'material cause', 'formal cause', 'moving cause' and 'final cause' that Aristotle defined as fundamental basis of determinism:

The divining cause is in some sense the cause of the occasion, equivalent to the contingent or chance element itself. The divining cause is linked, as it were, to the singularity of an event. [...] It demonstrates a reasoning that is by nature occasional, not so much subject to chance as taking chance as its subject.⁷

Ramey describes the divining cause as the fundamental essence of divination, not to predict what will happen, but as a means of interpreting chance events to uncover their unique, contingent potentialities.

In some sense divination exploits the fact that contingency itself is not the derivation of the actual from an arbitrary set of possibilities but an effect of a dynamic tension within the actual itself.⁸

Seen through the lense of divination the randonaut queries a Quantum Random Number Generator for a coordinate instead of throwing dice, shuffling cards, or sorting yarrow stalks. The answer is given in the form of the lived and embodied experience of venturing to a geographic coordinate, looking for answers or signs. Maybe it is the very act of submitting to the fundamental force of contingency that triggers contingency to manifest in synchronistic ways. Randonauts who journey to their target points often describe their experience of being hyper-aware of their surrounding.

Their consciousness temporarily finds itself in diviner's time, a term coined by professor of musicology and co-host of the Weird Studies podcast Phil Ford expanding on Joshua Ramey's concept of the divining cause:

The divining cause gives us the logic of occasion. It accounts not only for what things happen but when, and for the significance of their timing. [...] Unlike formal or final causes, the divining cause feels like something. There is a temporality proper to it that registers on the human organism much as musical time does. [...] Time organized by the divining cause I will call diviner's time. It is a peculiar temporality in which the sign, leaden with dread or effulgent with promise, announces itself in experience. Diviner's time is structured by repetition: an act of divination gives us the sign of something to happen in the future, and then something happens in our experience to manifest that sign. The repetition between these two occurences is exact — the omen and its realization chime together in perfect resonance. And yet, paradoxically, they are always varied, and in ways that cannot be predicted. Same guy, different wig. In a divinatory result, there is a feeling of inevitability — a promise kept, or a doom one has not managed to escape, in fact could never have managed to escape — and yet we are always surprised, somehow. Thus, for the diviner, the repetition of a sign in experience is always unexpected and yet, in the moment of its happening, feels foreordained and inescapable.⁹

In conclusion Randonauts are essentialy diviners, experiencing their journeys from within 'diviner's time', allowing synchronicities to unfold. Having delved into the concepts of chance, contingency, and time, we now circle back to the core theme that initiated our exploration: Place.

Elie Ayache provides a poignant reflection on this return:

Contingency is what happens, what occurs, what arrives (ce qui arrive), what takes place. What arrives has to arrive in a place. Events take place: they don't take time.¹⁰

In essence, Ayache distinguishes between the theoretical realm of possibilities, which navigate through the dimension of time, and the concrete manifestation of contingency, which requires a physical place for its occurrence. Unlike possibilities that oscillate between hypothetical alternatives and the actualization of reality within the bounds of time, contingency anchors itself in the spatial, in the tangible realm where events unfold. This distinction underscores the significance of place not just as a backdrop, but as an integral component in the fabric of occurrence, shaping and being shaped by the unfolding of contingent events.

Part 1 | Part 3

Martel, Jean-François. Beyond Doubt: The Anthropocene and the Restoration of Faith. (forthcoming monograph). ↩
Martel, JF. Reality is Analog. metapsychosis.com ↩
Cournot, Antoine Augustin; Moore, Merritt H. An Essay on the Foundations of Our Knowledge. Liberal Arts Press, 1956. IV. ↩
Ayache, Elie. The Medium of Contingency: An Inverse View of the Market. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. pg. 21 ↩
Ibid. pg. 20 ↩
Ibid. pg. 82 ↩
Ramey, Joshua. Contingency Without Unreason. 2014. Angelaki, Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 19, 2014. pg. 40 ↩
Ibid. pg. 41 ↩
Ford, Phil. Diviner's Time. https://www.weirdstudies.com/66 ↩
Ayache, Elie. The Blank Swan: The End of Probability. Wiley, 2010. Ch. 18.1.5 ↩

Close Encounters with Placeness: Un-places

2020-05-28T16:00:00+02:00

v.3.0

This three part essay is a revised and expanded version of my notes for a lecture and workshop with the same title I gave at last year's Occulture conference in Berlin.

It became centered around Randonauting but you may as well consider that a place-holder for many other kind of mindful ways of engagement with place. It has a meandering shape, covering a lot of thoughts I've had related to Spirit of Place or Placeness throughout the last years.

In this first part we will explore our relationship with place in general and the strange un-places in our minds. In the next part we will dig into synchronicities, contingency and divination, and in the final one we will look at deeper meanings of place and The Zone.

Close Encounters with Placeness

Exploring the Boundaries Between Self and Space.

Spirit of Place

Everyone who has ever been on 'vacation' can probably relate to this: visiting new places can have a profound effect on us. Experiences of standing before the vast expanse of the Grand Canyon for the first time, or a gothic cathedral in Europe, inspire awe and change our whole sense of being in the world. Yet, the power of place isn't limited to just the excitement of experiencing novelty or the visual spectacle; it can also be the comforting familiarity of returning to a childhood beach each summer, deepening our sense of belonging and nostalgia. Both kinds of experience described transcend mere travel; they fundamentally alter our immediate state of sensory awareness and connection to the world. A journey isn't just a physical relocation to a new setting but also a significant shift in our inner landscape, encouraging reflection on our role in the world and our personal life's narrative.

In his book Becoming Animal, cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram, who reflects on the intricate relationships between human beings and the natural world in all of his work, captures this succinctly:

For each land has its own psyche, its own style of sentience, and hence to travel from Rome to Paris, or from Barcelona to Berlin, is to voyage from one state of mind to another, very different, state of mind. Even to journey by train from Manhattan to Boston, or simply to walk from one New England town to another, is to transform one's state of awareness.²

The reason why we are so intimately connected to place is grounded in our basic corporeal presence in the world, a concept elegantly articulated by Mark Johnson in his influential work, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Johnson, a prominent figure in the field of cognitive science and philosophy, argues that our physical bodies are not merely vessels navigating through space but are fundamentally interconnected with our surroundings:

as animals we have bodies connected to the natural world, such that our consciousness and rationality are tied to our bodily orientations and interactions in and with our environment. Our embodiment is essential to who we are, and to what meaning is, and to our ability to draw rational inferences and be creative.³

By weaving together insights from cognitive science, philosophy, and linguistics, Johnson presents a holistic view where the body is seen as the conduit through which we interpret and make sense of our surroundings. Challenging traditional views that separate the mind and body, in The Body in the Mind, Johnson proposes instead that our sensory and motor experiences fundamentally shape our concepts, ideas, and linguistic expressions. The very physical acts of touching, moving, and interacting provide the foundational basis for our cognitive processes, including reasoning, imagination, and the creation of meaning.

Having a sense of oneself, as an individual embodied person, as a member of a society, as a self in relation to others is intricately linked to our connection with place. This nuanced relationship is explored in depth by Australian philosopher Jeff Malpas. In his book, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography, Malpas delves into how place forms personal and collective identity. He argues that places are not just background settings but active participants in constructing our identity and our position in the broader social and natural world:

the significance of place should not be construed as just a contingent feature of human psychology or biology, but instead as rooted in the very structure that makes possible experience or thought of the sort that is exemplified in the human (though this is not to rule out the possibility that certain particular features of our response to place may be contingently based). The sense, then, in which identity is tied to place (and so to a spatio-temporal realm in which persons and things can be encountered and a world can be grasped) is not just the sense in which a sense of identity might be tied up with a certain ‘emotional reminiscence', but derives from the way in which the very character of subjectivity, in the general and the particular, and the very content of our thoughts and feelings, is necessarily dependent on the place and places within which we live and act.⁴

It is a common perception that our transformation of self in places of novelty or nostalgia is merely a psychological effect 'inside our heads', a result of leisure or a break from our daily routines. This widespread perception overlooks a deeper, more complex phenomenon: the belief that we can 'pause' our embeddedness in the world and observe it from a perspective of 'visitors' moving through a landscape, ignoring the profound and intricate entanglements with our surroundings. We assume that we engage with the world around us as detached observers existing in temporarily worldless suspension.

The term was coined by renowned anthropologist Tim Ingold, whose extensive research spans the fields of anthropology, ecology, and philosophy. In his work, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. he criticises the misconception that life forms exist independently of the world they inhabit, encoded in a context-free medium—like 'genes' in biology or 'cultural information' in anthropology — falsely suggesting a separation between organisms and their environments. This view, prevalent in both fields, posits that organisms are defined by internal codes (such as genes) that are unaffected by their surroundings, and that culture operates similarly, existing inside individuals' minds and imposed upon the external world.

Again, there is one set of specifications for the forms of life that are carried around – as it used to be said – ‘inside people's heads'. And there is another set for the environment, often identified with ‘nature' or ‘the physical world', upon which these forms are inscribed.⁵

This perspective creates a dichotomy between the internal, encoded aspects of life and the external environment, neglecting the interdependent relationship between them.

In the subsequent sections, we will delve deeper into the understanding that 'place' transcends its simplistic representation as a mere point on a map 'in our heads' or 'the world out there' as a backdrop of our lives. We will explore its role as a potent ontological force, one that profoundly influences our identity at various levels—personal, societal, and even species-wide.

The narrative of Picnic at Hanging Rock, a classic colonial Australian novel that was later adapted into a film, serves as an uncanny illustration of the themes discussed here. Set against the backdrop of the mysterious Mount Diogenes¹ in central Victoria, Australia, on Valentine's Day in 1900, the story unfolds around a group of students from a girls' private school and their math teacher on an excursion to study and to have a picnic in the shade of the rock formation. After lunch four of the girls ask permission to explore the area and take geological measurements. They climb higher and higher into the rocks and soon a surreal atmosphere envelops them, leading to the inexplicable disappearance of several girls and subsequent tragic events, including the suicide of the school's headmistress.

An intriguing interpretation of the story is that the protagonists are no longer 'British colonizers' but have now been transformed into something else — they became 'Australians'. The foreign land had not only been conquered by the colonizers. In a weird kind of feedback loop the territory itself had also inevitably colonized the conquerors inner landscape.

Placelessness

The the buttoned up and well dressed Victorian characters in the story embody a broader human struggle stemming from a profound disorientation. This disorientation was triggered by a shift away from the old Aristotelian worldview, which valued a purposeful, interconnected cosmos, to Descartes' 17th-century philosophy of mind-body dualism. This dualism posits that the mind and body are fundamentally distinct kinds of substances: the mind is non-material and capable of thinking, while the body is material and operates in the physical realm. This separation laid the groundwork for viewing the mind as detached from the physical world, including one's own body.

David Abrams writes:

Psychological qualities once felt to be proper to the surrounding terrain—feeling-tones, moods, the animating spirits-of-place known to reside in particular wetlands or forests—all lost their home with the dissolution of the enclosing, wombish character of the pre-Copernican cosmos. For unlike quantities, qualities are fluid properties arising from the internal, felt relations between beings. Such feeling-tones now had no place in the physical world—itself newly conceived as a set of objects that had no internal relation to one another. Nature was beginning to be experienced as a pure exterior—a world of external, mechanical relationships: a world of quantities. It is only natural that psychological qualities fled from this open exteriority in the wake of the Copernican revolution, taking refuge in the private space now assumed to exist inside each individual.⁶

This division has been cemented into our collective psyche, with most scientific disciplines operating under the assumption of a clear demarcation between the mind, as an internal entity, and the world as something external. This dichotomy extends beyond the realms of science, permeating many modern spiritual practices as well:

If much natural science of the last two centuries held itself aloof from the nature it studied, pondering the material world as though that world were a huge aggregate of inert objects and mechanical events, many new-age spiritualities simply abandon material nature entirely, inviting their adherents to focus their intuitions upon non-material energies and disincarnate beings assumed to operate in an a-physical dimension, pulling the strings of our apparent reality and arranging earthly events according to an order that lies elsewhere, behind the scenes. Commonly reckoned to be at odds with one another, conventional over-reductive science and most new-age spiritualities actually fortify one another in their detachment from the earth, one of them reducing sensible nature to an object with scant room for sentience and creativity, the other projecting all creativity into a supernatural dimension beyond all bodily ken.⁷

Of course pointing fingers to a single cause or figure, such as Copernicus, Descartes, Kant, 'capitalism', 'empire', or 'technocracy', oversimplifies the complexity of these major paradigm shifts in human understanding. These shifts have deeply influenced how humanity perceives itself and the world, leading to a sense of alienation and fragmentation. Recognizing and acknowledging this disorientation is the first step towards integrating it.

In the 1960s, Guy Debord, a prominent figure in the avant-garde and political theory, emerged as a revolutionary voice against the prevailing currents of capitalism. As the founder of the Situationist International (SI), a group dedicated to critiquing and transforming modern society through radical artistic and philosophical practices, Debord introduced the concept of the 'spectacle' to describe and expose the ways in which capitalism has permeated every aspect of life, creating a society where genuine human experiences are replaced by mere representations and where the commodification of life is all-encompassing:

Spectacle is perhaps the major force in modern civilization: through selective, edited representation, the process of spectacle-making serves to reduce the vibrant, pluralistic, living richness of existence to a lifeless image which is then presented as reality. Spectacle serves to remove the "object" or "specimen" from its natural state of being itself into a state of separation ... Existence, which is a seamless continuum, is thereby represented as a disconnected assemblage of discrete and unrelated "objects" ... Spectacle is thereby a selfreferencing fiction, and like all such fictions, difficult to see for what it is. It is a closed loop that has, by accident and intention, created a specific self-perpetuating modus operandi.⁸

One practice that the SI encouraged to uncover the 'spectacle' was the 'Dérive' - the act of aimless drifting through the urban landscape, being led solely by subjective stimuli from the surrounding architecture. By doing so the drifter would notice the omnipresent organizing power structures that urban planning had imposed upon the city dwellers, the logic of production and commerce ruling the architectural landscape. Drifters were encouraged to create their own psychogeographical maps of the city, breaking the imposed structures and re-territorialize them into representations that would harmonize the inner from the outer sense of place in a more integral way.

In the 21st century cities show no more resemblance to how they looked in the 1960s, so the 'dérives' are probably less suited to unveil and break out of imposed patterns. 'Empire' has shifted to more subtle cybernetic means of control focusing mainly on individualized stimulation of desires in either aestetically harmonized environments or distracting us from 'the world' altogether by luring us into the fully synthetic version of artificial desire stimulation behind the inescapable multitude of our screens.

In this context, the practice of 'Randonauting' emerges as a potent antidote to the digital age's disembodied experiences. It combines elements of adventure, randomness, and the exploration of one's immediate environment. The 'Randonautica' smartphone app is used to generate a random set of geographical coordinates within a radius close to the participant. Participants, known as "Randonauts," then embark on a journey to these randomly determined locations, ideally with an open mind and a sense of curiosity, without any preconceived expectations of what they might find or experience.

Randonauting resonates with the Situationist ethos by inviting individuals to engage directly with their environment. It also suits the zeitgeist perfectly, because it lures the individual from within the confines of their portable screens 'out to the world' offering a way to reconnect with the tangible and the real, drawing attention away from the virtual distractions that dominate our lives.

But the aim is not just to discover new physical spaces and to defy the predetermined narratives and structures that digital and urban spectacles impose, but to go a step further and challenge one's own habitual patterns of movement and thought, to break out of daily routines and potentially experience the world in a new, more profound way. The core idea is that randomness and serendipity can lead to meaningful experiences, insights, or encounters that one would not have encountered in the course of the regular, predictable paths through life. The simple act of Randonauting has the potential to rekindle a sense of wonder and discovery in the everyday and to experience more meaningful connection to the places we live and to the myriad possibilities they hold.

The foundational theory of Randonauting laid out in a collection of text files published by the Fatum Project, argues that we all are trapped the confines of our daily experiences and perceptions, navigating through our "reality tunnel" imposed by the multitude of unseen rules that govern our lives—ranging from societal norms to personal habits and cognitive biases. These forces collectively form what's known as the "Stasis Field," effectively keeping us within the familiar bounds of our reality.

no matter what choices you make, and no matter how many variations on how your day may pass, there are always some places where you simply cannot be, because none of the chains of your decisions leads there.⁹

Through my own experiences and following the stories of others on the app's trip report feed and Randonauts subreddit it becomes evident that randonauting has the potential to lead to extraordinary moments. These experiences can range from simple, unexpected discoveries, more or less meaningful coincidences, serendipidous encounters, all the way to profound psychological shifts and, on occasion, events that might even be described as 'high strangeness'.

Part 2

A sacred place of gathering for the Dja Dja Wurrung, Woi Wurrung and Taungurung Peoples who refer to it as Ngannelong ↩
Abram, David. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. Pantheon, 2010. EPUB Reference 17.11 ↩
Johnson, Mark. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. University of Chicago Press, 1990. pg xxxviii. ↩
Malpas, Jeff E. Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge University Press, 1999. pg. 188 ↩
Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge, 2000. pg. 214 ↩
Abram, David. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. Pantheon, 2010. EPUB Reference 17.68 ↩
Ibid. EPUB Reference 23.24 ↩
Pennick, Nigel. Anima Loci. NIDECK, 1993 ↩
Fatum Theory ↩

Canary Capricorn

2020-03-02T20:45:00+01:00

This is a detailed report of strange days full of pine tree portals, morning glory vines, tachycardia, synchronicities and personal gnosis that preceded (or retroactively followed) my initiation into the sphere of Saturn during a vacation with my wife and daughter on the Canary Island of Tenerife.

Escaping Winter

In the last years the time after Christmas has always been quite a downer. Berlin falls into a mode of total greyness that just makes you want to hibernate. Usually my freelance economy is also hibernating during that time when there are no jobs around. For this year my partner T. and I decided to escape this misery and booked vacations on my beloved Canary archipelago - first a couple of days on the chthonic gods' black rock altar manifested as the island of Lanzarote and then three weeks on the sacred island of Tenerife. We prepared for relaxed weeks, but ended up in wonderland...

A few days after we arrived on Tenerife things became very strange. It all started on a Wednesday, two days after we arrived by sea with a ferry from Lanzarote. The trip between the islands was beautiful but also wavy and quite long. All tired and unnerved from the journey we arrived at a small and quite cold little hut in the mountains of La Esperanza. The hut was cute but had no heating, just a malfunctioning fireside. That Wednesday we all decided to go for a walk in the forest which according to the map was only minutes away. Remembering the ancient pine trees we had visited last time we came to this island, I let my offline-map-app Osmand show me all points of interest of the "tree" category and chose the closest one to our house.

Ten minutes later we found ourselves in a stunningly beautiful forest of mostly pine trees with eucalyptus groves and small leaved shrubbery on hilly ground covered in an endless carpet of pine needles. The walk was very soothing and gave us back a sense of peace of mind. We eventually arrived at our waypoint marker: a really creepy and old pine tree that must have barely survived a wildfire. Its trunk was hollowed out and from the remaining black bark dripped thousands of threads of golden resin. The bottom part of the trunk was so thoroughly burnt from all sides it created a hole you could see through to the other side, large enough for a person to crawl through.

Baal's Portal

Well, that's what we did, jokingly calling it a "gateway to another dimension". First I, then my wife T. and a bit more hesitantly, my 3 years old daughter E. stepped through the tree trunk. It was fun! Before leaving I decided I wanted a branch from the tree to keep as a magic wand because maybe the old pine had been struck by lightning which is supposed to be the perfect magically charged wood for wands. I circled the tree four times and threw a small log at one of the branches that broke off. The branch was not as straight as I had hoped for but was a bit crooked like a sickle, but I kept it anyway.

We walked a bit further, had a small picnic and started our way back to the car. Making our way through a bushy and narrow path downhill my daughter started to get a bit tired and bored and made up one of her roleplaying games. She declared: "I am Juno now! You have to call me Juno, OK?” I smiled and nodded and we continued our descent. Suddenly I remembered that the ancient mother goddess who was venerated by the aboriginal population of the Canarian archipelago and who had been syncretized into the Catholic patron saint Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria was assumed to have been the Catharginian goddess Tanit, whom the Romans dubbed "Juno Caelestis." What a curious synchronicity!

In the following night I had a strange dream involving a village road that we needed to urgently pass through and that it had something to do with Saturn. We needed to pick up a brown rental car of the type "Reverend" and it was a brown SUV stretch-limousine. The pick-up location was at a wide sandy beach and there were plenty of people wearing suits wildly racing stretch-limousines across the sand and performing wheelies and other tricks. It was loud and stormy. I looked along the beach and saw a body of a woman lying face down in the wet sand, white roaring waves breaking violently around her. Suddenly a humanoid giant emerged out of the whitewater and carefully picked up the body. The woman was was my wife! I ran to the giant as fast as I could. T. was confused but seemed fine. I thanked the giant and suddenly had a moment of realization. I looked at her, saying "If they are on our side, this must be really important!" Then I woke up.

Horned Gods

I obsessively thought about the "Saturn" part all day long. I just couldn't shake it off. In the evening I did a search for "Saturn" in my collected research documents folder on my computer related to myths and archaeological findings of the Canary Islands and found an interesting paper¹ I had not read yet. It was about a curious theory that the Canaries must have been visited by Christian missionaries before the official arrival of the Spanish conquerors in the late 14th century, because the aboriginal population mainly venerated a heavenly creator god and his holy mother when encountered. The author found this a too curious coincidence and looked into what numinous creatures local folklore had declared "devils" like in so many other Christianized areas of Europe where the previous pagan gods were either syncretized into Saints or declared evil demons. He found matching stories about "wooly goat or sheep like creatures" with "red eyes" an on one island a "wooly black haired man" who were usually appeased on mountain tops with offerings of milk and butter. The author's theory was that this was probably their god before they started believing in a transcendental heavenly father. He related the goaty god to Baal-Hammon, who was the other prime deity next to Tanit worshipped in Catharge and throughout many areas of North Africa, primarily by Berber tribes. In the paper¹ it was mentioned that the Romans saw in Baal-Hammon a form of Saturn.¹

Mind blown, I went to bed and thought a lot about everything I had learned. Then it dawned on me: Saturn! Kronos! Baal-Hammon! My dream and the forest walk suddenly made sense in an uncanny way. The pine tree is considered a Saturnian creature. The branch I had broken off: it looked like a scythe! My daughter suddenly coming up with the name "Juno". Tanit!

The next days were weirdly interwoven with synchronicities. I felt strangely disconnected from life and seemed to experience everything from a weird observer perspective. I obsessively started to think about doing a ritual for Saturn or Baal-Hammon. Maybe using the Trithemius method from "Seven Spheres"? I didn't have my "table of practice" with me. I would need to make one. I needed materials, incenses, candles, corresponding plants... The moment I had just finished this last thought I just finished parking our car next to a park in the city of La Laguna and almost fell into a gigantic hedge completely overgrown by purple Morning Glory vines. There it is! A Saturnian plant! We walked through the city and past a large mural sculpture made from plastic trash. It was a black crow! A Saturnian animal! Needless to say that I noticed SUVs everywhere we drove to, all in this weird brown color like the one in my dream.

One afternoon we took a walk along the large meadows surrounding the little house we had rented for our vacation. Suddenly a large flock of sheep entered our neighboring field with their archaic looking shepherd and his dogs. Half of the livestock were sheep, the other half a strange looking breed of black and very wooly goats with very long corkscrew-like horns. "Baal-Hammon" I thought. The "wooly goat god" of the Canaries. Also "Capricorn" popped into my mind. Of course. The sun just entered the sidereal zodiac sign of Capricorn, home of the planet Saturn who would also join his sign in the upcoming days. This was too much!

At night I couldn't sleep well. Something really bothered me. It was the fact that the Catharginian cults of Tanit and Baal-Hammon were tightly connected to human sacrifice, specifically child sacrifice. Followers had allegedly offered their firstborns to their gods, unless the whole story was just Greek, Jewish and later Christian propaganda. Nobody really knows. But it bothered me a lot, being a father and all. I did not want to go that path of syncretizing Saturn with Baal-Hammon. It just felt: wrong! In the night I had a nightmare of which the only image I remembered upon waking in panic was holding the limp body of my daughter in my hands.

Another evening my wife and I had a long and serious talk about our current life. It was a talk that had been long overdue. About our financial situation. About our job situation and occupational outlooks. About the lack of overview over our assets. About living from day to day, the lack of perspective and planning. About stability and getting our shit together. It was good. We also had more and more serious talks about what we want in our life. About where we want to live our life. About how much we loved it here and whether we want to stay in Berlin or relocate to the Canary Islands. A once wild dream suddenly became a concrete topic that needed attention, consideration, planning. Saturn in Capricorn. It all felt appropriate and weirdly controlled, as if external forces made us finally have these talks.

Transience

I felt very light-headed and dizzy one early evening and went to bed earlier than usual. I felt weirdly sick. My body was completely exhausted, but my mind was highly alert. I took this as an opportunity to try to induce "sleep paralysis" and attempt and out of body experience. It didn't fully work. I was able to shift my awareness around in the room and even push it outside of the house, but wasn't sure how much of it was just vivid imagination. It was a strange evening and I had feverish repetitive dreams that night without actually having a fever. The following evening our daughter seemed extraordinarily restless and crazy. Even for a three and a half year old. She was clumsy and whiny and when my wife took her on her lap to comfort her she suddenly said: "her heart seems very fast!". I put my ear on our daughter's chest and counted. 22 in 6 seconds. Holy Shit. A heart rate of 220 beats per minute! We calmed her down and went to bed, hoping for her pulse to slow down during her sleep.

It didn't.

The next day we rushed to the hospital. The closest one was the University Hospital Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria. How appropriate, I thought. We were treated nicely and with patience, although the emergency ward was completely overcrowded and in chaos. Nobody spoke English or German, yet we managed with my very limited Spanish. The very young doctors in the pediatric section did an electrocardiogram and gave our little one a shot of adenosine. A heart reset. It stops the heart for a moment. It is a very scary thought. But it works. It did work. Her little heart reset to normal speed and we were very relieved. She was very scared and confused. Poor thing.

Apparently she had relapsed into a fairly common heart condition she had as a small baby which she was supposed to be cured from a long time ago. During the next 6 hours staying in the hospital for observation so many things went through my mind. About parenthood and responsibility. About not taking things for granted. About more awareness of risks. About protecting my child better from insensible doctors. About fear of loss and parental anxieties. It was hell. But my daughter loved it. So much attention and hours of cartoons.

Eventually we could go home. When I left the building to get our car I saw a rainbow in the sky above the city. Problem was that I couldn't find our car anymore. Where had I parked it? I randomly walked up and down the small roads around the hospital. They all looked the same. Then I saw the rainbow again, at the end of a small street. I took a turn and walked towards it to get a better look and suddenly there it was in front of me: our car!

Temporality

That evening I was scared to the bones. Baal-Hammon. Saturn. Child sacrifice. A moment of death before the heart resets. My nightmare of holding my limp daughter. It was way too much. I wanted it all to stop. I suddenly felt almost compelled to do a ritual. Not to start something, but to stop it. The next day I gave my wife a day off to recover from the stress and I took my daughter to Puerto de la Cruz, to do something nice, buy her ice-cream, visit some playground. The secondary objective was to go to the local Esoteric shop and a paper shop to buy ritual accessories. A quartz crystal. Storax incense. Black paper. Silver pen. It had to be done.

At some pont it hit me! Saturn! Father of time! Of course! I realized that everything that happened in the last days had the strange taste of initiation to it. I remembered the Jovial initiation I did last year. The feeling of outside perspective on my own life. The sparks of inspiration. The lessons and emotions. All the weird synchronicities that happened after I initiated into the sphere of Jupiter. This was the same but different. Why did all of this happen BEFORE my initiation ritual and not AFTER? Why? Because Saturn rules time! He can do whatever the fuck he wants with it. Why not reverse it and let the initiation ritual ripple into the past instead of the future, or why not both ways? It was crystal clear to me now that I had to do the ritual as soon as possible. I decided to do it on the 25th of January. New Moon in sidereal Capricorn, sun also, and Saturn just entering his home sign too. Plus it was a Saturday. Perfect space weather. I asked my Tarot whether it was a good election and what to expect.

To my defense: it wasn't just me who felt this omnipresent looming weirdness. T. felt it too. Ever since we crawled through that creepy tree, she said. Oh god, that tree. It was true. Like another dimension! We decided that we needed to go back and crawl through it again – this time from the other side! And we were not joking.

On Friday and especially on Saturday I felt awful. Very depressed and sad for no apparent reason, anxious and clumsy and very snappy. Tired and unnerved we barely managed to go back to the tree, but we did. It had to be done. I circled it four times, this time clockwise, and all three of us climbed back through the gaping hole in the charred trunk.

We suddenly felt very relieved and strangely happy and walked back to the car.

Calling Qaftsiel

In the evening I packed all my ritual accessories I had gathered and prepared in the days before and got into the car around sunset. I drove down the village road to a hedge I had spotted before. Overgrown by Morning Glory! I harvested a few vines with the purple flowers and hit the road uphill towards the mountain. It was pitch black as I drove up the serpentine roads through the forest. After cancelling a hike up to the mountain top due to the darkness and also deciding not to use a cave near the road due to unbearable urine stench I spontaneously opted for a manmade cave I had marked on my phone-map a few days before. It was just off an easy to find hiking path and should be doable even in the darkness.

I was a bit scared walking through the forest at night but I felt excitement and an urge to push through with the plan. I climbed down a steep hill into a small valley in total darkness, slipping on the pine needles and mossy rocks. My phone reception went dead. I should have left my coordinates. Fuck it. Let's do it. I eventually found the cave! It was a small horizontal mine shaft from old attempts to dig a tunnel for water. There are thousands of these on the island. This one was around a meter in diameter and just two meters deep into the rock. But it was dry and clean and fortunately too inaccessible to be used as a toilet. It was perfect!

I set up my altar and table of practice, decorated it with the flowers and checked the time. Almost an hour left until the appropriate planetary hour of Saturn. I crawled back out and sat down on a rock. I closed the flashlight and looked around. Complete darkness. Complete silence. Just the wind in the treetops and omg, the stars!

I was mesmerized by the beauty of the night-sky. The Pleiades were right above my head and I saw a satellite pass by when I looked up. I stared into the sky for a long time lying on my back enjoying each moment that seemed like eternity. Then it was time for the ritual.

It took quite a while. I started with the day's prayer of my ongoing novena to La Virgen de La Candelaria and did a full Headless Rite following my usual new moon routine. The cave filled up with the incense smoke and hummed in resonance with the frequency of my voice while I recited the prayers of the Seven Spheres protocol. I was an amazing feeling.

After I was done I had such an intense feeling of relief and peace of mind that I got high from it. Absolute Clarity.

I somehow made it back to the car and drove home. The remaining days on the island were dominated by peacefulness and joy. Hardly have I felt so happy and clear minded. My family too.

Cold and dry in the head. Capricorn season.

Wipf, Karl A. "Der sogenannte Hochgottglaube der Altkanarier." Almogaren 15 (1984): 45-76. ↩↩↩

Quantum Geomancy

2019-05-25T11:00:00+02:00

This is not an article about the divination practice usually referred to as "geomancy". I use the term according to its original meaning: magic of earth. This is about a practical application of geomancy in the context of "randonauting". I will give a brief overview about this technique, then report some experiences, and layout some techniques of practical enchantment using randonauting as a tool.

Version 2.1 - May 18, 2020

Randonautics

Inspired by a video by Tommie Kelly of Adventures in Woo Woo I recently started "randonauting" because I've always been very fascinated by spirits of place and psychogeography and this new activity seemed like a fun way to expand my practice in the field.

Randonauting is the exploration of places in your immediate surrounding solely determined by a random set of coordinates. These coordinates are provided by an online software called Fatum Bot that can be accessed via Telegram messenger and a phone app called Randonautica.

The numbers used to find the coordinates are provided by a so called quantum random number generator (QRNG) that measures the magnetic field fluctuations of virtual particles in a vacuum and continuously spits out these measurements.

Initially the creators of this software wanted to just see was what happened when people visit randomly generated geographic points. But then some really weird stuff started to happen. People found strange objects or messages at the random locations, or they started experiencing strange repelling emotions.

The makers of the Fatum Project came up with a gamified theory for a real world application of their software: to break the user's predetermined probability-tunnel:

All things in the world are causally connected with each other and everything that happens, including our thoughts, is usually determined by the sum of all environmental factors. This makes the world close to deterministic. [...] This means that no matter what choices you make, and no matter how many variations on how your day may pass, there are always some places where you simply cannot be, because none of the chains of your decisions leads there.

Interesting that such places may be somewhere nearby. On your street there may be a lane in which you will never think to look and you do not even know about its existence. What could be hiding in such blind spots? [...] To find such places, it was decided to create points with random coordinates and go there, regardless of whether they look interesting or convenient to visit.¹

Attractor Points

The Fatum Bot offers different methods of generating random points. Pseudo-random coordinates and QRNG generated ones, but the most interesting type that seems to reveal the weirdest places, are so-called "attractor points":

For it's generation a few thousands of quantum-random points will be created and then program will find an area with maximum density of these points and calculate it's center as an attractor.

The power of the attractor is a relative coefficient to verify that the attractor is generated correctly. It is based on the ratio between the density of points near the attractor and in the entire search zone as a whole. In theory, if it is less than two, then it is difficult to call it an anomaly. (Farum Bot /help text)

The opposite of an attractor point is a so-called void, an area with the minimum density of random points.

Memetics

During the first experiment, when 70,000 randomly selected people were sent to random points coordinates, almost all of them immediately decided that the points were sent with the aim of a scam and saw danger in them. As a result, a very few decided to go there. Such a reaction can be explained by the activation of the despair-meme, with which the holistic memeplex tries to keep you within the framework of the pattern.¹

First a quick update on the terminology used in the quoted paragraph:

A meme is a unit of information in consciousness, whose existence influences events in such a way that a large number of its copies arise in other consciousnesses.²

Memocomplex (memeplex) - A set of mutually supporting memes that co-evolve in symbiotic relationships. Religious and political dogmas, social movements, artistic styles, traditions and customs, paradigms, languages, etc. are meme complexes.²

The aforementioned "strange emotions" that around 25% of randonauts experienced are explained in the official theory as being manifestations of the so-called "Despair Meme". To learn more about this phenomenon, I highly recommend the following two videos by Tommie Kelly and Fred Andersson. I have personally not experienced it much on any of my randonaut trips and I have to admit that I am sceptical about it.

Entanglement

It is hypothesized that part of the reason that the places seem to have some kind of weird uncanny ambience could be the use of quantum event generated randomness and the alleged phenomenon of entanglement with consciousness. This effect has been observed in many experiments, the largest ongoing one being the Princeton University Global Consciousness Project:

When human consciousness becomes coherent, the behavior of random systems may change. Random number generators (RNGs) based on quantum tunneling produce completely unpredictable sequences of zeroes and ones. But when a great event synchronizes the feelings of millions of people, our network of RNGs becomes subtly structured. GCP

It means that the theoretical "true randomness" of a QRNG is practically altered by the consciousness of the user through the so-called observer effect. Depending on the intent of the user in the moment of generation of the QRN, the randomness seems to get modulated and the random coordinates suddenly seem to point to places that have some kind of significance.

Heterotopian Journeys

First there are the utopias. Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.

There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places—places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society—which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias.³

During a holiday trip to Israel with my wife and daughter to see the in-laws aka. grandpa and his girlfriend I started to apply randonauting to my usual evening activity of exploring the city we stayed in. I visited single attractor points and experimented with attractor chains in which the visited attractor becomes the new location from which you generate the next point, and so on.

I started out with the minimum radius of 1000 meters around our flat and immediately got to very interesting places. The random coordinates led me to beautiful sculptures in a private garden, an abandoned car with plastic tubes strapped to it and a scarab beetle landing in front of my feet upon arrival, a lost toy car, strangely arranged objects in industrial areas, and a recurring number of water pipes, hydrants, and dry riverbeds. Most places surrounded an ambience of peaceful serenity and despite mostly being in an urban area, a feeling of liminality and heterotopia. They mostly felt inviting to contemplation and I often left an offering of tobacco in exchange for an artifact to take with me.

I had an interesting attractor chain experience: During a day trip to Tel Aviv I found a rare free parking spot next to a park. I sat down on a bench and checked my phone map for a public toilet. I started walking there and listened to a bunch of voice notes about Fatum Project. Sitting on the loo I generated an attractor point while focusing on the word "inspiration". I got a 4.2 attractor and went there. It turned out to be a backyard playground area of a kindergarten, shadowy and liminal, dominated by a large tree with a makeshift swing on it and surrounded by bushes. I would have loved to hang out at this place as a child. Very magical. But being a bearded grownup man wearing sunglasses sneaking around such a place invoked immediate anxiety (despair meme?) and I left. I chained up another attractor point thinking about "music production" and it appeared to be just 500m down the road I was already walking. I ended up at a construction site with scaffolding of a house front and it was quite noisy from drilling, throwing rubble and shouting in Hebrew and Arabic. I chained up another attractor with no intention and it lead back to the direction of the park. When I arrived I realized it was just 50m away from the bench I started out at and just a footstep away from where I started listening to the voice notes.

Manifestations

In two occasions I had the feeling that by doing the ritual of visiting a place and taking an artifact back into my own sphere of life had immediate effects of desire manifestation:

We had a rental car booked and when we arrived at the airport in Tel Aviv the company tried to scam us into having to book an additional allegedly legally required car insurance from them despite already having added one when we had booked the car online. We cancelled the booking and ended up without a car. I was quite devastated about it and felt stuck and trapped and thought about it all day. The first evening I visited an attractor point (power 2.77) that turned out to be a little green plastic chassis of a toy car, neatly parked next to a hedge on a sidewalk. I took it with me thinking "at least I have a toy car". When I arrived back home my wife excitedly told me that her father just messaged her that we can borrow his girlfriend's car for the whole time of our stay. I was happy and bamboozled by the "coincidence".

The next attractor point that I visited was at a rusty overgrown gate of a tall steel structure wall fencing a factory area. From the road-signs it was quite obvious that the place was private property but I walked in anyways, because the attractor had the unusually high power of 5.19 and I really wanted to get there. On the sidewalk in front of the gate was a wooden transportation pallet with a giant and very heavy looking flat white rock on it and a clean and unused car mat on top of it. I took the car mat with me, remembering the green toy car and wondering if and what this item would manifest. Arriving home I learned that a previously scheduled potentially awkward dinner with to me unknown friends of my in-laws that I had been anxious about all day got cancelled.

At this point the data-set is too small to draw any conclusions about a correlation of attractor points and manifestation of desires, but nevertheless I find the anecdote worth mentioning. I will certainly experiment further into this direction and I had an idea about using Fatum Bot points for casting intents. You will find it below in the praxis section.

Geomanteia Praxis

Aside from the official Randonaut theory based practice of bringing quantum randomness into the topology of your reality and using them to cause change, I had a few ideas for magical experiments that I will briefly describe here:

Divination

Set your location and radius in the Fatum Bot or the Randonautica app.
Choose Attractor (/getattractor) for the point and while it is calculating, ask a question out loud or in your mind which you want an answer for.
Go to the attractor and note any hints, symbolic objects, atmosphere, written text that might lead to an answer.
Optionally you might also want to note the same about anything you encounter along the path to the attractor.
Make it a chain of attractors for more complex answers.

Balancing the Void

(Currently this only works in the Bot)

Get a Pair (/getpair) to receive an attractor point and a related void point.
Go to the attractor and take an artifact, leave an offering, ask the spirit of place to charge the artifact with its energy.
Go to the void point, place the artifact, ask the spirit of place to receive energy from the artifact as an offering.
Remain in a meditative receptive state and record whatever emotions or insights you have.

Quantum Crossroads

If you imagine lines between attractor points as akin to ley-lines, then their intersections have power also. Call them 'crossroads' and you can apply all kind of crossroads related magic to these intersections.

Here is a calculator that lets you find the intersection of two lines defined by four coordinates or two coordinates with a bearing.

Also check out the other tools, like midpoint calculation or antipodes for even more potential magical applications.

Geosophic Sigil

This is the idea to trace the shape of a sigil by walking from attractor point to subsequent chained attractor points while keeping an intention in mind and then using that shape as viewed from above as a symbol to represent the intention and the journey of sigil creation itself.

Set your location and radius in the Fatum Bot
Get an Attractor (/getattractor) and while it is calculating, say your intention out loud or in your mind.
Go to the attractor and try to be as mindful about your intention and the journey itself as possible.
When you reach the attractor, set it as your current location and repeat steps 1 - 3.
Do this as long as you feel like you need to be doing it.
At the end, put markers for each attractor you visited on a map and trace them with straight lines from beginning to end. Terminate the beginning of this line with a circle and optionally the end with a dash or an arrow. This is a glyph symbolizing your geosophic sigil.
Optionally make it into a hypersigil, by putting more emphasis to the whole journey and taking notes on the way. Once you are finished, write a "Hero's Journey" type story using the places or atmospheres or other elements relating to your visited attractor points as plot-points. Ideally make up this story already during the journey.

Ad Hoc Sigil Network

There are already a number of discussions around using attractor points for a "sigil network" in the Fatum community. An early approach was based on the Floodgate Sigil Network by Ring of Lethe but it never really caught on.

Here is an outline of my own practice that has already been in the back of my head since my grave token network, but was also inspired by conversations in the Fatum community I engaged in.

At high power attractor points, place a unique sigil or half of a token pair (any pair of objects, halves of a rock/clay object, coins, whatever. See my Dawn of the Dead article part about my token network)
Record information about how the place feels like, any planetary, elemental or other magically related correspondences that come to your mind and which sigil/token represents this place.
At your altar space, do a ritual where you connect places that share correspondences by placing the sigils/tokens that represent these places around a central sigil that represents the intention of linking them together.
When you do other rituals in which you feel the need for more resonance of certain energies that you felt at a certain attractor point, use the above created network to pull energy from these places - or vice versa if you want to push some intent or energy to these places you can do that in the same fashion.
After the ritual, disconnect the places from the linking sigil again and dissolve the network.
With the above outlined method you can create ad hoc networks of places when needed and don't need to worry that your network might get taken over or other issues the famous DKMU "Ellis" aka. "Linking Sigil" network allegedly suffered from.

Here is my Fatum attractor linking sigil design, mainly inspired by a simpler design by AciaMeriPens/RoL, spelling FATUM but using Futhark runes as letters. I combined it with "a cube in a cube" as symbol for quantum randomness and spatiality, but also the appearance of a spiderweb for "network" and a downward pointing arrow known in electronic schematics to signify "ground".

Directing Intention

The four cardinal directions are paramount in many magical operations, some grimoires like the Steganographia by Trithemius of Spanheim or the Art Theurgia Goetia of Kinge Salomon have lists of spirits sorted by their direction on a compass.

You can use attractor points in directional relation to your point of origin as places to set an intention for a magical operation, to cast sigils, conjure spirits, whatever you want. The act of moving from a place to another in a certain direction is charged with magical meaning.

There are several esoteric systems you can apply to this method. The most straightforward one is using the four cardinal directions and their magical correspondences in the western tradition (according to Agrippa, not the Golden Dawn)

Direction	North	East	West	South
Element	Water	Fire	Air	Earth
Qualities	cold, wet	hot, dry	hot, wet	cold, dry

Find more correspondences on this extensive chart.

Using this logic you can derive other correspondences, for example which planetary energies can be found in which direction. Here is a planetary chart derived from the Aristotelian Qualities from the chart above:

Planet	Direction
Moon	North
Mercury	South-East
Venus	West
Sun	East
Mars	East
Jupiter	North-West
Saturn	South

Another excellent system for setting intention is the Bagua principle from Feng Shui geomancy:

Direction	Element	Trigram	Topic
North	Water	坤 Kūn	Career/Lifepath
North-East	Earth	震 Zhèn	Knowledge/Wisdom
East	Wood	離 Lí	Family
South-East	Wood/Wind	兌 Duì	Wealth/Prosperity
South	Fire	乾 Qián	Fame/Reputation
South-West	Earth	巽 Xùn	Love/Marriage
West	Metal	坎 Kǎn	Children/Creativity
North-West	Metal	艮 Gèn	Helpers/Travels

The best way to find the exact direction from your point of origin (OP) to the Fatum attractor point (FP) is by using degrees of bearing.

The bearing of a point is the number of degrees in the angle measured in a clockwise direction from the north line to the line joining the centre of the compass with the point. A bearing is used to represent the direction of one point relative to another point. (source)

Here is a chart of cardinal directions and the corresponding bearing degrees:

Direction	Degrees
North	315° - 45°
East	45° - 135°
South	135° - 225°
West	225° - 315°

with diagonal quarters:

Direction	Degrees
North	337.5° - 22.5°
North-East	22.5° - 67.5°
East	67.5° - 112.5°
South-East	112.5° - 157.5
South	157.5° - 202.5°
South-West	202.5° - 247.5°
West	247.5° - 292.5°
North-West	292.5° - 337.5°

I requested a feature from the Fatum developers to display the bearing degrees of a generated point. It has been implemented, but is only available in the bot.

Olympus Mons

2019-04-22T18:00:00+02:00

This is a detailed report of synchronicities and personal gnosis that followed my initiation into the sphere of Jupiter during a one week trip to the area of my hometown in the South of Germany. I experienced Jovial energies during a stroll through the city, another evening I received a symbolic gift, and a few days later I found myself on a nightly quest through the forest of an enchanted mountain.

Titanic Origins

The day after my initiation into the sphere of Jupiter I had to travel to Mannheim for a job. I stayed in a shabby hotel in Ludwigshafen, the other part of the twin city across the Rhine river. Let's be honest, Ludwigshafen ain't pretty. It is mainly known for hosting the chemical industry giant BASF and the city is dominated by a dystopian industrial landscape. BASF was a co-founder of the notorious "IG Farben" conglomerate responsible for Zyklon B (the gas used in the concentration camps), and other chemical research during the Nazi war effort.

Obviously Ludwigshafen was razed to the ground by Allied bombers during the Second World War and you can still feel it. In the shadows of industrial chimneys the cityscape consists of rectangular 60s and 70s buildings that had seen better days and everything looks somehow moldy and rotten and uninviting.

I walked around the inner city and I could not stop thinking about how Saturnian everything felt. I walked past a yellow brick building hosting a high school and the sculpture that adorned its front was a black metal object with sharp edges depicting Prometheus after his fall. What an odd choice for an educational building. What a strange coincidence walking through a Saturnian place after a Jupiter initiation and seeing Prometheus, who had betrayed both, first his Titan kin Saturn by siding with the Olympians around Zeus in the Titanomachy and then his king Zeus, to bring fire to his beloved humans.

I entered a very depressing shopping mall that maybe had its golden days some time during the early 80s and been in decline ever since. I had to find a shop to buy a cable. It made me chuckle to find a branch of the consumer electronics chain "Saturn" while I was thinking about Prometheus and the Titanomachy. In front of it was a giant Transformers robot statue, a metal "Titan". Wondering if all of this was already meant for me to think about or if I am just a mythology nerd I wandered through the shop and found my cable.

When I left the mall I walked by a stand of Germany's far right wing party AfD which was depressing but suited the overall atmosphere of this abomination of a place. I walked down the wide pedestrian shopping mile that looks exactly the same in every average German city, flanked by generic mobile phone and fast food stores - here it was just a little bit more rotten than elsewhere. I was hungry, but nothing looked inviting. I had known that Ludwigshafen was notoriously unappealing, but not expected to be dragged down into such a depression. I just wanted to go back to my hotel.

On the way back along the shopping mile the grey Saturnian vibes surrounding everything suddenly got shattered by the piercing sounds of a Zurna (Middle Eastern woodwind instrument that sounds a bit like an oboe or bagpipe) and a Davul bass drum. Shivers went down my spine and I intuitively followed the music. On the next street corner was a crowd of people dressed in festive clothes and I realized it was a Middle Eastern or Turkish wedding. Some of the young men started dancing and the music became louder. It caused tears to well in my eyes and I felt like a blanket of lead was suddenly lifted off me. The depressed feeling that had dominated my stay in this city had vanished immediately and even the overcast sky was suddenly flooded by sunlight and patches of bright blue sky.

Now I was completely certain: Kingship and betrayal, Zeus' Titanic ancestry, family gatherings, weddings, music and dance; Spirits of the Sphere of Jove were teaching me about their powers and energies!

Here's a YouTube video I found that captures the same vibes quite well:

Squares and Mercenaries

After my job I travelled to my hometown Heidelberg which is just a few kilometers away from Mannheim. My wife T. and daughter E. came down from Berlin by train to meet me there and we wanted to spend a week with my sister and my parents. At past visits we usually stayed at my parents house, but this time we had booked an AirBnB for five of the seven days.

The AirBnB was a small one room studio apartment, so when T. took E. to bed around 7 p.m. I went outside for a stroll in the neighborhood. It was unknown to me because it was just recently built and used to be a freight trainyard and industrial area back in the days when I had still lived in the city. I aimlessly strolled along a shallow water canal with inviting benches and I sat down on one, enjoying the evening air. I noticed something lying beside me and picked it up. It was a cardboard box with a board game in it, labelled "Go für Anfänger" ("Go for beginners"). I was excited! Go, the "Chinese Chess"! I took it with me and continued walking until I reached a small bridge. I crossed it and wandered down a small road with modern duplex style family apartment buildings that reminded me a bit of suburban Tel Aviv. The street ends at an intersection with a paved pedestrian and bicycle road along pasture and farmland. I looked into the distance across a green field and noticed three strange looking shapes moving slowly across. It realized they were three very large birds, three storks! I stared at them and a thought popped up in my head: black and white like the Go game.

At that moment it hit me again: I was meant to find the game. It's Jupiter again! A quick online search on my phone confirmed what I had already anticipated: storks are associated with Jupiter. Chess too. I went back to our apartment and started researching about Go. The name is derived from the Japanese name igo, which is derived from its Chinese name weiqi, which roughly translates as "board game of surrounding". It is a 3,000+ years old abstract strategy game for two players and the goal of the game is to surround more territory than the opponent. In antiquity it was considered one of the four essential arts of the cultured Chinese aristocrats besides mastering a string instrument, calligraphy, and painting.

"The board has to be square, for it signifies the Earth, and its right angles signify uprightness. The pieces of the two sides are yellow and black; this difference signifies the Yin and the Yang; scattered in groups all over the board, they represent the heavenly bodies. These significances being manifest, it is up to the players to make the moves, and this is connected with kingship. Following what the rules permit, both opponents are subject to them; this is the rigor of the Tao." - Pan Ku, 1st century historian

I unpacked the game and noticed that instead of the standard 19x19 line grid, this one had just 9x9. Go boards have 4 to 9 decorative dots on symmetrically chosen line intersections. They help you not get lost between all the lines and intersections and have other minor functions in variants of the game. This board had four dots and I immediately noticed that the dots form a large square of four by four small squares - like the kamea of Jupiter! That made me pay more attention to the empty squares instead of the grid of lines around them and I noticed that the whole board has 8 by 8 squares, like a chess or checker-board. With the black and white pebbles one could even play checkers on this board! I found this similarity curious and I dove into the rabbit hole of the history of checkers - and it suddenly all started to make even more sense:

Long before Chess or Checkers existed, the ancient Greeks used to play a popular game called "Petteia" which Plato claimed originated in Egypt. It was played with black and white pebbles on a board divided in squares, mostly 8 by 8. The exact rules are unknown, but it was about capturing the opponent by surrounding them. It very likely survived into the Roman Empire under the name of "Ludus Latrunculorum" or "Latrunculi": "The Game of Mercenaries." Based on various mentions of the game throughout the history of the Roman Empire, various attempts to reconstruct the detailed rules have been made, but the most accurate reconstruction was made by Ulrich Schädler in 1994:

The game is for 2 players. Before the game begins the players decide how many pieces each of them is going to have. The allowed range is 16-24 pieces per player. The pieces start off the board. The first turn is decided by lot, such as toss of a coin. Then, each player takes a turn to place one piece onto any empty square on the board. Once all of the pieces have been placed, the players take turns to move their pieces. Pieces can be moved horizontally and vertically to any adjacent square. A piece can jump over another piece of either color, if the square behind the piece being jumped over is unoccupied. Several jumps can be made in one move, just like in checkers. A player can trap enemy pieces between two of their own pieces. A trapped piece cannot be moved, but stays on the board. Once an enemy’s piece became trapped, on their next turn, the player can capture it and remove it off the board, as long as both pieces that are trapping it are still free and did not become trapped themselves on the opponents following move. Once a piece is removed off the board it does not return into the game. If the opponent surrounded one of the enemy pieces trapping their trapped piece, then theirs is made free, where as the enemy trapped piece becomes trapped. A player can move their own piece between two enemy pieces only if by doing such a move will trap one of the enemy pieces. Such a move is called Suicide. The player who remains only with one piece on the board loses the game.

Check this website for more information

Go and Petteia. Games of strategy, conquest, kingship, capture and expansion. Game as cultural art for pleasure, leisure, and fun. Thanks for this gift, Jove! It is not only a clear pointer for me to act more strategically in my life, but I also already have a ton of ideas of how to apply concepts and elements of "Latrunculi" in magical operations and sigil creation.

Mons Omnium Sanctorum

Thursday evening I spontaneously decided to go for a hike to release some of the tensions that usually build up when hanging out with my folks. I had an urge to just enjoy nature and connect with some spirits of place of my hometown. I wanted it to be a bit adventurous, so I chose to walk up to the top of Heiligenberg ("Holy Mountain"), a 449 meters high hill on the opposite river-side of the Königstuhl ("king's chair") that rises above Heidelberg's old town.

Heiligenberg is a special place. It is a quite high elevation from which you can look far across the Rhine valley and parts of the Neckar valley. It was inhabited since the Neolithic era and Celts had built a double walled fort around its peaks around 500 BC. During the Roman era the hill was a sacred precinct with a North-facing temple to Mercury on its summit. Archeological finds include votive stones with Latin inscriptions to Mercurius Cimbrianus, "Mercury of the Cimbri",suggesting a place of worship of the Germanic god Wodan, who was identified with Mercury by interpretatio romana. In the 9th century a church dedicated to the Archangel Michael was built on top of the Roman temple, incorporating its rocks and it was expanded to a monastery in 1023. There is a second smaller monastery of St. Stephan below the peak from aorund the same era and next to that is the infamous Heidenloch ("heathen hole"), a pit 55 meters deep, of unknown age and purpose. It has been suggested that it is a Roman well or cistern, but most likely it had some kind of cultic function.

During his travels along the Rhine river in the mid 19th century, Victor Hugo even visited the Heiligenberg and the Heidenloch. I found out about this after my journey and I added some quotes of his report, because he describes the aura of the place in a very fitting way.

During the Third Reich, a Thingstätte ("Thing place") open-air theatre was constructed on the Heiligenberg for propaganda and cultural events. In my teenage years I remember that it was a tradition to celebrate the night before Mayday, Walpurgisnacht or "witches night" by getting drunk on the river beach and then hiking up to the Thingstätte with thousands of other people and partying all night with giant bonfires and drumming sounds. It was always a quite psychedelic experience that felt very pagan and it was the "largest inofficial event of the year" in Heidelberg.

I left our AirBnB around 8pm and took a tram to where I knew a hiking path to the mountain begins. The sun was about to set when I walked up the forest route. I walked quickly because I wanted to reach the top before complete darkness. It did not work out quite as I thought. It got dark fast and I soon noticed that I was a city guy now. Every tiny shuffling or cracking sound in the trees and bushes around me freaked me out a bit, not knowing if it came from a mouse, bunny, a boar, or worse.

I had left the town about noon by a path known as the Philosopher's Walk, which leads nobody knows where, as befits a philosopher's walk, — I found myself in a small valley; and after exploring it leisurely for awhile, I set to work climbing the side of a steep hill by one of those old paths one often finds in this region, — staircases paved with stone, one might truly call them. Twilight was slowly settling down upon the valley behind me, and as I turned when about midway up the ascent I beheld one of those weird, evening landscapes in which the mountains that border the horizon remind one of a long procession of immense snails, and the mist-veiled rivers and streams the silver track they leave behind them. --Victor Hugo

My first destination was the "Bittersbrunnen", a very ancient spring that had already served the Celtic settlers as a water source in the fifth century BC. It was night when I reached it and the moon shone brightly from above. The spring had been covered by erosion for centuries, but was restored in 1980 and stabilized by a stone construction, a small tunnel and a basin. I recited Eliphas Levi's "Prayer of the Undines" and left an offering of a handful of almonds I had taken with me as a snack. I wanted to take some of the spring water with me, but I did not want to sacrifice my bottle of drinking water for it. The almonds I had brought were kept in a glass jar, so I decided to use that and poured all the remaining almonds into my backpack and filled the jar with water from the rock basin of the spring. I noticed that the lid of the jar did not fit tightly enough and leaked water, so I could not put it into my backpack but had to carry it in my hand. It was a bit annoying, but worked.

Around 15 minutes later I reached the summit and I could already see the black silhouettes of one of the monastery's ruined towers through the trees. When I reached the St. Michael's ruins the starry sky and bright moon were overwhelming. It was a very magical atmosphere. I climbed the tower and looked around. I could see city lights of towns all around and gazed forever at the night sky, enjoying the moment.

From the broad summit, covered with a thin growth of heather and pitilessly swept by the wind, the country below looked, not like a landscape, but like a huge, nearly round geographical map similar to that which Christ must have beheld when Satan took him up into a mountain to show him all the kingdoms of the earth. --Victor Hugo

Then I walked over to the remains of the ancient Roman temple, faced North and recited the Orphic Hymns to the ruler of the day: Zeus, and to Hermes, the ruler of this place. I closed with a short prayer to Wotan and did a cycle of Qi Gong exercises and a meditation. I took a thin branch of a hazel tree that grows in the middle of the old monastery as a souvenir and apologized to and thanked the spirits of place for this memorable visit up here.

I left the sacred site and checked the map on my phone to orient myself and to find the shortest and easiest to walk path downhill. It was around 10pm and pitch black and I wanted to go home as quickly as possible. The fastest way was via the Thingstätte open air theatre, so I walked down the giant stairs facing the rocky stage area and memories of my teenage times popped up in my mind: my first ever high from some dubious legal ecstasy herb mix with 17 up here during Walpurgisnacht had definetly been a night to remember. How old I've become so quickly. Right below the Thingstätte is a small restaurant that was just in the process of closing and at a spring fountain next to it I refilled my drinking water bottle, put a jacket on and reorganized my backpack a bit for the hike down.

I walked down the paved mountain road that connects the restaurant to civilization and passed by the ruins of St. Stephan's monastery. I wanted to pay a quick visit to the Heidenloch before descending, so I walked over to the small circular hut that houses the ominous pit. I spontaneously decided to recite the Orphic Hymn to Hermes Chthonios because it felt appropriate and I threw some almonds down into the depths as an offering to whoever dwells here. The pit is covered by a metal grill and fine wire-mesh to keep people from falling down there or dropping their trash into it, but the mesh was wide enough for almonds to pass through. I listened to them falling and bouncing off the walls on their way down. The sounds seemed to not stop, just fade out very slowly. It was mesmerizing.

It was only an old cistern perhaps, but the hour, the place, and the moonlight imparted a strange weirdness to this mysterious chamber buried in the ground with only the sky for a roof. What can it be? Pushing aside the tall weeds and briers with my cane, I seize hold of a young sapling, and leaning over the side of the opening, peer eagerly down into the depths below. Just then I hear a sad and quavering voice behind me distinctly utter the word "Heidenloch." [...] I turn, but no human being is visible. Though I know very little German, the meaning of this term is familiar to me. It means the pagans' dungeon. I turn, but no human being is visible. The soft sighing of the wind is the only sound I hear. [...] I confess that I remained gazing down into the pagans' dungeon a long time, imagining it the empty tomb of some giant, perhaps, or a temple of the Druids, or the reservoir of some ancient convent, or even the site of a demolished gibbet whose grim sides had been sprinkled with human blood or piled high with lifeless bodies. --Victor Hugo

When I collected my stuff to go I almost kicked the glass jar with the spring water I had collected earlier and I left the hut to finally head home. It suddenly felt colder than before and there was also strong wind blowing through the treetops. Time to get going. I checked my phone again to make sure I would take the right path and suddenly my phone just turned off. I could not turn it back on as if the batteries had just died. It was weird because I knew I must have had at least 20% of power left when I last checked 10 minutes earlier. Fortunately I had my little yellow wand flashlight with me and I searched the side of the road for the beginning of the footpath I had wanted to take. But I could not find it.

I freaked out. No map, unexpected stormy weather coming up, no idea where to go. I oriented myself towards the city lights of Heidelberg, took my flashlight and just walked straight through the forest that wasn't very bushy and fairly easy to cross in this part of the hill. I reached a wide footpath and turned left walking parallel to the river. I remembered that a lot of paths follow around the hill and lead downwards in a zigzag fashion, so I just kept going. I noticed that I suddenly couldn't see very well anymore. It seemed like the air had become very dense and opaque, as if there was fog. I kept walking for 15 minutes but there was no path leading down, no curve, nothing. I decided to walk back into the other direction. I felt lost and scared. Was all this a result of me stirring up things in the creepy Heidenloch? Why did my phone die? Why is there suddenly fog and wind although it was clear sky before? Am I getting superstitious and paranoid?

I finally reached a crossroads with directions carved into a large rock. The arrows were not very clear, so I decided intuitively which way to go. It seemed to get darker and I could barely see anything but at least I got used to all the animal sounds around me by now without freaking out. I found another sign pointing to "Hirschgasse" ("Buck's alley") and I faintly remembered that name. It might be the small alley with stairs that lead down to the old bridge that crosses the river to Heidelberg. I followed the sign. What felt like an hour later I finally reached a paved footpath that led straight downhill. I followed it, but it dawned on me that Hirschgasse was not what I had thought it was. I saw streetlights and houses but I came out at the wrong end of the city on the wrong side of the hill. I didn't care, I was back in civilization!

I left the tree-branch I had used as a hiking stick at a crossroads, thanking it for its help, and walked towards the river. Under the streetlight I noticed something floating in the spring water glass jar I was still carrying in my left hand. It was a leaf. I opened the jar and took the leaf out, thinking it was a good idea to not drink the water on my way down. Then I noticed that there was something else floating in the jar. I held it up to the light and looked more closely. I almost dropped it when I saw two small creatures floating in it, with arms and legs, and fins and long tails. What the hell? I had accidentally taken two amphibian larvae with me from the ancient Bittersbrunnen spring! What did it mean? Was I supposed to take them home with me?

I walked by the Neckar river towards the old town of Heidelberg, pondering about what to do now. There was no way for me to take these creatures back to Berlin! When I reached the Old Bridge and walked across towards the town's gate I stopped and did an impromptu prayer to the river spirit. I told him I cannot take these water creatures with me and that I will give them into his care. I asked him to protect them, let them grow and show them the world downstream. I opened the jar and flung the contents down the bridge into the waters of the Neckar. I felt sad about losing the ancient spring-water I had so carefully carried down Heiligenberg. I had wanted to use it for magical operations. But I also felt somehow relieved and liberated. It was a curious emotion and I walked through the city gates and greeted the "Brückenaffe" ("bridge monkey"), a little bronze sculpture of a baboon like monkey holding a mirror towards the spectator. It made me chuckle. Yes, I am such a fool!

I bought myself a Kebab and walked through the old town to Bismarckplatz where I luckily caught the last tram to where our AirBnB was at and I arrived home safely around midnight. What a trip!

Olympic Alchemy

Before my initiation into the sphere of Jupiter I had expected mainly that I might learn lessons about earthly manifestations, material wealth, something I have never been good at, or about the expansion of my own sovereignty in terms of my life as a freelancer and entrepreneur. I was surprised that the main topic that suddenly unfolded was about very personal family matters.

Sachiel had pointed me to some quite painful issues regarding my relationship to my parents that I had assumed were resolved a long time ago. But they were not and they bubbled up again. I did not get into details in my report due to their private nature. All I can reveal is that it was an unpleasant confrontation in several episodes and I was not able to reconcile with them about fundamental elements of my life and our relationship - but eventually that was perhaps the quintessence of the Jovial teachings: Zeus had Titan parents and he had to defeat them to gain sovereignty and the throne of the world!

My afternoon in Ludwigshafen had presented me with the Saturnian melancholy and depression, suddenly broken apart by Jovial optimism, joy of music and dance, and the founding of a new sovereign family all represented by the image of a Middle Eastern wedding.

I was gifted a board-game of strategy and conquest, expansion and sovereignty that immediately sparked a ton of ideas and interpretations without even having played it yet. There will be a lot of things to unpack from this in the future for sure, and food for thought about my role in the world and my approach to life. I am excited to embrace it.

My nightly pilgrimage to the holy mountain of my birthplace unexpectedly turned into a small "Hero's Quest" that reconnected me with the spirit of place. I visited and honored the god who was once worshipped at this place and when I recited the hymns to Zeus and Hermes I realized that they both are parts of Wotan's nature (Jovial and Mercurial). I was illuminated and left in awe by the moon and the stars above and haunted and cursed by dark forces from the below. I had unknowingly (unconsciously) carried two amphibian larvae in my hand from an ancient source in a dark forest up to the summit and all the way down to the valley where I became conscious of their existence and flung them into the raging waters of the river of my hometown. Right after that, a monkey showed me a mirror and mocked me a fool. That whole evening is already so dense with potential meaning to unravel, it will take a while to fully comprehend.

What seems to have shifted in my consciousness after my initiation ritual is the constant feeling of having been taken out of 3D reality and forced to become an observer of my own life. I've had this feeling occasionally every since I started practicing rituals, but now it feels like I levelled up and can't stop seeing everything from that perspective. It does not mean that I have difficulties being present in the moments of my life - quite the opposite actually. It was rather a shift in general awareness of life itself.

Another very profound difference is that now - especially after my nightly journey - it feels validated to me that my own mind and objective consensus reality are not two separate worlds, but rather different points of one spectrum. It has become difficult to separate my mind from a dark forest with a bottomless pit and ruined monasteries. As above, so below.

A smaller yet peculiar observation is that from the beginning of my preparations and research for the Seven Spheres initiation I had noticed a recurring synchronicity: Almost 70% of the time I looked at my phone throughout the day to check the time, it presented me some kind of interesting number combination. Double numbers, like 14:14 or 21:21, mirrored ones, like 12:21 or 15:51, as well as triplets or quadruplets, like 23:33 or 11:11. After the initiation, the probability of those has risen to over 90%. Now I am actually surprised when it does not happen.

The night after my journey to Heiligenberg I had an intense and vivid nightmare in which I was haunted by a demon named Samael. I bound and defeated him, but it triggered some interesting synchronicities I will get into in a future post. But besides that, I have a hunch that my next initiation will probably be into the sphere of Mars.

(Victor Hugo's quotes taken from an English translation of his travel report "Le Rhin")

Altar of the Serpent Goddess

2018-08-25T19:30:00+02:00

Yet again, this year I returned to the rocky island of Pag to do the same job as in the last years. I was quite excited to come back to celebrate my two year serpent dream anniversary and one incredible year of invincibility. Before my trip I started doing a bit of research about the antiquity of Pag with the intention of finding some kind of mythological or historical thread to pull on in order to tip my hat to an older spirit of place in the course of ritually celebrating my magical birthday.

Well, I had barely touched the first thread I could find and a whole spaghetti bowl of delicious mess of myth and enchantment landed in my lap!

Serpent Goddess

I found out that in pre-Roman times the island of Pag was inhabited by a tribe of the Illyrian people called "Liburnians" that lived along the Adriatic sea and was well known for their seafaring skills.

At the more spiritual level Illyrians were certainly much taken with the force of spells or the evil eye. Pliny’s story that there were among Illyrians those ‘who could gaze with the evil eye, cast a spell and even kill someone’ is repeated in the following century by Aldus Gellius in his compendium of table-talk among Roman intellectuals. (1)

Not much is known about their pantheon, mostly because it consisted mainly of very regional deities with changing names, almost all of them female! The only mention of names of their deities are from Roman Empire period monuments, some with interpretatio Romana.

there are two main features associated with Liburnian deities: the absolute predominance of female gods, and the lack of iconographic expression. It is as if Liburnian deities did not have an anthropomorphic character (2)

But besides plenty of depictions of a prominent solar cult in the North of Liburnia there is one other powerful symbol that is found on altars and other votive objects dedicated to their female deities:

The most significant indigenous symbol in Illyria-Dalmatia is the serpent. [...] Although the serpent is often considered a male symbol of chthonic character, the presence of the serpents in the cultic iconography related to the Illyrian female goddess should not be underestimated. (3)

Wow! Goddesses in the shape of serpents! I knew I was on the right track...

I dug deeper into finding some more information on the mentioned Roman monuments to see whether something related to Pag would come up. And it did...

A fully preserved sacrificial altar dedicated to a Liburnian deity was actually found on the island, erected by the Roman noblewoman Calpurnia in honor of the local goddess Heia syncretized with the Roman goddess Bona Dea!

I couldn't believe this series of synchronicities with my own serpentine obsession and my quite fresh connection to The Mother Goddess, all tying in with the place where all of this started! It might be connected to having just finished another novena to Our Lady of Candelaria ending on her feast day a week before...it felt like I was being directed to something.

Journey to Cissa

Anyways, excited about all my findings I travelled to Pag - mainly for my job - but now I even ended up with a mission for my magical anniversary: to acknowledge and to thank the local goddess Heia and the spirits of this place.

In the last years I always had rented a scooter to explore the island but this time my work schedule was tighter so I didn't find the time to do that and the range of accessible places to do a ritual was quite limited.

I remembered an old ruin near the villge of Caska reachable by foot in under an hour. Coincidentally the same village is also the location of most of the findings of Roman architecture and objects. Back in the days, the island of Pag was called Cissa or Gissa after this exact Roman settlement of the same name.

Caska itself is a very tiny village and is mainly consisting of tourist apartment houses along a road to the town of Metajna. According to the tourist brochure (4) several Roman artefacts were discovered there as well as a necropolis next to the sea. The ruins above the town are actually of a Roman fortress from Byzantine times that hosted a church dedicated to the patron of Pag: St. George (aha, the serpent slayer!).

Perfect! I planned to do a little hike to Caska to check out the necropolis and some excavations and to do a small ritual inside the old church of St. George.

I found it a bit confusing why there are not more remains of ancient Cissa itself if it was apparently such an important Roman outpost that gave the whole island its name. I found the answer in the same tourist guide (4): apparently the city had disappeared!

Inspired by the multitude of archaeological finds along the coastline and in the shallow waters of the cove, legends about the dramatic sinking of the famous and rich city of Kisa were passed down orally in the Novalja area for centuries. The most frequently told story was about two sisters, the good sister Bona and the evil sister Mala, and about the angel sent by God to find one good human being among the evil, corrupt population of Kisa. The angel found Bona and ordered her to flee the city, which forever disappeared into the sea in a terrible earthquake as she fled.

In the second version of the legend, the good sister with her beautiful, healthy children lived in dire poverty, while the evil sister with her pale, sickly children swam in a sea of riches. When the good sister asked her evil sister for help one day, she was rudely refused. God was greatly angered and in retribution sank the entire city, sheltering the good sister and her children on the hill top Sv. Juraj (St. George) beforehand. (4)

On Tuesday the 21st of August - my magic anniversary - I left Novalja around two in the afternoon and walked along the little road to Caska and up the hill to the Byzantine ruins. In contrast to my last year's self-initiation I wanted to keep it simple this time, but to honour my personal tradition of new beginnings happening on this island I also planned to try something new: shamanic journeying!

I sat down in the middle of the church remains, gave some offerings of spring-water, frankincense and mugwort from back home to my regulars, the genii loci and my ancestors and was grateful for being back on Pag. Then I plugged into my iPod and played the classic Michael Harner journeying drumming track. I closed my eyes and off I went...

...it was my first attempt of consciously visiting the underworld and unfortunately it didn't really work out. I was in a deep meditative state where I couldn't feel my body anymore and all kinds of thoughts and ideas meandered through my consciousness but it wasn't a journey. But it was all fine, I didn't have any expectations.

...half an hour later I opened my eyes and right in front of my face was a shiny black giant cicada humming around a small purple flower that grew in one of the cracks of the ancient rocks. My first thought was "oh a scarab!". It was a beautiful moment.

I walked down to Caska and along the rocky beach to a small watchtower that had been used by tuna-fishermen for centuries. I also found the remains of the "necropolis" which was a bit odd because it was right at the beach next to countless half-naked young people listening to loud music, getting sunburnt and sleeping off their hangovers from the hard party nights on this party island. I continued back to Novalja taking a small detour through one of the few beautiful pine forests.

Augusta Triumphalis

On the next day I felt a bit anxious and disappointed. Not only did my journeying attempt not really work out, but also the contrast between a rich and spiritual Roman past and today's hyper-mundane tourism-for-profit reality everywhere on the island left me a bit depressed. This did not feel like a proper anniversary at all! I needed to do something else!

The moment this thought had formed in my head I knew immediately what my goal was: to find the altar to the local serpentine goddess Heia!

I opened my laptop and connected to the awfully slow internet the tourist apartment provided and went through my sources again: what was this altar all about, who was this noblewoman Calpurnia and where in Cissa/Caska did she live?

Located somewhere in the Caska area was the estate of the well-known Roman senatorial family Calpurnii Pisones, which is indicated by the ruins of three sacrificial altars erected by Calpurnia, the daughter of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, Roman Consul in the year 1 B.C., and the granddaughter of Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, Roman Consul in 23 B.C. When Calpurnia lived in Caska, her family was experiencing difficult times: in 19 B.C. her uncle was accused of murdering the young and favorite Germanicus (the nephew of the emperor Tiberius and brother of the emperor Claudius), which ended in his suicide during the court procedure in 20 B.C. Calpurnia’s father also committed suicide in 24 B.C., during rigged court proceedings for supposedly insulting the emperor. After this the family’s situation stabilized and things turned for the better. (4)

Very exciting! A haunted, decadent, Roman city that sunk after a haunted and probably decadent, Roman senatorial family had lived there!

One interesting aspect of this specific altar is that it is dedicated to the local Liburnian goddess Heia (Eia, Heja, Eja) syncretized with the Roman women-only mystery cult goddess Bona Dea whose real name was secret but assumed to be Fauna, the shy and secretive wife of Faunus. It is intriguing because Faunus and Pan are tightly connected to the god Silvanus (also Dionysus/Sabazius) who was also prominently venerated throughout Illyria. Plus, Bona Dea is usually depicted with a serpent wrapped around her arm (Asclepius connection of healing) and surrounded by serpents. Her temples were known to have hosted numerous living serpents (5). It makes a lot of sense to see her as interpretatio Romana of a local Liburnian goddess Heia.

I went through several sources on Roman votive monuments and Liburnian deities that had lists of altars and other artifacts found along the Adriatic coast to find out more about the specific altar, especially about it's current location.

One Croatian list noted the altar was found in Caska/Gramače and is stored at the Stomorica collection in Novalja, another one (5) claimed that the altar was found in a "vinyard of doctor R. Palčič" in Caska and the tourist catalog (4) only said it was "found in Gramače", which is a completely different village than Caska.

I concluded that it was probably not anymore where it was found, so most likely it must be at the aforementioned Stomorica collection, a small museum of Roman artefacts in the city center of Novalja. I went there straightaway. It was just a 10 minutes walk but closed when I arrived, so I went to the small cathedral instead and also took a look at some ancient mosaics around the corner. On the way back to my apartment I noticed the museum was open now (the church visit had paid off!). It was one room with shards of Roman pottery, some gravestones and rusty coins and pieces of different altars. I asked the lady at the entrance if she could tell me where I could find the "large Calpurnia altar" and she looked at me as if I had just ordered a Hamburger and fries. She did not know anything aside from selling tickets and postcards, so I left disappointed.

Back home I sent an email to the museum asking for more information about the altar, without expecting to ever get an answer. Then I looked into my sources again. If it's not in the local museum, perhaps it is still where it was found? I spent a few hours scanning the satellite view of Google maps, comparing them to archeological sketches from other sources, and virtually driving along Google Street View, peeking into peoples virtual gardens. I started getting a bit obsessed about this mission (what Mars retrograde energies can do to an person with ascendant Mars and martian personal daimon!) Must. Find. It.

I decided to do this detective work in a more logical and structured way and thought about just taking the handful of clear information I had at hand and see what to conclude from them:

a hand-drawn sketch of the altar itself
the dimensions of the altar
found in either Caska or Gramače
a few blurry photos from the tourist catalog that show a rock that might be the altar

The rock that can be seen on the photos looks a lot like the hand-drawn sketch and the photos also show an architectural structure right next to the rock, an L-shaped wall with a hole/window. In the background you can see the sea and some reddish roofs of modern houses.

It must be in a town or next to at least two houses
It must be on a clearing where the sea is visible
It must be either near Caska or Gramače

I took another tour across and over the island via Google maps, scanning for small L-shaped structures in close proximity to houses. After an hour of doing that I gave up. It was pointless.

I went back to staring at the photos. I suddenly remembered the incredible crowdsourced forensics work of bellingcat and how they could locate objects from photos based on the background landscape. Let's try this again, Mars whispered into my ear.

I looked at the photo backgrounds again, beyond the bushes and houses. I noticed the hillscape you can see beyond the sea. From Pag you can see the hills on the mainland on one side and a few more islands on the other side. Also it has long stretching coves and bays on the island itself, so it should be possible to find a place with this view.

I jumped back into the virtual Google car and drove up to Gramače first, trying to find a spot where you can see the sea from the road. I looked south-west but aside from a small island on the horizon there was no such view in this direction. I looked down the other side towards the mainland. It looked a bit like on the photo but not really. The mountains were much higher.

Then it suddenly struck me: The hill on the left side of the photo could actually be Sveti Vid, the highest mountain on the island of Pag which I had climbed for my initiation ritual last year and the lower bits on the right could be the beaches of Zrće! In that case it must be taken in or near Caska.

I "drove" to Caska and peeked towards the sea. Yess, very possible!.

The next day I walked to Caska again. The landscape from the photos was burned into my brain in all pixelated details so I was able to compare it in real-time walking the main road of Caska. I peeked up and down, left and right, trying to find hints of white rock walls near houses with similar roof-shapes as on the photos. I felt like Indiana Jones.

Then I saw it! Down very close to the beach, behind a field of very dry looking vines. There was a wall that had a hole in it. I walked down towards it and noticed that it was located in a private garden next to a very modern looking house. It's too late now to respect properties, Mars whispered. So I jumped into it and there it was! A beautiful white limestone altar, exactly the shape of the one from the sketch!

(Coordinates: 44.550010, 14.919650)

I felt a moment of joy and peace, sat down, offered again frankincense, spring water and mugwort from home and did a stuttery impromptu prayer of gratitude and devotion, and reciting the inscription of the altar:

Bonae Deae Dominae Heiae Augustae Triumphali terrae marisque Dominatrici Conservatrici mentiumque bonarum ac remediorum Potenti Deae Bene Iudicanti

(Bona Dea Domina Heia Augusta Triumphalis, the Mistress of land and sea, the Protectress, the Mistress of wisdom and medicine, the Goddess of right judgement)

This felt right. This felt good. I was satisfied. Mission accomplished. Something clicked. It almost felt like a cycle was over, an open circle closed, or a spiral turned once. I still need to find out what this actually means.

Update 28/08/2018

I was surprised to find an email in my inbox - from the director of the local museum in Novalja herself, confirming that the altar is located in a private garden in Caska and clearing up the confusion about Gramače. Apparently "gramače" is a Croatian name for a certain stone formation found in this area, but in publications it apparently got confused with the settlement of the same name north of Novalja. She also said she will send me a brochure of epigraphic monuments on the island and that there are some new things showing up:

The first inhabited part of the island is the hill Košljun, close to Caska and on the way to ferry. There you could still found interesting parts of pottery, mosaics on the floor of what seems to be a small church, graves, remnants of the fortress wall and much more. Actually it is being explored as we speak. The archaeologists usually come before and after the tourist season and they are there right now.

(1) Wilkes, John. The Illyrians. Wiley-Blackwell, 1995.

(2) Matijašić, Robert. "The iconography of indigenous cults in northern Liburnia." Akti VIII. međunarodnog kolokvija o problemima rimskog provincijalnog umjetničkog stvaralaštva. Goledn Marketing, Tehnička knjiga, 2005.

(3) Prusac, Marina. "Hybrid Deities in South Dalmatia."

(4) Caska Cove Brochure

(5) Brouwer, Hendrik HJ. Bona Dea. Vol. 127. Brill, 1989.

Spirits of Berlin

2018-04-21T12:00:00+02:00

Psychogeography

Imagine Berlin. Imagine a city of fragments and ghosts. Imagine a metropolis which inspired countless artists and witnessed uncountable murders. Imagine a laboratory of ideas, the fount of both the brightest and darkest designs of history’s most bloody century. Imagine the most arrogant capital of Europe devastated by Allied bombs then divided. Imagine it reunited and reborn as one of the creative centres of the world. (Rory Maclean "Berlin: Imagine a City")

I live in Berlin for almost two decades now. It's the place I call home - my freely chosen Zuhause, not the Heimat where I was born. Besides enjoying the obvious perks of living in a European capital city, Berlin has always felt to me like I belong here. It has given me subtle weird and at the same time beautiful tingles from the first day of my arrival: uncanny feelings of nostalgia I only know from some of my dreams and a permanent sense of out-of-time-and-place-ness that I very much resonate with.

I live in Berlin. [...] it is different from anywhere else. But I cannot quite express that difference, that otherness, in words yet. (Nooteboom "Roads to Berlin")

In the past I have always explained away the strangeness with the unique historical impacts of two World Wars and a Cold War that one encounters almost on every street corner, but since I started travelling my path of enchantment, I've wanted to dig deeper into the metaphysical heart of this city - to find the Spiritus Loci.

Berlin is the city of the negative space, the space where something is not, the bombed-out-of-existence, the closed-off, the mysteriously forbidden. The symbol of this is the bullet holes that you can see so often, small indentations, places where stone or brick should be, but where they are conspicuous by their absence, just as people are absent from closed metro stations. (Nooteboom "Roads to Berlin")

The twentieth century has had such a harsh impact on Berlin that it becomes difficult - almost impossible - to look beyond the trauma, to get a larger historical perspective, to try to grasp a more macroscopic image of Berlin's soul from the times before the death and destruction.

He did not have the same feeling in France, in Italy, or in his own country. Those places had enough past, but somehow it had transformed more or less organically into a present. Here, the transition was not complete. The past had become stuck, bogged down, coagulated, curdled, been torn away. But it was still there. Perhaps it was just waiting. (Nooteboom "Roads to Berlin")

Obviously Berlin is haunted with ghosts - eerily silent ghosts. I didn't want to look for those, they are everywhere anyway. I wanted to find the spirit of the city itself.

In his books, Gordon White writes about the importance of a city's river spirit:

[T]he story is always the same because river spirits are always the same: How long have we been here? Who came before? Where did they go? Who or what answered their night prayers, and at what cost? Civilisation is the tobacco of river spirits. They seem to crave it, to will it into being up and down their banks, even though the relationship appears damaging over the long term. (Gordon White "Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits")

In our local monthly meetup of Berlin based witches & wizards we've also discussed this topic and it inspired me to look for folklore and myths about Berlin's Spree river to find clues about the nature of it's inhabiting spirit. I started digging into German online sources, looking as far back as the very beginnings of the history of Berlin:

Prehistory

In pre-christian times the area of Berlin had been visited by Germanic as well as Slavic tribes. Although the Germans had been here first, almost all of their tribes had settled here just temporarily on their way further South during the great migration periods in the 5th until the 7th century. The Wends, a Slavic people coming from the East, settled in the area but mostly in the South of Brandenburg along the Spree. They had established and defended themselves against German re-conquest until the end of the first millennium. A second and larger germanisation attempt in the 13th century was successful, the Slavic rulers were defeated and their people were slowly assimilated. Of course history was way more complicated than that, but this is the very short summary. Their legacy are names of places (like Berlin), the Sorbic language spoken by a minority in the East of Germany, and lots of interesting folklore.

All through the timeline I could not find any relevant myths and legends regarding the Spree river from the close proximity area of Berlin, I guess because Berlin had no real significance until the beginning of the era of long distance trade with ships during the Middle Ages when it became a real city.

The Nix of the Spree

So I followed the Spree upriver looking for hints and I found a whole treasure of legends from the Spreewald area, where the river splits into numerous creeks and canals surrounding marshes and swamps. The other place that offers legends surrounding the river is from Lausitz (Lusatia) further upriver towards the Czech border.

Besides very interesting local legends about the Serpent King, the little dragon Plon, the funny Lutki gnomes and the midday woman, who likes to kill everyone who works at noon instead of taking a break, I found tales of the spirit of the river in the form of the Nyks!

The Nix or Nyks, also called Wodny Muž or Vodnik is a quite moody merman shaped trickster daimon. There are many legends of mermen and mermaids across Celtic, German and Slavic lore, also very often called Nix or Nök but the Spreewald one seems to be especially peculiar.

In his evil or grumpy version he is depicted as having a fish or toad like appearance or of a water corpse. He likes to sit on the banks of the river and scare or even kill children with a club or pull people into the water who are not paying attention or who are mindlessly picking water lilies. He is responsible and feared for causing floods, especially during spring time. The Nyks is said to have beautiful daughters (Nixen) that lure young men into the waters.

When he is in a good mood he appears as a rich farmer, fisherman or a well dressed groom (of "Mother Spree"). He likes to dress in red or wear a green jacket and he is known to help poor fishermen. The Nyks has quite mercurial features as he likes to trade on the market square and play cards and drink in taverns. He can be recognized by his coat having a wet seam and because he never touches cards with a cross (clubs). He likes to loiter around the riverbanks smoking his pipe. Fishermen ask him for help by placing a pinch of tobacco in the water and saying, "Here's your tobacco, Lord Vodník, now give me a fish."

(The Nök, a similar spirit of the Karpfenteich pond in Berlin Treptow)

Being a mercurial trickster it becomes clear why he likes the presence of creatives and entrepreneurs, artisans and merchants. The city is crowded with mercurial people and is a hub of globetrotters and travellers. The creative scene and nightlife are well known around the globe. The open-mindedness is nothing new: it probably peaked in the roaring 1920s and was already present in different ways even before that under Frederick the Great and Frederick William despite their military fetish.

The Black God

It made me wonder about the dark and malefic aspects Berlin certainly has. The constant re-occurring Martian obsession with order, control and militarism, fascism, xenophobia, the omnipresent scars and absences, the borderlines, the dragging stubbornness.

I stumbled upon several references to another myth surrounding the Spree - also further South near today's Bautzen: When the Wends ruled the region, apparently there had been a cult-statue of a god called Flins, Flynz or Flinc who loomed over a steep gorge of the Spree that flows like a wild river until this spot, after which it becomes silent, deep and slow. The icon is described as a bearded skeleton-like figure wearing a long coat, holding a burning bowl in his right hand and having a lion on his left shoulder - other sources describe him as standing next to a lion, being made from gold, holding a spear in one hand and holding up a cauldron over his other shoulder that started steaming when this war-god called his people to battle.

Sounds very Saturnian to me!

There are legends of caves around the gorge where his priests dwelled and about human sacrifices to him. When the Germans conquered and christianised the area, the icon was pushed down the cliff into the roaring Spree. People have tried to dive for it and there seem to be legends about underwater gold treasures and the Flins seems to demand more and more human sacrifices as people disappeared in the waters of the Spree.

It has been speculated that the Flins is no other than the notorious West Slavic black god called Chernobog or Diabol about whom much has been speculated but little can be said definitively.

So assuming the Flins was an animate icon of the West Slavic black god whose veneration for appeasement had suddenly ceased after christian conquest and he was forced into the Spree, it seems obvious that he haunts the river ever since and emanates his Saturnine influences into it. Combine that with the darker aspects of a mercurial spirit Nix and it becomes uncanny that the people in the largest city on the river's banks became obsessed with war and death, and had the world's most famous border-wall cutting right through the heart of the city - a border between people, countries, ideologies, worldviews. And before all that happened, the city was even the home of an occult Saturnian brotherhood.

Not that I want to blame all evil on the river, but he might certainly have had some influence.

Spirits of Berlin

Although the Nix seems at a first glance to not be specifically Berlin related, he is the spirit of the Spree that flows through Berlin. On top of that he seems to also be possessed by a restless black god who occasionally demands sacrifices. It's about time the Nix and the Flins get the recognition they deserve as spirits of place with influence on this city and time for us to try to connect with them.

How does a fish see the river it is swimming in? It cannot leave the water to gain distance or perspective. Something like that is happening in Berlin. Everything is flowing. (Nooteboom "Roads to Berlin")

I live in the area of Kreuzberg, near the Landwehrkanal, a canal connected to the Spree through a series of locks. The banks of the canal host farmers markets twice a week and occasionally flea-markets. The area is also popular for its abundance of bars and clubs - all places I can imagine the Nyks haunting regularly.

I walk along the canal every morning during my strolls with my daughter and I cross its bridges several times a day running chores, so I decided to start trying to hook up with grumpy old Nyx through offerings.

Judging from the folklore, appropriate offerings to him seem to be tobacco or a handful of earth or toasted bread. I assume he would also not deny strong alcohol. Protection from him can be achieved by wearing a cross.

Now I always try to bring some tobacco or bread along with me when I know that I'll be crossing or walking along the canal to offer it to the Spree spirit. I have asked for a few little general favors, like to bring luck. I have not had clear and obvious communication with him, but I hope that will be established soon. He is known to be stubborn, but so am I.

(I found a "7 of Clubs" card and burned it as an offering to the Nix)

I also started including the Flins into my Saturday routine of praying to Kronos and perhaps start thinking about offerings to him too - although plenty of forces from Berlin seem to have provided more than enough human sacrifices during the 20th century to keep him pleased for a while, right? Let's hope so...

Quotes taken from:

Nooteboom, Cees (2013 [2009]), Roads to Berlin: Detours and Riddles in the Lands and History of Germany. Trans. Laura Watkinson. London: MacLehose Press.

found mainly in:

Böttcher, Hannah (2016), Sydney and Berlin Cities of Silence and Absence - A psychogeographical reading of contemporary non-fiction texts, PhD thesis.