SUBLUNAR SPACE - underworld

Hypogearchy

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

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

In the first part we mapped out the Gnostic Kenoma of Capitalist Realism and the Gnosis of Acid Communism. In the second part we pulled the red thread through digital acceleration and hypostitional collapse toward the pull of the Outside Attractor. In the third part we descended into the plague years and came back up with a direction. Now we stop mapping and start digging.

Rule from Beneath

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solar Empire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here the spade should hit rock.

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

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

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

Soil ≠ territory. We will come back to that.

Dust to Dust

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soil Horizons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Katabasis 19

2026-10-10T11:40:00+02:00

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

In the first part we mapped out the Gnostic Kenoma of Capitalist Realism and the Gnosis of Acid Communism. In the second part we pulled the red thread through digital acceleration and hypostitional collapse toward the pull of the Outside Attractor. Now, let's descend into the liminal void of the pandemic, where time warped, and something terrifying, tender, and possible tried to emerge.

In the previous discussion, I already briefly touched on the COVID‑19 pandemic as a kind of catalyst for the systemic changes already set in motion in the years preceding it.

Here, I want to force our attention back to what many have worked hard to forget and put more emphasis on how COVID-19 manifested as a too visceral, world-changing threshold between what was and what came after. Half a decade has already passed and most of us have managed to piece together a new narrative, so we could get back to a routine and a normal life. This is a remarkable feature of us as humans that allows us to persevere and continue on, no matter what.

Yet when we think ourselves back to 2021 there is a lingering feeling of shared rupture in our sense of continuity and belonging, fuzzy and blurry. If we honestly compare life before and after, it becomes impossible to ignore the existential tremor that shook the foundations of how we live, work, and connect with one another.

Let's go back to the "plague years" and take a closer look at what actually occurred in that valley of darkness. Besides the fear and suffering, wasn't there also hope?

Black Swan

As far as I remember the months leading up to the disaster most of us followed our daily lives, fought our struggles, pursued our dreams, took for granted some narrative framework that defined our reality: Capitalist Kenoma. And suddenly, out of nowhere we encountered the Black Swan: an impossible Other that our narrative had not anticipated. An unannounced experience of the Real:

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.²

The Real manifested as a viral agent, alien to the immune system and to medical science. COVID-19 brought disease, suffering and death on a massive scale. Almost overnight it forced us to leave our workplaces and shopping malls, our factories, schools, and airports. Everyone grounded. Curfews confined us to our homes and confronted us with the reality of our fragile bodies and more importantly: our own finitude.

Death came peeking out of where we had hidden him for decades: behind closed doors, in hospices and convalescence homes. Death returned to where he used to belong: the midst of our homes, surrounded by family witnessing final moments.

The paradoxical, ambiguous nature of this moment is so confounding, so bewildering! I mean, how excellent that our arrogant species receives this collective slap-in-the-face reality check, waking us two-leggeds up to the simple truth that we are not at all in control, have never really been in control, that we live at the behest of powers—of a complex interplay of powers—far beyond our ability to fully fathom, to predict, or to steer. What hubris to have imagined we could do whatever we want with this exquisitely interwoven wonder of a world! And yet how awful that this lesson must come at the expense of so many unsuspecting human lives, so many innocent souls now shivering with fever and fright as they struggle to draw breath.³

Despite the zeitgeist of hypostitional reality-denial and conspiratorial scapegoating I will forever acknowledge and extend my gratitude to the countless care-workers and unpaid care-givers within and beyond our families who ceaselessly powered on to keep us fed, healthy, and alive. While these unwavering heroes sustained us, the frail systems scrambling to retain control over this unknown agent forced many of us into confinement, loneliness, and boredom.

This mandated dead time challenged our awareness of the meaningless distractions that once consumed our attention, and of the relentless pace that had come to define our lives, and it opened a capacity for interiority we forgot was possible. Stillness, quietude, suspended temporality that allowed inner monologue, undisturbed trains of thoughts, inner vision. Many of us were forced to deal with ourselves. Our world became more intimate.

And between the extreme modes of ceaseless care and the suspension of time came the temporal disorientation. Hours seemed to melt into days, days and weeks dissolved into some nebulous glob of experience. Everything seemed to be slowing down. Time itself stopped making sense.

Dead time—moments of withdrawal, of what old mystics called Gelassenheit, releasement—are crucial for the revitalization of our life experience. And, perhaps, one can hope that one of the unintended consequences of the coronavirus quarantines in cities around the world will be that some people at least will use their time released from hectic activity and think about the (non)sense of their predicament.⁴

Gaping Wounds

COVID-19 brought everything to a halt, not just us as individuals. The virus landed some of its hardest blows on the most powerful nations and seemed to have stalled even the great engine of capitalism itself.

It suddenly laid bare the gaping structural faults of a system that have been papered over for decades: the corruption, the dynamics of exploitation, social injustice and biopolitics, biodiversity and violence, all the ignored shortcomings underlying our neoliberal reality.

The cognitive dissonance between our beliefs in functional systems of governance and the sudden exposure of their fictionality led many of us to question the very structures we once believed were holding the world together.

The unpopular but legitimate medical imperative for quarantine was eerily mirrored by a more primitive tribal impulse: the urge to redraw boundaries, to quarantine imagined enemies, and to protect our fragile identities under the guise of safety. Fake news, conspiracy theories, paranoia, xenophobia and racism exploded. The collective mind virus of Hypostition emerged, as contagious as the physical pathogen itself.

Given what the virus did to us and what we did to ourselves in response, we had many reasons for despair. [...] Our adversity elicited psychological responses that are common to our species: we felt sadness and grief; responded with anxiety, fear, and anger; and tried to hide the truth from one another and even from ourselves. [...] These emotional responses and behaviors can themselves rightly be seen as foundational parts of epidemics. We might even say that the definition of an epidemic disease should include the fact that it can have outsize psychological effects. [...] To cope with a plague in the twenty-first century, we responded not only with familiar interventions, but also with familiar feelings.⁵

Between the paranoia and conspiracy theories the pandemic also blew open the Overton window of long avoided conversations around topics like mental health or the rigidity of the 9-5 workday. It suddenly became socially acceptable to prioritize self‑care in ways unheard of before.

Remote work suddenly became feasible for many jobs, revealing our standard model of office work as arbitrary, exploitative, and unnecessarily taxing, often forcing people to choose between their career and their well-being.

Radical political and economic ideas that had previously been dismissed as unthinkable were suddenly back on the table: universal basic income, housing the homeless, generous investments into public health, reduction of weekly work days, shorter supply chains, local solidarity and an economy geared towards resilience rather than profit margins.

The Pleroma was suddenly imaginable on a mass scale. Something had suddenly re-emerged: "the spectre of a world which could be free".

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.⁶

Of course we were not the only ones noticing the emperor was without clothes. So did the powers that be. And they knew exactly how to exorcise this dangerous "spectre" that emerged out of interiority, contemplation, class consciousness, and the suspension of time itself.

By speeding things up, averting attention, undermining communality, asserting control. Fear was immediately weaponized as the driving force of hypostitional narratives: The virulent conspiracy theories got accelerated, driven by social media algorithms and political influencers. Fearmongering drove us apart, made us end friendships, relationships, rupture family ties. We got split into irreconcilable camps and incompatible individual identities.

Chthonic Potential

There is no return to normal, the new “normal” will have to be constructed on the ruins of our old lives, or we will find ourselves in a new barbarism whose signs are already clearly discernible.⁴

Collectively we had a chance for change. We decided against it. Out of fear and confusion amid the uncertainties, lack of leadership, lack of vision, out of habit. It's tragic but understandable. We should not hold a grudge or grieve our inabilities. It's human nature.

The story of how exactly we lost hold of this momentum again, why and how we chose to forget is yet to be gathered, retold and analyzed in depth, but that is not a goal of this essay.

What I want instead is to hold this memory of the liberating potential for change, this fragile moment pregnant with real possibilities. Gnosis. Pleroma. Made possible by slowing down, by stopping the engine, by a sudden capacity for interiority, by communing with each other, by questioning Capitalist Realism, by class consciousness.

There is a war taking place in heaven concerning the soul of humanity, and it will be fought in each person’s heart, every day, without rest, and into the foreseeable future. I have no choice but to sound metaphysical and religious, because this is where the psyche goes when it enters the liminal.⁷

Most importantly we should remember where the potential for change came from: Not from an incursion from a cosmic Outside, but breaking out from the Inside. Inside of Us. From Underneath.

The above was written in August 2025, over a year ago. Then it sat there, unpublished forever. I told myself it was for lack of time. But the truth is: I forgot. Both, forgetting and melting time, seem to come naturally when you descend into the plague years. Faced with the daunting climb back up, forgetting becomes the more comfortable choice.

The old Greek word for a journey like this is katabasis¹: a descent into the underworld. What separates the myths is what one brings back up. Orpheus went down for Eurydice and returned with nothing, because he looked back. Inanna was stripped of one garment at each of seven gates, and got out only by sending someone else down in her place. Aeneas went all the way down and came back up carrying the future of Rome, shown to him by his dead father.

A katabasis is not a fall. Not even a forced one. One descends on purpose in order to return, and one should not return empty-handed. So what do we carry back up from Twentytwentywhen? The answer is dirt simple: firsthand knowledge. It's not a blueprint or a manifesto, but the tangible, lived experience of which direction the opening lies in.

It's the opposite of the Gnostic ascent, of Fisher's future, of Land's Outside. It's downward and inward, toward the ground, the soil, the dead. It's not a direction toward some destination. It is the direction. And it has a name, one I've been quietly attaching to these essays all along, without once saying it out loud...

...continue with the next part, in which we stop mapping and start digging, and find out we were never the only ones breathing down here.

Wikipedia: Katabasis ↩
Ayache, Elie. The Medium of Contingency: An Inverse View of the Market. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. pg. 20 ↩
David Abram, In the Ground of our Unknowing, Emergence Magazine, April 7, 2020 ↩
Žižek, Slavoj. Pandemic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World. OR Books, 2020. ↩↩
Christakis, Nicholas A. Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live. Little, Brown Spark, 2020. ↩
Arundhati Roy, The pandemic is a portal, Financial Times, April 3, 2020 ↩
Zachary Stein, Covid 19: A War Broke Out in Heaven, What is Emerging, March 26, 2020 ↩

Dark Night of the Soul

2023-07-10T19:30:00+02:00

This is the most difficult article I've written so far. I have less mental capacities to write than I used to and so much has happened since we set sails to our escape journey at the end of 2020. Little did I know that it would turn into a real odyssey.

I have written extensively about some of my experiences of planetary self-initiation in the past but I have come to realize that the further I progessed through the spheres the more meaningful and personal they became. It feels almost inappropriate to make all the details public here, due to their very personal nature and because they coincided with a difficult period of depression and crisis that took quite some time and effort to get out of. But I will try to briefly touch on them because they might actually be the most important magical experiences of my life.

The last time I had been through a similar personal upheaval and depression was over a decade ago around the time of my Saturn Return (while being completely ignorant of that concept). Back then I managed to shed several layers of self-perceived expectations and societal pressure that had kept my authentic self in confinement and came out of it feeling more like a grownup than before.

This time it was different. Not only in terms of the darkness and confusion I had to push through, as well as the mind-blowing levels of self-realization, but especially due to the magnitude of traumatizing fallout that directly influenced my immediate family. It's one thing to live through a period of depression by yourself, but when you are embedded in a family unit and have responsibilities as a spouse and parent, it is impossible to protect your loved ones from getting hurt.

Thus Spoke the Goddesses

Past planetary initiations had taught me about my relationship with my parents and the need for personal sovereignty (Jupiter), about the temporality of life and nonlinearity of time (Saturn), the art of war and listening to my instincts (Mars). They were all mind-blowing and exciting. In contrast, the initiations of the feminine planets I went through while living on the Canary Island of Tenerife turned out to be deeply soul shattering.

I had been especially looking forward to my Lunar initiation ritual, naively hoping it would help me get more lucid dreams or better psychic skills. Instead, the luminary goddess made me realize that significant parts of my past life had been a self-deceptive lie and that I actually tick all the boxes of an ADHD diagnosis while leaning heavily into the Autism spectrum. How's that for a surprise?

Facing Venus was something I had been scared of ever since starting the 7 spheres cycle, mainly due to the frightening experiences my mage friend Aaron of Charm the Water had gone through but I had to eventually do it and the ritual timing coincided with a very difficult relationship crisis. With equal intensity to her lunar kin the goddess of love and beauty made me ask myself very uncomfortable questions about my interpersonal experiences and abilities that both directly tied into my newly discovered neurodiversity. On the upside - and very weird for a pagan goddess - my venusian initiation resulted in a sudden felt sense of closeness to - wait for it - I still can't really comprehend it: Jesus Christ.

Into the Abyss

So here I was, displaced on a volcanic saturnian island in the middle of the Atlantic. Grappling with mental health issues, questioning my whole past life, having lost my career and general faith in humanity during a raging pandemic, having no friends and a shattered marriage apparently wasn't enough: I conducted Covid-19 during a short trip to Romania and infected my family when I returned. It hit us hard. My wife the hardest. I don't know how we all managed to not lose our minds completely and I really have problems recalling memories of that time. It was grim.

Three months after having officially recovered from Covid-19 I almost drowned from attempting to swim in the sea. My physical condition was at its worst ever, I could barely breathe and it all really bummed me out. When Russia invaded Ukraine at the end of February 2022 it was the cherry on the despair cake and I lost it. I drifted off into a serious depression of which I barely recall anything besides fractions of images. I was suffering heavy post-Covid symptoms, overwhelming fatigue, a brainfog so intense I was unable to read or write properly.

In the months that followed, my wife - who miraculously hadn't left me - somehow managed to drag us all off the island and we spent several weeks traveling. We met my parents on their holidays on the neighbor island of Fuerteventura, we also traveled all our former homes, reconnecting with family and friends and it felt like collecting long forgotten shards of my soul.

Tikkun Atzmi

I wandered the endless white beaches of Fuerteventura, drowning in nostalgia from childhood vacation memories, reliving the bliss of those magical times, letting months of stuck tears flow.

I walked the streets of Berlin with a never before encountered intense sense of placeness. I ritually visited every house and neighborhood I had lived in for the past 20 years. I was overwhelmed by forgotten memories, almost breaking down on several occasions, finding myself crying, finally integrating grief and loss of past failed relationships and old friends.

I wandered through the forests around my hometown, in awe of the intensity of how much 'home' this place felt, reconnecting with my parents and friends from teenage times. We ended up spending several weeks in Heidelberg and I couldn't shake the feeling that immersing myself in this ancestral place contributed a lot to my recovery. I finished the seven Spheres with Mercury at his temple on the same mountain I had started the planetary journey three years earlier.

It was during that time that we decided to close this weird liminal chapter of our life and leave Tenerife for good. What had started as a hopeful and optimistic escape had turned out to be a dark underworld journey in the middle of a tropical paradise. And like every heroes journey it felt crucial to finish it properly and to return home. But what does 'home' even mean when you are a mixed background family? This had been one of our primary discussions in the last two years: where is our home? Where do we want to live? Where is our 'Ithaka' to return to?

We stayed on the island for just a few more weeks, wrapping up our life there and eventuall left the same way we had arrived - by land and sea - like Odysseus.

We arrived back in our old home of Berlin and rediscovered all of our belongings we had left behind two years before. Everything felt eerily familiar yet foreign and distant. In an almost manic tour de force we managed to get rid of the majority of our stuff, renovate the old flat and sublet it to a friend of ours - all within a month - and we took off to open a new chapter in a new place - yet another chapter of uncertainty but with ancestral ties: my wife's homeland, the holy land, Israel.

Solve et Coagula

I am still in the midst of an ongoing and probably never-ending process of re-framing and integrating my own past, re-adjusting my life to my newly realized neurodiversity and attempting to put it all into context. It's been a wild ride so far. My (also neurodiverse) wife and I have managed to reconcile and rebuild trust and are working through a ton of past baggage, both individual and common. Meanwhile I got the diagnosis of a liver condition resulting in raised cholesterole levels that might be the result of genetic disposition and long-covid. I take medication for that and since doing so I have been feeling much better physically. Also my brainfog has lifted to the point where I can read books again and write a few paragraphs of text. Overall I am hopeful and positive about the future and despite the intensity of dark experiences during the last two years I am grateful and in awe about the deep transformations I am going through. Jung called the process 'individuation', alchemists called it 'Magnum Opus', the 'Great Work' and now I know that 'great' refers to the incomprehensible heaviness of the 'work', the sacrifices and traumas one can endure on the way to a more authentic self.

I thank the planetary spirits, the gods and the theotokos for heeding my calls and pushing me through this magical adventure, the labyrinth of self-discovery that without proper divine help has the potential to merely become what's commonly referred to as 'midlife crisis'.

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.

The Serpent Seal

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

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

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

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

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

(sketch i drew right after waking up)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sceptical sidenote:

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