found that detailed article on Pazuzu boring so i came up with this one...

Thanks Reza - Excellent informative post with v. helpful links.
I've got a qabbalistic angle on Pazuzu but i'll leave it until the discussion gets going (so as not to drive people away with premature numbo jumbo)

Thank you Nick ... am very interested to see your qabbalistic surgery on Pazuzu.

IMHO, Pazuzu is a good start for a discussion on Puppetism; does anyone remember ‘Patient X’ from Exorcist III: Legion? There are many cinematic examples: John Trent (In the Mouth of Madness), Father Karras (The Exorcist), The Brotherhood of Sleep (Prince of Darkness), Prisoner KSC2-303 (Versus), etc.

How does puppetism link to hyperstition dynamics?

Any discussion of cinematic puppetism will ultimately need to include the character of Doctor Mabuse.

Thanks ... yes, actually I thought about Mabuse and Caligari as the first cinematic examples but intentionally didn’t include them because of their emphasis on who pulls the strings (Siegfried Krakauer’s book) but hyperstitional puppetism is mainly about strings (the linearity between the operator and the subject [victimhood?] is highly confounded and ‘perhaps’ dismantled) rather than the puppet or its puppeteer. ... for the same reason i didn't select Reagan in the exorcist; but i'm eager to hear your opinion on Mabuse.

not sure how this connects -- but remember some old ccru hyperstition discussions that sought to distinguish between puppets/posession and trafficking/trade -- think (tho not sure about this) that there is something more hyperstitional in the dispersed agency implied by trafick than the one way take-over that happens with puppets.

guess this has to do with Reza's point about pulling strings?

Mabuse--I am unfamiliar with the context of the puppets/possession discussion to which anna eludes, but on the thinnest of threads and blindly, I suppose I will say the latter, possession, is the more apt term for describing how the figure of Mabuse operates. While he begins life in Norbert Jacques' original novel as a particular man with a particular history, later Jacques would intimate that this Dr. Mabuse may have been invented and adopted by a man--at which point we can no longer tell who--as a ruse. So while Dr. Mabuse is a character which adopts false identities and bends the will of other characters to act as his proxies, all in order to protect his true identity, it may be that his true identity is another mask. Yet after the death of the man who played at being Dr. Mabuse, it is Dr. Mabuse who comes back from the grave to possess would-be criminal masterminds infatuated with his legacy. This possibility that Mabuse is not himself, has no self, is what opens him up to enfranchisement. (Mabuse isn't just one of the earliest examples of cinematic puppetism; there have been over a dozen films.)

thistle,

Very interesting ... I’ve not read the original novel (have seen Lang’s original movie and later sequels) but yes, as you suggest Possession is more appropriate for Mabuse. In the same way you discussed ‘Possession’ should not be reduced to the possessor and the possessed or a spectacle of take-over; it is base-participation or radical contamination between tendencies (a becoming gone wild). Possession as a polarized puppetism or colonization is actually an old riddle invented by Cyril of Jerusalem (as a monotheistic doctor and exorcist) who thought a possessor tyrannically instrumentalizes another body as his own property, a polarizing process which colonizes a defenseless agency through an arena of faction disputes and rival tendencies (am not sure if this is originally a Western / Christian approach to possession that is conducted through signification). But returning to the ancient Mesopotamian and Indian culture, possession is a mutating journey for ‘a collative agency’ which cannot be discriminated as the possessor and the possessed; the ultimate question that possession brings is WHERE or have it oversimplified: where are the possessor and the possessed through possession? Here, obv, the first thing that is uprooted is ‘I’ as a core (possession eats all traces of the ground) ... possession takes place on periphery and its anonymous diagrams not maps or segmented localities. For example, in Assyrian puppetism, demons are constantly changing and mutating through possession, the prey also becomes a demon (in CCRUoid description of Demon *) and a traffic zone for all xenochemical data-currents ... the complicity is not docile but intensively active as it attracts all sorts of xeno-currents (Deleuze and Guattari call attraction, the functioning itself).

* CCRU GLOSSARY: http://www.ccru.net/id(entity)/glossary.htm

>>> (Mabuse isn't just one of the earliest examples of cinematic puppetism; there have been over a dozen films.)

Yes, there are many German and French examples on puppetism among early movies but Caligari and Mabuse are among the most famous ones, esp. because of their professional direction and modern insinuations on their contemporary atmosphere.

Reza

very intrigued by the 'old riddle invented by Cyril of Jerusalem' - can you say more?

Anna Cyril’s riddle is not very special, it questions: does the property that is possessed belongs to the possessor or the possessed or in his term, the demon or the victim? And finally concludes, that it belongs to the possessed: “the unclean devil, when he comes upon soul of the man ... comes like a wolf upon a sheep, ravening for blood and ready to devour. His presence is most cruel; the sense of it most oppressive; the mind is darkened; his attack is injustice also, and unsurpation of another’s possession ... he throws down him who stands upright for he is akin to him who fell from heaven. [etc.]”

A few things here and there, scattered about. Thrown down. One might say down a hole. "...A hole...deep and dark...its darkness has lasted since ancient times..." The question of where. Hole: a secret theater, a fourth wall opening on the surface. "Hypnotic behavior is meaningful, goal-directed striving, its most general goal being to behave like a hypnotized person as this is continuously defined by the operator and understood by the subject"--Robert W. White.

thistle,

Yes, Hole is definitely a subject of discussion here. I think Locke for the first time talked about HOLE (I’m not quite sure). In the 90s, Achille Varzi and Roberto Casati wrote a book on Hole and other modes of super-ficial parasitism which you may find helpful, of course, if you haven’t read it yet (check The State University of New York for the articles and Amazon.com for the book). I prefer to talk about Hole as Cata-space (see CCRU Shanghai’s post on Katak and Catadromic space) or ‘( )hole complex’ since HOLE is bound to mereotopological problems (where is the surface?, where is the hole?, what is part?, what is whole? And all through mereological analyses) which somehow restrict the discussion. CATA-space or ( )HOLE Complex as you mentioned are bringing many subjects: darkness, where-ness, Falling (Descent) as Falling Angles, Diagrammatic Space, Unground, traffic zones, etc. (for more details on Cata and darkness, see: http://www.cold-me.net/text/cata.html)

On ( )hole complex, please see: http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/003502.html

Unfortunately, I’m nearly ignorant about Hypnotic behaviors ... could you open it a bit more?

You asked about hypnotic phenomena (HP). I am not studied on the subject, so I can only give a fragmented account. My quotation of White above was inspired by a section dealing with the subject of hypnosis in Daniel Lawrence O'Keefe's Stolen Lightning. O'Keefe's intention is to use hypnosis as a model for trance phenomena in general, the mechanical alteration of an enframing psychology. He notes as interesting, though he doesn't elaborate, that hypnotism was injected into the West at a moment the West had rationalized trance phenomena out of the social body. The details of the medical context which he is alluding to organizes around Franz Mesmer, the inventor of the theory of animal magnetism, also known as mesmerism. Generally, animal magnetism has many of the hallmarks of magic. 1. A vagueness regarding the underlying mechanism. Wikipedia: "Any definition [of hypnotism] is necessarily vague, as the underlying mechanism is little understood." I'll point out here that this vagueness is not simply a matter of the facts of neurology; it is a motivating factor. The hypnotic subject is invited to interpret what hypnosis means in the absense of adequate definition. 2. The invitation to participate [in the interpretation of hypnosis] is guided by means of demonstration. The hypnotizing agent, for instance, might enact trance phenomena by means of inducing a trance in himself or by means of a shill or former hypnotic subject. 3. As with many magics and as especially with medical magics, hypnosis takes the form of a professional-client relationship. 4. This guidance of the professional hypnotist is punctuated by a repetitious patterning of symbols of any type from the semiotic storehouse--sounds, words, images--either through discrete repetition or serialization with enumeration. 4. Particularly in the case of Mesmer, hypnotism borrows language from the physical sciences, in this case electromagnetism, which is little understood by the ostensible subjects. This has at least two effects. The first is to provide the discipline with an air of authority. But this is perhaps not as important as the second, insofar as these vague concepts offer a site upon which the subjects can graft their own interpretation. 5. O'Keefe calls the ability to comprehend hypnotic vagaries at all--to comprehend them enough to act upon them--the "agreement to agree," following Wittgenstein. That is, in the social context of hypnosis--which the demonstration of the hypnotic state rearticulates--conventionalizes the possibility of interaction and to a certain extent interaction itself. All parties agree to agree that the terms being used have an actionable meaning, even if the specifics of what those meanings are aren't totally shared. 6. The hypnotist and the client negotiate together not only symbols but subjective trance states. For O'Keefe, trance states are not only not specialized phenomena, they are (almost) normative phenomena. Any number of things can destabilize the "general reality orientation." Citing Ronald E. Shor, O'Keefe states: "Mere drowsiness, inattention, or distraction causes sections of it to blur or erase themselves. The hypnotist avails himself of this vulnerability to erase parts of the frame during hypnotic induction. Having done so, he can then develop his own modified frame..." 7. The hypnotist and client subsequent to the hypnotic session talk about the session, either in its details or its meaning, thus sedimenting in the client, but also in the hypnotist, how things will go in the future.

Mesmer's 27 Propositions Concerning Animal Magnetism:
http://www.unbf.ca/psychology/likely/readings/mesmer.htm

Thanks very much ... for now, see: http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/004053.html#comments

Awesome page! Keep up the great work, its was very helpful to my report! Thanks guys.

Thanks ... glad it helped; i may update this page later.

Anyone have any clue how i can get a statue of the Pazuzu that looks as close as possible as the photo with the red background at the top of this web page please email me at samhainaz@yahoo.com . I think that looks cool! Thanks

Dorood be Aezdehak!
Reza Farsi harf mi zani?

Div Aeshma, lol ... Druj be hamrahat. Baleh, Farsi ham sohbat mikonam.