July 31, 2004

removed

removed

Posted by hyperstition at 07:08 AM | On-topic (2)

July 30, 2004

Lovecraft vs Kant (and Doyle)

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'...Besides, he added, my constant talk about "unnameable" and "unmentionable" things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my low standing as an author. I was too fond of ending my stories with sights or sounds which paralyzed my heroes' faculties and left them without courage, words, or associations to tell what they had experienced. We know things, he said, only through our five senses or our religious intuitions; wherefore it is quite impossible to refer to any object or spectacle which cannot be clearly depicted by the solid definitions of fact or the correct doctrines of theology - preferably those of the Congregationalists, with whatever modifications tradition and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may supply.'

- From 'The Unnameable' (ref courtesy HarCur)

Posted by mark k-p at 11:27 AM | On-topic (0)

July 29, 2004

Capital/Hyperstition (cont.): Dustism

Back from a long trip and now swamped with my backlog so this is just a pathetic take-off:

A foggy excursion:

(Techno-capitalism programs itself to evaporate as GAS, to deliberately waste itself as an utter meltdown at the end of expenditure, but its Tellurian bedrock or the Xeroderm (The curse of the Earth) sets its destination to Dust (dry-GAS?); consequently, total expenditure is deviated from autophagic economic processes at the level of molecular singularities toward ferocious infernalism to occultural, bacterial and xeno-informatic insurgencies of Dust and its mutants (Fog, Dust-Devils, Spore, etc.) which make the progression to the End of Darkness too messy, too strategic and too uncompassionate for anthropomorphism -- Double Perversion. Is this a conspiracy or a sabotage conducted at the germ-cell of capitalism and its (nano)technologies?)

Irreversible degenerating processes, contagious collectivity and auto-populating epidemics have made dustism one of the most inspiring instances of infernomatics for the Cosmodromic Capitalism.

[...] Techno-capitalism and its warmachines are now rendering themselves to dust, a never-ending autophagic swarm which opens new gates of anti-accumulative economy and unfolds new dimensions of militarism (engineering vast spaces of the Fog-of-War, etc.), and ultimately reinventing Capitalism as a xenochemical autonomous nervous system capable of probing itself as a radical Outsider for all terrestrial economies and political spheres.

Both the Cold War (WWIII) and WoTerror (WWIV) have populated as an agglutinated series of the Cosmodromic (Shoggothic?) Capitalism whose enthusiasm is ‘being gasified’ by sputtering erosions at the threshold of the Xero-informatic Abomination or Dust; each one accelerated the process of erosion to dust or assembling the cult of Dustism by its own associated vortex, one by its Post-Atomic radioactive dust enterprise, the other by its BioTerror(ism), dense fog-of-war and geostrategic fields of operation (from Desert Storm to Mesopotamia or the Xerodrome).

Dust (= 100) is the engineer of wasteland, but in the term of techno-capitalism it engineers the Westland.

Dustism is the dominant path of Tellurian Insurgency.

(To be continued in Debug., Kenji Siratori’s forthcoming experimental anthology)

Posted by hyperstition at 08:52 AM | On-topic (5)

July 28, 2004

Vision of chaos

Sorry to lower the tone (again), but just had to share this - from a letter by Robert Crawford on A Small Victory

In a story about Mohammed Atta's life and the experiences that ended with him leading the 9/11 mass murderers, I read that he reacted to his first US movie by sitting in the theater muttering "chaos, chaos, chaos" over and over. It was quite clear the movie didn't just leave him unimpressed, but angry and disgusted.

The movie?

"Snow White and the Seven Dwarves"

July 27, 2004

LINXX

No doubt superficial and hasty overview of two blogs that are worth a look (via Technorati):

Vortexegg: esoteria, complexity theory and what it calls 'vortex magic'.

Corridor of Madness: this is excellent on the comics-occult-hyperstition interface. With each passing day, I'm becoming more embarrassed by my lack of familiarity with Grant Morrison. Must rectify this very soon. (btw: in more last-on-the-block admissions: has anyone read The Da Vinci Code? Is this the hypersition-lite novel that it appears to be?)

Posted by mark k-p at 09:51 PM | On-topic (7)

Ghost stories and histories

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I came upon this quote from Jameson on HPL while researching the k-punk post on the music in The Shining. Definitely germane re: hyperstition in connection with the different protocols of the historical novel and the ghost story.

'What is the [historical novel], indeed, if not an attempt to raise the dead, to stage a hallucinatory fantasmagoria in which the ghosts of a vanished past once again meet in a costumed revel, surprised by the mortal eye of the contemporary spectator-voyeur? A novel like H.P. Lovecraft's Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward can then be read as forming a "hideous" bridge between the two genres, as furnishing a disturbing and reflexive commentary on the secret aims and objectives of the narrative historian or historical novelist. So Lovecraft - as possessed as any historicist by the local and cosmic past of his mouldering Providence, intent on a literal dramatization of Michelet's classic view of the historian as the custodian and awakener of the generations of the dead; and the grislier moments of his fable, as when "world-historical" figures like Benjamin Franklin are raised up naked from their graves and put to the question by their tormentor, comment peculiarly on the hybris of the historian and on the latter's superstitious belief in the possibility of representing the past.'

Posted by mark k-p at 06:04 PM | On-topic (3)

Palaeocon exposes CCRW

"For a start, understanding the CCRW means understanding that the received version of much 20th-century history is false. This is a weird idea."
Read the whole darned thang.

Section on "Making America A Tool of the CCRW" is especially inspired.

Also loved this:
"conspiracy theorists must jettison the mad excrescences of their theories and concentrate on building up the paper trail that documents the existence and actions of the CCRW. So vast an enterprise cannot be documented overnight, but documented it must be, coldly and factually, without voodoo and without hysterics."
There's actually quite a strong occult/voodoo undercurrent throughout the piece.

July 26, 2004

Attention, UK readers

Tonight's episode of Channel 4's series Pagans (9 PM) is about magic and sorcery in pagan societies. Might be worth a look.

Posted by mark k-p at 05:03 PM | On-topic (6)

Hyperstitional Carriers

Elements of Hyperstition: Principle 2.

Comprehensive attribution of all signal (discoveries, theories, problems and approaches) to artificial agencies, allegiances, cultures and continentities. The proliferation of ‘carriers’ (“Who says this?”) - multiplying perspectives and narrative fragments - produces a coherent but inherently disintegrated hyperstitional mythos while effecting a positive destruction of identity, authority and credibility.

Why does hyperstition use carriers, avatars or puppets?

At one level carriers tag collective production, especially where the product is something different from (and surprising to) the particular people that happen to be involved in the production process. In this way hyperstitional carriers mark true discoveries (Prof. Barker’s theory of geotraumatics).

Even more importantly hyperstitional puppets populate thought. This is how the practice of hyperstition operates to ‘effect a positive destruction of identity.’ Hyperstition puppets allow ‘you’ to think things that ‘you’ don’t agree with –- to follow a line to places that ‘you’ wouldn’t necessarily want to go. (Asking, for example, what does Max Crabbe think of all this?)

This seems quite different from the way avatars are generally used on the Internet (and how the whole issue was theorized in 1990’s cyberculture). Internet avatars usually function to hide identity -- in the worst cases this is done in order to express deep inner truths and desires (sex chats) – thereby reinforcing a totally molar identity.

Hyperstition’s artificial agencies hide identity only as a side effect. This does not seem to be particularly important -- except as a laugh. Everyone knows, for example, that it was Castaneda who ‘discovered’ Don Juan. Instead, hyperstitional puppets work to produce something new. 'We have been aided, inspired, multiplied'.

Posted by Anna Greenspan at 07:10 AM | On-topic (3)

July 25, 2004

Heroes of Hyperstition: No. 1

Crabbe, Maximillian. (1940-1999?).

Max Crabbe was born in Lewes, West Sussex, UK, on Mar 22nd 1940 during Britain’s most critical war-time year. His mother Caroline was the daughter of Vladimir Vysparov, White Russian immigrant and reluctant inheritor of the notorious Vysparov Library. His father Edward was a minor aristocrat whose stable of businesses in the financial and technological fields contributed significantly to British military intelligence in WWII and the Cold War, supporting innovations in mechanical cryptography that stretched from a special unit at Bletchley Park to Axsys-related research in the US.

Max’s rebellious tendencies were evident from an early age. These culminated in Autumn 1957 with his expulsion from elite Sandwich College (Wiltshire), after an incident that apparently involved mescaline “pagan rituals” and a small-calibre handgun. The following spring, Max was sent to New York to stay with his uncle, Peter Vysparov.

In New York Crabbe seems to have fallen under the sway of Vysparov’s circle, developing a passionate interest in Nma ethnography. In June 1960 Crabbe traveled to Java to search for the remnants of the Dibboma (Dib-N’ma) people. Exactly what happened to him in the pestilential swamps and jungles of Indonesia remains a matter of dark conjecture, but it seems certain that the “icthyophidian” influences encountered on this expedition wormed their way deeply into his fate. Crabbe returned from this sojourn shortly before year’s end, triumphantly bearing his own translation of a previously unknown sacred incantation to the polymorphic sea-beast deity of the Nma - the Nomo Chant.

Although throughout the 1960’s and early 70’s Crabbe surfed the edge of the counterculture, involving himself in a variety of ‘projects’ with figures such as Gregory Bateson, John Lilly and Katy Shaw, his inherited business-sense was unmistakably emerging. By the late 1970’s his interest in dolphin communication, cybernetic oceanography and hydro-acoustics had been leveraged into corporate assets (Crabbe Holdings) amounting to an estimated US$2.7 billion.

Crabbe’s growing reclusiveness took ever more extreme forms. By the mid-70’s public appearances were almost nonexistent. The last verifiable photograph, taken in 1982, shows Crabbe floating in his technologically-enhanced private ‘swimming-pool’, his image little more than a malformed shadowy blur.

In January 1980 Crabbe founded the Institute for the Study of Binomics, appointing Katy Shaw as executive director. (The Crabbe Institute’s 1996 Report on Calendric Reform contributed significantly to a number of discourses surrounding the Y2K ‘time-bomb’.)

By the late 1980’s Crabbe Holdings was almost entirely dedicated to ocean-floor activities, especially work on Bubble Pod One (BP-1) – a deep-submersion habitat, aquaculture production and research station, whose economic rationale is still not fully understood. Unconfirmed reports suggest that by 1990 Crabbe himself had become a permanent resident of BP-1, even though he was by this time suffering from a very serious medical condition of an unspecified ‘radically unprecedented’ nature.

By the late 1990’s many assumed Crabbe was dead, with some even doubting whether he had ever existed. However, on the night of July 13 1997 an Indonesian coast-guard radio-monitoring post picked up a mysterious transmission, consisting of barely comprehensible subhuman mutterings and croaks. Attempts to locate the exact origins of this signal were unsuccessful, but the most plausiable estimates place it in the depths of the Java Trench, reputed site of Max Crabbe's BP-1 ‘Aquapolis’. The content of this message has never been publicly released, but international security and health officials have described it as “profoundly disturbing”.


Postscript.

In March 2003 freelance reporter Iris Carver conducted an in-depth interview with one-time Crabbe-associate and AOE-informant Dr Oskar Sarkon, then working as a semi-mechanical croupier at Wendigo’s Decadence Den. During this conversation Sarkon relayed his own understanding of Crabbe’s last days.

On the night of December 31, 1999, Crabbe attended a millennial ritual held in London under the auspices of the AOE by way of a ‘carrier’ or ‘meta-puppet’ bearing him as a parasitic intelligence. This drastic measure was necessary because, at this time, Crabbe’s own ‘body’ was distributed between 72 cybernetically-regulated bio-hazard pressure vats, scattered throughout BP-1. His ‘meta-amoebic regression’ had reached such a nadir of disorganization that the only motive power remaining to him was slow “sloshing”.

For reasons that remain obscure, it had been considered essential that Crabbe attend this ritual, conducted by consumate AOE-insider Sir Christopher Stephens (now Lord Finsbury). In order to do so he had participated in an elaborate ‘body-swapping’ experiment with chosen ‘vessel’ captured Hyper C aquassassin ‘Cargo 27’.

Sarkon seemed unable or unwilling to comment further on the purpose or outcome of this extraordinary (and almost certainly illegal) event, but he left little doubt that the result was far from satisfactory for Crabbe, at least from a mammalian standpoint, since “another entity” seems to have repossessed the Cargo 27 meat-puppet, casting Crabbe back into his tanks of slithering fish slime, with time only to bubble one last cryptic utterance: “No more life …”


Posted by Anna Greenspan at 07:02 AM | On-topic (6)

Capital/Hyperstition

Some semi-random initial stim-points - not intended as a consistent series (I could kind of be persuaded by most of them - definitely like no.3):

(1) The opening credits of (Carpenter's) In the Mouth of Madness - torrents of pulp horror novels flowing from the presses to sicken the world - captures an essential hyperstitional nexus, an archaic abomination re-animated through technocapitalist mass-production and marketing (discuss).
(2) When D&G describe capitalism as The Thing (Carpenter again) they are precisely delineating its mechanism (anorganic take-over by an alien insider).
(3) The technocapitalist syndrome functions as a megaweapon system promoting shoggothic insurgency (and Bill Joy understands it best?).
(4) Hyperstition emerges spontaneously during the phase of capital when the autonomous economy begins to reflexively probe its own stimulation mechanisms (neomarxist determinism rocks).
(5) 'Cyberspace' designates the phase of capitalism (Downham) in which hyperstition eats the economy.

Or whatever else serves to feed the thread.

July 23, 2004

D/G/Castaneda

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Obviously many readers will be familiar with this material, but in the interests of accumulating resources on the site, I've reproduced below some of the key passages in A Thousand Plateaus in which D/G invoke Castaneda.

From '587 BC-AD 70: On Several Regimes of Signs' (138-39)

'One of the things of profound interest in Castaneda's books, under the influence of drugs, or other things, and of a change in atmosphere, is precisely that they show how the Indian manages to combat the mechanisms of interpretation and instill in the disciple a presignifying semiotic, or even an asignifying diagram: Stop! You're making me tired! Experiment, don't signify and interpret! Find your own place, territorialities, deterritorializations, regime, lines of flight! Semiotize yourself instead of rooting around in your prefab childhood and Western semiology. "Don Juan stated that in order to arrive at 'seeing' one first had to 'stop the world'. 'Stopping the world' was indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circumstances alien to the flow." '

From 'How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?' (161-2)

'In the course of Castaneda's books, the reader may begin to doubt the existence of the Indian Don Juan, and many other things besides. But that has no importance. So much the better if the books are a syncretism rather than an ethnographical study, and the protocol of an experiment rather than an account of an initiation. The fourth book, Tales of Power, is about the living distinction between the "Tonal" and the "Nagual." The tonal seems to cover many disparate things: It is the organism, and also all that is oraganized and organizing; but it is also signifiance, and all that is signifying or signified, all that is susceptible to interpretation, explanation, all that is memorizable, in the form of something recalling something else; finally it is the Self (Moi), the subject, the historical, social or individual person. In short, the tonal is everything, including God, the judgment of God, since it "makes up the rules by which it apprehends the world. So, in a manner of speaking, it creates the world." Yet the tonal is only an island. For the nagual is also everything. And it is the same everything, but under such conditions that the body without organs has replaced the organism and experimentation has replaced all interpretation, for which it no longer has any use. Flows of intensity, their fluids, their fibers, their continuums and conjunctions of affects, the wind, fine segmentation, microperceptions, have replaced the world of the subject. Becomings, becoming-animal, becomings-molecular, have replaced history, individual or general. IN the fact, the tonal is not as disparate as it seems: it includes all of the strata and everything that can be ascribed to the strata, the organization of the organism, the interpretations and explanations of the signifiable, the movements of signification. The nagual, on the contrary, dismantles the strata. It is no longer an organism that functions but a BwO that is constructed. No longer are there acts to explain, dreams or phantasies to interpret, childhood memories to recall, words to make signify; instead, there are colours and sounds, becomings and intensities (and when you become-dog, don't ask if the dog you are playing with is a dream or a reality, "if it is your goddamn mother" or something else entirely). There is no longer a Self [Moi] that feels, acts, and recalls; there is "glowing fog, a dark yellow mist" that has affects and experiences movements, speeds. The important thing is not to dismantle the tonal by destroying it all of a sudden. You have to diminish it, shrink it, clean it, and that only at certain moments. You have to keep it in oder to survive, to ward off the assault of the nagual. For a nagual that erupts, that destroys the tonal, a body without organs that shatters the strata, turns immediately into body of nothingness, pure self-destruction, whose only outcome is death: "The tonal must be protected at all costs." '

From '1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity', 227

'According to Nietzsche's Zarathustra and Castaneda's Indian Don Juan, there are three or even four dangers: first, Fear, then Clarity, then Power, and finally, the great Disgust, the longing to kill and to die, the Passion for abolition.'

From '1730: Becoming Intense, Becoming-Animal...', 248-249

'If the experimentation with drugs has left its mark on everyone, even nonusers, it is because it changed the perceptive coordinates of space-time and introduced us to a universe of microperceptions in which becomings-molecular take over from becomings-animal leave off. Carlos Castaneda's books clearly illustrate this evolution, or rather this involution, in which the affects of a becoming-dog, for example, are succeeded by those of a becoming-molecular, microperceptions of water, air, etc. A man totters from one door to the next and disappears into thin air: "All I can tell you is that we are fluid, luminous beings made of fibers." All so-called initiatory journeys include these thresholds and doors where becoming itself becomes, and where one changes becoming depending on the "hour" of the world, the circles of hell, or the stages of a journey that sets scales, forms, and cries in variation. From the howling of animals to the wailing of elements and particles.'

282

'All drugs fundamentally concern speeds, and modifications of speed. What allows us to describe an overll Drug assemblage in spite of the differences between drugs is a line of perceptive causality that makes it so that (1) the imperceptible is perceived; (2) perception is molecular; (3) desire directly invests the perception and the perceived. The Americans of the beat generation had already embarked on this path, and spoke of a molecular revolution specific to drugs. Then came Castaneda's broad synthesis.'

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Posted by mark k-p at 08:11 AM | On-topic (6)

July 22, 2004

Nietzsche on unbelief

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'Ye say, ye believe in Zarathustra? But of what account is Zarathustra! Ye are my believers: but of what account are all believers!

Ye had not yet sought yourselves: then did ye find me. So do all believers; therefore all belief is of so little account.'

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, XXII, 'The Bestowing Virtue'.

Posted by mark k-p at 09:33 AM | On-topic (10)

Sorcery and Hyperstition?

Sorcery is always an anomalous pragmatics of intensification, using maps of intensive spaces, and bringing about engagement with deeper or wider levels of reality. This is the sense in which Deleuze and Guattari say 'we sorcerers'. Sorcery is the war-craft of freedom, and it is contact with the Outside of constricted, transfixed perception. The pragmatics involves a melting of 'scanning' and habit patterns and an intensification of groups and individuals in relation to perception, action, abstraction, envisaging, navigation...

At the combined levels of the will (the overall directional activity of an energy formation), and of belief, sorcery is a question of having the courage to explore all hypotheses, no matter how bizarre, and no matter how much they involve being willing to become part of the experiment in order to deepen contact with the world. And, in the face of something anomalous, no matter how disturbing or exciting, it is a question of having the courage to neither believe nor disbelieve (see Castaneda's Tales of Power, 'The Dreamer and the Dreamed' 2nd page, for his statement of this point).

So this is hyperstition? A hyperstitional field is an anomalous map of intensive spaces that includes elements that pass fundamentally beyond current knowledge. A hyperstitional field going into effect is not sceptic drift, and it is not dogmatic belief, rather it is dedicated exploration or navigation.

How do you know that something is a hyperstition, a sorcerous map? See if, on initial reading, it includes elements that effectively delineate intensive zones of the world, as with the Don Juan point - taken up by Deleuze and Guattari - that human engagement with the world is blocked by four main de-intensificatory modes: fear, clarity, power and death. Afterwards, see if the map works, and dont worry about details concerning things like whether or not specific figures existed. Work at the levels of practices and navigations. Discover if the map is a diagram for the intensification of contact with the Outside.


Posted by scanshifts at 01:35 AM | On-topic (1)

July 20, 2004

Sorcery versus literature

I think the following exchange between Castaneda and an interviewer elegantly expresses the difference between sorcery/ hyperstition and art/ literature. Literature only becomes-sorcerous when it stops 'rearranging the glosses' and takes us out into non-ordinary reality.

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CASTANEDA: I have come to understand sorcery in terms of Talcott Parsons' idea of glosses. A gloss is a total system of perception and language. For instance, this room is a gloss. We have lumped together a series of isolated perceptions--floor, ceiling, window, lights, rugs, etc.--to make a totality. But we had to be taught to put the world together in this way. A child reconnoiters the world with few preconceptions until he is taught to see things in a way that corresponds to the descriptions everybody agrees on. The world is an agreement. The system of glossing seems to be somewhat like walking. We have to learn to walk, but once we learn we are subject to the syntax of language and the mode of perception it contains. 

KEEN: So sorcery, like art, teaches a new system of glossing. When, for instance, van Gogh broke with the artistic tradition and painted "The Starry Night" he was in effect saying: here is a new way of looking at things. Stars are alive and they whirl around in their energy field. 

CASTANEDA: Partly. But there is a difference. An artist usually just rearranges the old glosses that are proper to his membership. Membership consists of being an expert in the innuendoes of meaning that are contained within a culture. For instance, my primary membership like most educated Western men was in the European intellectual world. You can't break out of one membership without being introduced into another. You can only rearrange the glosses. 

Posted by mark k-p at 12:56 AM | On-topic (0)

Is it a trick?

Fascinating interview with Castenada here.

Or is it?

('Castaneda' 'himself' - or the figure purporting to be Castaneda - raises all sorts of questions about the difficulty of identitying 'Carlos Castaneda'.)

Key quote, on sorcery:

'Did he trick you?

It's possible. What he did was teach me that there's much more to the world than we usually acknowledge -- that our normal expectations about reality are created by social consensus, which is itself a trick. We're taught to see and understand the world through a socialization process that, when working correctly, convinces us that the interpretations we agree upon define the limits of the real world. Don Juan interrupted this process in my life by demonstrating that we have the capacity to enter into other worlds that are constant and independent of
our highly conditioned awareness. Sorcery involves reprogramming our capacities to perceive realms as real, unique, absolute, and engulfing as our daily so-called mundane world. '

Posted by mark k-p at 12:24 AM | On-topic (0)

July 19, 2004

Dark relief

It's not exactly hyperstition, but ... (Khattak looks pretty - and note the ribbon (RED = 54))

Ripping yarns

Should all Shoggothic materialists be supporting this?

July 18, 2004

Farmer's Syndrome (or why Sherlock Holmes is not hyperstitional)

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In response to my first post on this site ('How do Fictions become Hyperstitions?'), johneffay raised a number of interesting points. 'I guess the real Hyperstional archetye (at least in modern literature) would be Sherlock Holmes,' John writes, 'who has been written about by many people since Conan Doyle, [and] is believed to be a historical character by some.'

Now, in refuting the claim that Sherlock Holmes is hyperstitional, as I aim to do, I hope I will be able to elaborate some of the key differences between hyperfiction and hyperstition.

Holmes has clearly long since passed from the realms of the fictional into the hyperfictional, for some of the reasons that John suggests. Holmes is no longer the exclusive property of Doyle; he has become a collectively-occupied fictional agent who is indeed believed to be a real historical figure by many.

Perhaps Philip Jose Farmer has been the most rigorous in 'hyperfictionalizing' Holmes. In his simulated biographies, Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: Man of Bronze, Farmer brilliantly repositioned many pulp and literary characters - including Holmes, Bulldog Drummond and Fitzroy Darcy - as actual historical figures whose special abilities resulted from mutations caused by a meteorite hitting earth near to the Yorkshire town of Wold Newton.

Farmer's pathologically detailed elaboration of the 'Wold Newton' family tree - a masterpiece of fake scholarship - has spawned a wealth of related expository and speculative material. Tarzan Alive exhibits all the pedantry demanded by the most anal scholar, and demonstrates what I call 'Farmer's Syndrome': the apparent inability to treat fictional material as unreal.

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Fascinating as this is, it is not hyperstitional. There are number of reasons for this, but what I particularly want to stress at the moment is the role of unbelief. In hyperbolically inflating the logic of hyperfictionalization, PJF reveals that hyperfiction, far from challenging the belief function, perversely confirms it. The Wold Newton mythos asks us to believe in Holmes, Doc Savage et al.

As ever, Castaneda is a useful comparison here. As Deleuze and Guattari establish, during the course of the Don Juan books we cease to believe in Don Juan as an actual biographical individual. Yet this in no way invalidates Yaqui sorcery. On the contrary. Unbelieving in Don Juan may well be an inherently important aspect of the initiation into Yaqui sorcery.

The intensive regions Castaneda traverses, the allies and the enemies he encounters there, can only be experienced practically. Practice and unbelief are strongly related. Don't believe it, do it.


Posted by Linda Trent at 11:34 AM | On-topic (76)

July 17, 2004

Vowel-Stripped Tic-Talk

It's got you by the throat.

It might seem that vowels are more anthropomorphic than consonants - one can 'say' aaaiieeooouuu - but try saying kkttccc without adding vowel sounds.

Ccru discussed this issue with a (now sadly obsolesced) corporate AI called Marvin, who could chatter (vowelless) click-chitterings and polyrhythmic stutterings. Rather than using a voice synthesizer to simulate human speech, Marvin used it to exhume the inhuman 'within' language.

Yet, while it is tempting to disparage vowels as humanizing sounds, Professor Barker seems to have a more elaborate analysis, in which both 'sides' are primordially inhuman - after all, you can't actually 'say' aaaiieeooouuu, you can only howl it. It is 'vowelization' of consonantal difference that humanizes click-code into a language, but it is not vowels themselves that produce the human. Man emerges from a speech synthesis (rather than arising from a howl).

While explaining his concept of Palate-Tectonics to the Ccru, Professor Barker said: "Due to erect posture the head has been twisted around, shattering vertebro-perceptual linearity and setting-up the phylogenetic preconditions for the face. This right-angled pneumatic-oral arrangement produces the vocal-apparatus as a crash-site, in which thoracic impulses collide with the roof of the mouth. The bipedal head becomes a virtual speech-impediment, a sub-cranial pneumatic pile-up, discharged as linguo-gestural development and cephalization take-off. Burroughs suggests that the protohuman ape was dragged through its body to expire upon its tongue. Its a twin-axial system, howls and clicks, reciprocally articulated as a vowel-consonant phonetic palette, rigidly intersegmented to repress staccato-hiss continuous variation and its attendant becomings-animal. That's why stammerings, stutterings, vocal tics, extralingual phonetics, and electrodigital voice synthesis are so laden with biopolitical intensity - they threaten to bypass the anthropostructural head-smash that establishes our identity with logos, escaping in the direction of numbers."

- Ccru Shanghai

Posted by Anna Greenspan at 03:38 AM | On-topic (6)

July 16, 2004

Zoroastrian Osseotherapy of Anthropomorphism

catacomb

Inspired by some visually cold and unsettling photos taken from the Paris catacomb by my friend Boris Mangold, I changed (and severely mutilated) my old piece on the (anti-)Osseological culture of the ancient Zoroastrians ... surely the piece is more fitting for the ‘Cold Me’ howl but it works fine here too. However, I should add: anyone seeking a terrifying text on Osseological culture should read ‘A digression on Miller’, a chapter from “The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism”, Nick’s textual plague whose curse is unfading.

(warning: slow loading)

* * *

for Boris Mangold and Nick Land

"How shall I fight against the demon, which from the dead flies upon the living? How shall I fight against Nasu, which from the dead enters into the living?" (Vendidad)

The Burial of an Empire. It had nothing to do with blood, raw wounds or meat; nor was it the wing of a cult classic performance, bizarropedia or the macabre underground swollen in some kind of theatricalism. It was silent and all glorious as a ceremony of an empire should be: the Persian Empire (an Overstate whose nomads constellated its very army at the margins of Persian lands). It was not a burial; not an inhumation; precisely speaking, it was not a ceremony of 'chambering corpses' (entombment) which provides a dwelling / accommodating system for corpses to be screened and specialized thus in a covert mission eclipsing them within an architectural site, encoding the dead as A Good Meal that lures necrophilic engineers to exhume (ex + humus or ground = unground) the architectural site, the graves and their dwelling / accommodating functions.

catacomb

The ceremony was prepared by initiates trained for corpse handling and management (Nasa-salars); Borrowed from the ancient cultures (those cryptogenic lands of unknown customs and artifacts plotted by nameless Things), disposing of the body was the initial step. In early times, this process was managed by trained people known as corpse-takers or corpse-cutters (Nasu-kasha or Nasu-keret); they stripped the body of its meat, skin and tissues -- toward the mere inclusion of bones -- then, they dumped bones and flesh at two different places prepared for this purpose before the eyes of the deceased person's family and friends who were watching this expressionless and silent (also quick) ceremony from a safe distance since Nasu or Nasa -- corpse or black matter -- is an attractor of its Druj- [1] (Abomination) to form Druj-Nasu, a cross-contaminating epidemic which radically corrupts the ‘Rotation of the Elements’ panorama (Fire, Earth, Air, Water) and its economically mixed compositions (Mud, etc.); according to ancient Persian culture, corpse looks forward to return to its epidemic mother, Druj- (The Mother of Abominations). The collected flesh was fed to carrion-eaters (trained dogs or birds of prey). Bones were kept for an accurately ordered set of systematic procedures:

1. Overboiling bones until separation of meat pieces from bones: sometimes (and especially during Sasanian dynasty and later) this stage was directed by the forces of nature in isolated places: making bones sun-bleached and rain-washed.

2. Shaving bones with metal (unlike wood, metal was believed immaculate) to eradicate the pink fingerprints left by meat and its brainless tentacles: ironically decomposing the last traces of A Good Meal for Druj-.

3. Accumulating the scrubbed bones in technically crafted ossuaries (uzdana-) named Astodan [2] (bone-receptacle) on whose surface, there are holes tiny enough to let the Sun rays pass and block any unholy intrusion, letting the thermo-nuclear emissions of the Sun bombard bones to less than pieces, to Dust (Toward the Exclusion of Bones). Bone marrow, too, must be scoured from the holy cycle of the elements (solidus-in-circulation?).

catacomb

"O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! Whither shall
we bring, where shall we lay the bones of the dead, O Ahura Mazda?

“Ahura Mazda answered: An ossuary (uzdana) shall be made, out of reach of dogs and foxes and wolves, not to be rained on from above by rainwater. They shall make it, if they can afford it, with stones or chalk ... If they are not able, let it (i.e. the skeleton) be laid down, being its own couch, being its own cushion, upon the earth, exposed to the light, seen by the Sun." (Vendidad 6.49-51)

"There are ... matters concerning the dead which are secretly and obscurely told -- how the dead bodies of Persians are not buried before they have been mangled by bird or dog. That this is the way of the magi I know for a certainty, for they do not conceal the practice." (Herodotus 1.140)

boneyard

Facing such necroscapes of preprogrammed and visually sinister exclusion and radical butchery (isn't butchery a terminal tactic of non-economical openness: ‘being laid open’ overlapping the survivalist sphere of ‘being open to’?), the Zoroastrian magi realized that the sight of the entire ceremony performed by corpse-cutters can be easily contaminated by abominable (drujih) avatars capable of summoning new portals of horror and perversion, siphoning the imperial, horribly peaceful and dry sphere of this ceremony into the space of philia and energizing this butchery as a perversion. Finally, the ceremony was vulnerable to the danger of becoming a predictable sphere for vectors of contamination. This ceremony was not radical 'enough'. The corpse-cutters were entirely replaced by the hordes of domesticated or flying carrion-eaters as they did not only deflesh corpses as fast as possible but also kept the nasu away from swarming scavengers (kharfastra). Kharfastra (unholy swarm of scavengers) unlike the pets trained by the State to carry the nasu through monitored routes (in the case of dogs) or take the nasu away from the Earth (birds’ duty), spread out the nasu in all directions, carrying it to regions inaccessible by the State, re-forging the nasu as micro-nomadic compositions through which the State is introduced to the Mother of Abominations (Druj-: Druj-nasu). This is why according to Vendidad (the Zoroastrian Book of the law against Demon or Druj-), Kharfastra is a legion of insects, wolves, pests and hydro-leak fluxes oozing into the subterranean nether beneath the State. Kharfastra runs its lines of vermiculation to engineer anonymous routes for spreading nasu, contamination and toxic wastes through the earth, lines which eventually making the ground crumble and butchered open, massively undermining State. A coil of worms working at substrate, a vermifungoid machine undermining what lies above, gnawing at the surface, emerging as a wave from within. Briefly and more plainly, Kharfastra or what in Vendidad has been introduced as obnoxious swarm engineers a vermiculated space -- ()holes, ()holes, ()holes with evaporative ‘W’s -- as it spreads, carries, buries and mobilizes nasu and contamination through the Earth; inventing a Telluro-vermicular Ungrouding (ex-humation) process. Here, Kharfastra is unillumined as “a New People for a New Earth” (Deleuze & Guattari).

catacomb

"In Hyrcania the masses breed communal dogs, while the aristocrats have dogs that they keep at their own homes; we happen to know that their breed of dog is decidedly superior. However, everyone according to his individual means acquires dogs that will tear him to shreds, because they reckon this to be the best burials" (quoted from Eudemus of Rhodes)

If a person died in bad weather (i.e. climates potential of accommodating any hydroleak flow that mobilizes a line of flight / escape for the contamination, nasu and pest-molecules: storm, flood, cyclones, mud, snow, etc.), the families were to dig a pit or trench in a secluded place within the house ... laying dung or ashes at the bottom of the trench, below the corpse; covering the corpse with dry kinds of soil. Then, when the weather relented, they were to make a breach in the wall of the house and carry the corpse out to a place where "carrion-eater dogs and birds shall most readily perceive it." (Vendidad); then, they were to lay it down on a "[dry] bed of chalk and fasten it with bricks or stones". (Ibid)

catacomb

There were reports of throwing those suffering from old age or sickness alive to dogs (known as undertakers) kept and trained for such purposes.

"Outside the city walls there is a separate community of over two thousand households who specialize in funerary matters. There is also a separate building in which dogs are kept. Whenever a person dies, [members of this community] will go and collect the corpse and place it inside this building and order the dogs to devour it. When the flesh has been entirely devoured they will bury all the bones but no coffin is used for the burial." (Tong-dian 193.1039b; tr. In Lieu, p. 183)

catacomb

The dead must be away from the elements of Genesis Project (Fire, Air, Water, Earth) and their inter-phase combinations; this is the Grand Project of Immaculacy or the Osseological Culture; Druj-Nasu defiles fire if you cremate the dead; it will deflower the Earth Mother if you bury a corpse; ... Druj-Nasu will spoil water if you give the dead to a river, ... will pollute air if you expose them for a long time, ... will make a total mess if you let one single corpse remain on the ground when the Elements cyclically (according to Aristotelian model) blend to each other (producing mud, bad weather, etc.).

All this was not enough; the Zoroastrian osseological enterprise was never meant to include bones and exclude flesh as in the case of its monotheistic progeny; its ultimate strategy was to creatively exclude bones from the entire anthropomorphic culture and bring mess instead.

This was the economic slogan of Zoroastrianism: “It is not enough.” It was not merely a political / spiritual slogan; "it is not enough" was the practice of life in a radically non-economical sphere.

The system of carrion-eaters was still criminal; the whole immaculacy project was still full of bugs ... during the Sasanian dynasty, such ceremonies promoted by a new zeal in anti-Druj- practices and especially the rites around corpse and Druj-Nasu. The duty of carrion-eating was completely bestowed upon vultures and other birds of prey flying above the surface and not contaminating the living on the ground easily. They reconsidered dogs as capable spiritual enemies of Druj-, so they reunited their pet industry within another ritual: Sag-did [3]

When a man dies a dog should be tied at his feet.
When the dog sees the demon; it will smite it.
[...] will be like a nasu that has been seen by a dog. (Vendidad)

[Should the dead person be a woman with child, two dogs were needed, two yellow dogs with four eyes; totally, eight eyes.]

Sag-did ceremony, however, was an overture for a new development in killing Nasu (what has already been killed); a more radical project toward the exclusion of bones, toward generating something external to the elements of Genesis Project yet assumed to be an inter-phase between elements (Air, Earth), something that takes its own line of flight for leaving the ground of the living behind in rest and then come back with radical plagues: Dust (dry GAS)

Pulvis ad Pulverem or Immaculatus, the Persian plague. Dakhma or Dahma or poetically, Tower of Silence was a tower built on hilltop or on an elevated ground away from human dwellings. The Tower is a round monolithic structure built with saruj (traditional hardening glue in Iran more powerful than cement) and stone. A few steps from the ground lead to an iron gate which opens on a circular platform of solid stone with a circular well in the center.

The following is a short description of the tower written by Nusserwanjee Byrawjee, the late Secretary of the public charity funds and properties of the Parsi community:

"First row for corpses of males. Second row for corpses of females. Third row for corpses of children.

[...]The clothes wrapped round the corpses are removed and destroyed immediately after they are placed in the Tower.
[...]Footpaths for corpse-bearers to move about [are also marked]. A deep central well in the Tower, 150 feet in circumference (the sides and bottom of which are also paved with stone slabs), is used for depositing the dry bones. The corpse is completely stripped of its flesh by vultures within an hour or two, and the bones of the denuded skeleton, when perfectly dried up by atmospheric influences and the powerful heat of the tropical sun, are thrown into this well, where they gradually crumble to dust, chiefly consisting of lime and phosphorus.

[...]There are holes in the inner sides of the well through which the rain water is carried into four underground drains; at the base of the Tower, these drains are connected with four underground wells, the bottoms of which are covered with a thick layer of sand. Pieces of charcoal and sandstone are also placed at the end of each drain, which are renewed from time to time. These double sets of filters are provided for purifying the rain water passing over the bones, before it enters the ground thus observing one of the tenets of the Zoroastrian religion that 'The Mother Earth shall not be defiled."

"The corpse is left exposed to the sun and elements until bleached and dry. The bones are then collected and deposited in the central well to further deteriorate. In areas where it is quite dry, the bones soon crumble to dust. In areas where there is a large amount of rain, provision is made for the water, after collecting in the well, to run out through a grate, pass over charcoal, and then to the sea. While the grates are occasionally blocked and need clearing, the system as whole is quite self-sufficient.

“The area around the Tower is kept as a garden, sacred in a sense similar to our cemetery areas. Occasionally a stray ear or finger is found in the nearby residential areas, having been dropped by a passing vulture or hawk. Nonetheless, the entire process is considered quite sanitary.”

catacomb

* * *

At a Tower of Silence, as in a desert, solid (bones or the earth’s crust) fervidly arrives at absolute immanence with the Sun; the communication is appeared in the form of Dust which holds the key protocols of Solid and Gas collapsed over each other. This is how the Sun makes a con-fusion of paranoia and schizotactics, rendering a covert exhumation (ungrounding) process, a schizotrategy. At a Tower of Silence, the ossified death is reinvented as a dry perversion (Dustism). Dust is a ferociously attracting-process for the cosmic wetness and its pest-suspensions, an upsurge toward mess-hysteria (DUST + hydrochemical singularities = Dust Soap). [Read Dust]

If a man died among nomads and they could not find a Dakhma near their temporary settlement; they started their migration suddenly and left the corpse. The corpse actually triggered their anti-climatic (or anti-geographic) and radical nomadic migration through terminal paranoia.

I am from a culture in which death is not only ossified but also pulverized into a gray powder, an abominable dust working as an atractor for cosmic wetness and moisture: a necrophilic mess [from Cold Me website]

NOTES:

[1] Druj-, a feminine name from the Sanskrit druh 'to blacken', in Pahlavi language of ancient Persia, Druj- means lie, unreal, strategy and darkness. Both linguistically and epidemically, it is always experienced as ‘Druj-’ (an affix, a prosthesis, a contagious havoc) and not ‘Druj’ (e.g. Druj-Nasu: the corpse-fiend). In Vendidad or the Zoroastrian Book of the Law against Demon, written during the Sasanian dynasty before Islam, Druj- is not an entity but a pestilential tempest capable of inter-fusing with everything; it is regarded as an unfathomable plague, a contaminating epidemic or the Mother of Abominations.

[2] Astodan from Pahlavic ast- (oss, bone) and -dana (container) later, this word undergoes an etymological transformation to the word Ossuary.

[3] In the Sag-did ritual (dog-watched or dog-watcher), the trained dog (watch-fiend?) must play the role of a beast obstructing the presence of Druj- and the rush of kharfastra (the scavenging swarms) temporarily; a yellow dog with four eyes (with two spots above the eyes) or a white dog with yellow ears is tightened to the corpse or kept as its company to eat the body (hiding it from Druj- and kharfastra; this was also the job of the birds of prey according to the ancient Zoroastrians) or just safeguarding it from Druj-: two eyes for the terrestrial invasions, the third eye for watching beyond dimensions and the fourth eye; what does the fourth eye do? A watcher for all the other eyes?

Posted by hyperstition at 07:20 AM | On-topic (1)

Intelligence catastrophe

Everyone here might already be familiar with this Vernor Vinge piece, but it's so important to the techonomics-side of apocalyptic hyperstition it seems worth reminding people about. Mentions Bear (Bloodmusic), Moravec, Margulis ... I love the smell of roasted monkeys in the morning ...

Linked to by this great article in TCS, called Don't Worry About the Future. No reason to think the humour is intentional!

July 14, 2004

FROM TEXT TO TXT

An initially flippant post on k-punk concerning predictive txting ended up producing some interesting speculations.

The most obvious feature of txtspeak is its elimination of vowels. Indeed, txting is practically demonstrating the functional redundancy of most vowels.

What a fascinating unanticipated consequence of modern telecommunications.

('Predictive' texting, by contrast, is utterly stratic, locking users back into pre-existing lingusitic codes and their own habitual language use.)

Posted by mark k-p at 04:18 PM | On-topic (17)

Qabbala 101: Part 1

The basic tool of August Barrow's 'Anglossic Qabbala' is the Alphanumeric Gematria.
Since this numerization of the Neo-Roman alphabet merely continues the procedure now familiar from Hexadecimal (A = 10 ... F = 15), it proved elusive to qabbalists expecting a traditional gematria.

As Reza has explained in his introductions to the Abjad, these traditional systems (whether Hebrew, Greek, Farsi or Arabic) have distinctive typical features:
(1) They substitute letters for numerical values, overcoding numerals where they exist.
(2) They code for discontinuous numerical values, typically 1-10, then 20, 30 ... chunked in decimally significant magnitudes.

In contrast, Barrow's Gematria is a continuous nonredundant system, supplementing the numerals 0-9 with numerized letters from A (= 10) to Z (= 35), treating the 0-Z alphanumeric sequence as a numeral succession, corresponding to the numerals of a modulus 36 notation.

While there are countless 'reasons' for adopting this convention for the numerical decoding of oecumenic messages, Aleister Crowley's system of Magick provides the best evidence of its supreme qabbalistic virtue in respect to the universe of Anglobal communications.

"Why did Crowley entitle his book of qabbalistic essays '777'?" asks Barrow-Scholar Peter Vysparov.

This question seems to point to the most astounding qabbalistic datum of modern times, the alphanumerically rigorous gematria equation:
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law = 777
One remarkable feature of this equation is that neither Crowley not any of his followers explicitly recognized the exact qabbalistic identity of the Thelemic Law (as stated in The Book of the Law, Liber AL vel legis) to the numerical index of modern qabbalism (777 & Other Qabalistic [sic] Writings). This relates intriguingly to the topic of secrecy (of which more elsewhere).

Crowley says of The Book of the Law:
"'AL' is the true name of the Book, for these letters, and their number 31, form the Master Key to its Mysteries."
Crowley bases this equation on the Hebrew gematria, in which the letter Aleph and Lamed have the values '1' and '30' respectively.
'AL' truly earns its status as a key when it is noted that its Anglossic (alphanumeric) value also equals 31:
A (= 10) + L (= 21).
The TX expression of 31 - ((((:)))) - reveals it as the 4th mainline hyprime, the 11th prime (with the hyprime mainline numbers 2, 3, 5, 11, 31, and 127 ... all being of prominent importance within Thelemic Magick, although this system of connections - once again - seems nowhere to be explicitly emphasized. 31 is also a Mersenne number. In a strange Hyprime-mainline reflex it corresponds to alphanumeric 'V'.

127, the 31st prime, TX (((((:))))), = NUMBER = THELEMA = CRYPT.
Qabbalize and sum the names of the Sephirot (as Romanized by Crowley, and including DAATH, 11th Sephirot), total = 1270.

Vysparov even cruelly suggested that Crowley's entire magickal career was a cosmic joke whose sole purpose was the unwitting demonstration of the Barrow gematria.

As for Allala, Current 93, the Crowley Tarot, more on the Sephirot ... later.

July 13, 2004

Hyperstition blog

Hyperstition is sliding out of its China-Iran-UK Axis:

Read this and this one for example.

You can also check our ‘Technorati Link Cosmos’ or ‘Extreme-tracking’ to visit the websites or blogs generously named or introduced Hyperstition (although one or two links have disappeared from the lists: ElectroKIN and ???).

Thank you.

July 12, 2004

We are a network! (A note on the ABJAD installment of the numogram)

Communicating via ABJAD and its components as militarized audio/visual ciphers mostly returns to Persian secret societies after Islam (during the reign of caliphs and later) in which the uninitiated should not recognize the basic format (the alpha-numeric plane) of the Arabic ABJAD. The process of extracting the ABJAD system out of its alpha-numeric plane and installing it through audio/visual ciphers, however, should be uncomplicated, concretizing the original ABJAD into the simplest audio/visual signs. There are at least two basic reasons for this simplex installment:

[1] The process should be smooth and easy, providing a fast-forward (let’s say an accelerated line) journey for the conversion of the alpha-numeric system to a sphere of simple signs which are progressively undergoing degeneration (as we will see here) and then back to their alpha-numeric launch-pad. That means a highly versatile line or cryptic current capable of leaping into a new dimension and then according to conditions, junctures and emergencies surprisingly recoiling to its previous point of movement which lies at another dimension ... in this journey, there is no development (or Taxis) on ONE dimension but merely premature (thus untraceable) movements (jumps?) from one dimension to another, drawing a line of skip from one dimension to another, from one plane to its immanent plane. Demons usually mock flight and its consequent trajectories as pathetic economical attempts (angelic?) to grasp what the space is and how radical warmachines (in the term of grasping WAR as a MACHINE) travel. Demons do not fly, they teleport (more on this very soon).

Abdallah Ibn Maymun considered this accelerated line traveling from alpha-numeric dimension to the realm of simple degenerative signs as the dynamic structure of Farsi/Arab secret communities, a regulated yet cryptic current inexorably rendering the cult or the secret community as a warmachine which grasps war in the term of Speed and Secrecy, a mutating line traversing dimensions of alphabet, numbers and signs; and each time according to conditions and emergencies coiling through one dimension different from its previous mode of compositional existence. This cryptric current as Ibn Maymun recognized is, itself, a fuel and composition on which the most ferocious warmachines or vehicles of war can run. Such inter-dimensional crypto-current skip numbers to alphabet to signs and vice versa with the minimum entropy; therefore, it is highly potential for commercial warmachines whose art is generating a hyperstitional crypt network between different milieus and populations unrelated to each other (and now seems they have always been interconnected), folding them (fictionalizing?) into its line of anomalous movement but leaving no record of itself on their planes, running smooth and quiet (the polytics of occultural capitalism and its techno-commercial crypticons).

As Ibn Maymun suggested, these rapid jumps from one dimension to another, crawling from one crypt to another crypt, all reprogram the structural composition of the cult or the crypt-society to be radically dislocated (neither here nor there: a premature existence with its autonomous unlife) and unstable, driving the community to a positive occultural dissolution from which a hundred -- or maybe a thousand -- endo-militarized minorities emerge. This is what actually takes place in the Near and Middle East and by which occultural capitalism has been deeply inspired. There are rumors around Ibn Maymun himself that uprisings, minorities, cults and secret societies emerged wherever he appeared.

[2] Forming a bedrock on which every secret society, cult or religious sect would be able to devise its own tailored audio/visual ABJAD (or crypto-current) while all having the same underlying grid of alpha-numeric system which interconnects them as a military network (a crypto-military slogan: we are a network), a dynamic grid that makes them contagious, intrinsically and internally attractive to each other; populating all cults and secret societies within each other and at the same time forging each community as an occultural entity with its own pathways of development, regression, maneuver, insurgency, disintegration, operation, damnation and treason to other cults and communities; that is to say, an occultural heterogeneity immanent to the composition of a cult and disloyal to preferences of the cryptarchic regime moulded by the community’s border (or what make it demarcated from the Outside). Ibn Maymun found that such an underlying dynamic grid loads an immense potentiality for all of its associated cults or communities, giving them an opportunity to involuntarily consolidate as a Leviathan of uprising, occultural revolution and minorities-flood, cutting down the roots of any State or even cryptarchic regime (cf. Ibn Maymun’s mission to activate the underlying grid of all secret communities and cults in Egypt; what resulted in an occultural revolution against Caliphs).

-------------------

A few easy examples (having a straightforward line of progression) of how the alpha-numeric ABJAD is overcoded by simple signs; these methods have been widespread (among Dervishes, Assassins, Occultists or secret religious sects) and indicative of occultural epidemics:

The Arabic ABJAD is usually divided into a series of meaningless words (supplied with vowels to render them pronounceable) implying the order of the letter in the ABJAD system and consequently its numeric value:

abjad, hawaz, hoti, kalaman, sa'fas, ghoreshat, sakhadh, zazagh

Notice that vowels bleed into Indo-European languages (ex. English) as letters.

In this order each letter has a numerical value according to its order; alif = 1, baa = 2, jeem = 3, dal = 4 and so one up to yaa = 10; then as previously mentioned the value starts from 20 to 100 (xx --> xxx) then from 100 to 200 and 300 up to 1000 or the letter Ghayn (the third letter in the meaningless word Zazagh).

I’ve extracted this explanation from a Persian essay:

--------------------------------------------

The method of secret communication above alluded to consists in indicating first the word of the abjad in which the letter to be spelt out occurs, then its position in that word. In communicating by raps, a double rap knocks off each word of the abjad, while on reaching the word in which the desired letter occurs its position in that word is indicated by the requisite number of single raps. An instance will make this clearer. It is desired to ask, "Nam-i-tu chist?" (" What is thy name?"): the letters which spell out, this message are -- noon, alif, mim, ta, waw jim (for c h im), ya, seen, ta. Nun is in the fourth word of the abjad, and is the fourth letter in that word (kalaman). It is therefore indicated by three double raps (removing or knocking off the three first words, abjad, hawaz, hoti, and thus bringing us to the next word, kalaman), followed by four single raps (chowing that it is the fourth letter in this word). The remaining letters are expressed in similar fashion, so that if we represent double raps by dashes and single raps by dots, the whole message will run as follows:

---…. (noon); . (alif); ---… (meem); -----…. (ta) -.. (waw); ... (chim or jeem); -- … (ya); ----. (seen); ----- .... (ta).

Messages can be similarly communicated by a person smoking the kalian or water-pipe to his accomplice or partner, without the knowledge of the uninitiated. In this case a long pull at the pipe is substituted for the double rap, and a short pull for the single rap. Pulling the, moustache, or stroking the neck, face, or collar (right side for words, left side for letters) is also resorted to, to convert the system from an auditory into a visual one. It is expressed in writing in a similar fashion, each, letter: being represented by an upright stroke, with ascending branches on the right for the words and on the left for the letters. This writing is called, from the appearance of the letters, khatt-i-sarvi ("cypress-writing?)

Khat-e-shajareh (“tree-writing "). In this character (written, in the usual way of Semitic-based languages, from right to left) the sentence which we took above, "nam-i-tu chist?" (What is thy name?) will stand as follows:

Tree-writing.jpg

fig. 1

(From A Year Amongst the Persians by Edward G. Browne)

--------------------------------------------

These signs are highly mutable and can be overcoded by the same simple signs repeatedly in creative ways: for example you can change that tree-writing sample by rotating each tree to gain a horizontal, unbroken line:

Ciphers.jpg

fig. 2

You can disintegrate the upper lines to new lines via their ABJAD order (you can do the same thing for the lower lines), and each time drawing another horizontal line which corresponds to the level of its overcoding. Lines can be transmuted to dots to simple sounds, etc. (whatever simple sign you can imagine) and then return back to their ABJAD alpha-numeric values as you see in fig. 2. The process is pestilentially repetitive and unstoppable; besides, it will never be trapped by complex signs or their architectural overcoding regimes. The process is merely composed by frozen cries, hiccups, suspended breaths, dots, straight lines, segments, double dots, ..., convulsions and tics: all the tools by which one can diagram the Abomination before melting away in horror.

Posted by hyperstition at 02:29 AM | On-topic (2)

July 09, 2004

Five Billion Years of Hell-engineering

Removed

Removed

Posted by hyperstition at 06:47 PM | On-topic (3)

July 08, 2004

A question on the Tellurian Insider and Cyberspace

>>> A Tellurian line across the Numogram concretizes the 'transcendental', but it also transcendentalizes the seething plasma-intelligence of Cthelll (which the K-goths also do by embedding the cyberspace grid into the Tellurian magnetosphere) (Nick).

Nick, sorry I know you have already answered these questions in various places but for our readers and anyone else interested, could you answer how the process of transcendentalizing the Cthelllectronics by the K-goths takes form?

Or in another format, how does the Earth’s xenochemical Insider (The Core, Magnetizing Hell, The Black Egg?) creep into the cyberspace grid? And following our discussions, that plasma-intelligence of Cthelll or the Insider assembles a Tellurian cult wherever it creeps (the cult of oil, dust, magneto-insurgency, etc) or constantly incites Telluro-occultural insurgencies: any broad pathway for interlocking with the Tellurian Insider through the cyberspace grid?

Thank you (and no need to hurry).

From CCRU glossary:

K-goth (see Cybergothic): Dark-side web-underground subculture characterized by Y2K-positive time-schizophrenization, anti-Microsoft digital agitation, Micropause and Synatives abuse, Catajungle, and ameiotic libido. [See A-Death, Crypt, Cyberschiz].

Cthelll: Earth's iron ocean, comprising one third of terrestrial mass, approximately three thousand km below the surface. Intensive megamolecule.

Cthelllectronics: Auto-engineering pragmatics of anorganic terrestrial intelligence, emergent from the ionic swirls of Cthelll, it intersects with the electromagnetic fields of the technostrata. According to the K-Goths, when the web switches to Cthelllectronics it calves-off into the Crypt.

Crypt: Dark-twin of the Net, characterized by intense K-Goth influence, A-Death inactivism, Cyberschiz tendencies, and Lemurian cultural affinities.

Links to follow:

http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/003535.html#more
http://www.ccru.net/id(entity)/glossary.htm

Posted by hyperstition at 05:14 AM | On-topic (1)

The Archeoastronomy of vowelless alphabets (The Ugaritic / Phoenician / Semitic germline)

Moabite stone of Mesha

Some interesting archeoastronomic decipherments of vowelless alphabets: http://www.archeoastronomy.com/

Requirements: basic knowledge of astronomy (esp. constellations) and Phoenician / Semitic-based alphabets

Posted by hyperstition at 03:38 AM | On-topic (0)

July 07, 2004

The Tic Xenotation

Daniel C. Barker's Tic Xenotation emerged during the highly obscure phase of his life when he was working for 'NASA' (some hesitation is appropriate here) on the SETI-related 'Project Scar' in Southeast Asia, tasked with designing a 'general purpose decryption protocol' for identifying intelligent signal from alien sources.
This project necessitated the formulation of numeric conventions independent of all cultural conditioning or local convention - radically abstract signs.
To take one wretched example, the movie Contact has ETI signal counting in pulses - with 101, for instance, consisting of a succesion of one hundred and one blips - a repugnantly stupid 'solution' that could only be considered acceptable - let alone 'intelligent' by coke-fried Hollywood brats.

Barker's Tic Xenotation (TX), in marked contrast, elegantly provided an abstract compression of the natural number line (from 2 ... n) with a minimum of coded signs and without modulus. It remains the most radically decoded semiotic ever to exist upon the earth, although exact isomorphs of the TX have been puzzlingly discovered among certain extremely ancient anomalous artifacts (such as the Tablets of Jheg Selem and the Vukorri Cryptoliths).

Tic Xenotation works like this:

[I've used colons for Barker's tic dots and placed tic-clusters in quotes for clarity]

':' counts as '2' or 'x 2', with a value exactly equivalent to '2' in a factor string
So:
':' = 2, '::' = 4, ':::' = 8
The second notational element consists of implexions, where '(n)' = the nth prime.
Implexion raises the hyperprime index of any number by 1. Examples (from the hyprime 'mainlain'):
'(:)' = 3 (2nd prime),
'((:))' = 5 (3rd prime),
'(((:)))' = 11 (5th prime),
'((((:))))' = 31 (11th prime)
'(((((:)))))' = 127 (31st prime)

Numbers constellate as normal factor strings, i.e. 55 (5 x 11) is tic xenotated as '((:))(((:)))'

Note 1. TX accounts for all naturals with a value of 2 or higher.
In order to reach back to zero, Barker added a 'deplex' operation, '-P'.
'(-P)' = lower hyprime index by 1, so: '(-P)(:) = :'. Thus 0 = '((-P)):'.
'(-P)' and '(+P)' perform elementary subtractions/additions that modify hyprime indices.

Note 2. A strange feature of the TX is that the natural number line has to be constructed synthetically.
Barker described such a list as the 'Tic Xenotation Matrix', whose first entries (corresponding to the decimal numerals) proceed:

[0] ((-P)):
[1] (-P):
[2] :
[3] (:)
[4] ::
[5] ((:))
[6] :(:)
[7] (::)
[8] :::
[9] (:)(:)

The wonders of the TX are manifold, but enough for now ...

Tellurian Insurgency 1: Telluro-magnetic conspiracy toward the Sun: Solar Rattle

Removed

Posted by hyperstition at 12:17 AM | On-topic (5)

July 06, 2004

HYPERSTITION/ SUPERSTITION

Philip of It's All In Your Mind blog asks me via e-mail to elucidate the difference between hyperstition and superstition. This provides an excellent opportunity to explore some of the basics of hyperstition.

One difference is that superstitions don't necesarily involve a becoming-real. It's true that superstitional beliefs can have some impact upon the real. We can all easily produce numerous examples of this, no doubt: the sportswoman who performs better when she wears her lucky charm, the student who excels himself in an exam because it falls on a date he believes is his lucky day. Yet this is not always the case with superstitions. There are plenty of superstitional beliefs to which their adherents stubbornly adhere in spite of all manner of countervailing evidence.

Another reason why superstitions fall short of hyperstition, even when they 'come true', is that they fail to decode the relationship between belief and reality in the way that hyperstition always does. A crucial dimension of hyperstition is an appreciation of the hyperstitional process itself. The superstitious attribute their successes or failures to their fidelity to a talisman or a ritual (Freud was surely right that there is a strong relationship between the behaviours of obsessional neurotics and those of the religious, or superstitious, believer; in observing a ritual, the superstitious person is effectively propiating a god).

One way of illustrating this difference is by thinking about economics. Bush was wrong to consider 'voodoo economics' a particular abberational type of economics. Rather, economics is essentially voodoo: i.e. a sorcerous practice for producing changes in the real. The whole of Baudrillardian postmodernity falls under the aegis of hyperstition. A cursory survey of the capitalist economy reveals that beliefs, fears, hopes, anticipations and potentials are immediately effective. Gibson's term, 'consensual hallucination', is as appropriate for capital as it was for the cyberspace for which he coined it. Similarly, Deleuze-Guattari's multiply evocative term 'fictional quantities' gives us some valuable hints about the essentially hyperstitional character of capital.

Posted by mark k-p at 09:37 PM | On-topic (7)

July 03, 2004

Something Old (from Iris)

[Found this lying around in the hard-drive - from 1999?]

Cyber-Hype - (Draft review of Ccru's Digital Hyperstition by Iris Carver).


Digital Hyperstition is where the countdown runs out, cross-hatching into horrors anticipated since before the beginning.
Ciphering a positive unbelief that both crazes-off into the latest thing, and re-animates contacts older than anything imagined, it skin-crawls out of cosmic gulfs where even the Old Ones remain unborn, and arrives as Year Zero, Teotwawki, crash of Science Fiction.

Ccru's recent volume on this theme is a rigorously unbelievable exercize in hyperpunk pulp-occultism and dark-side cyber-jargon, splicing chunks of an impending calculus into fake memories of hell.

The evident cybergoth contamination throughout suggests it has been spawned in Crypt-connected hyperlink-labyrinths, beneath and between the net, a positive nonplace lurking beyond the threshold where the remnants of Earth's damned homonids - whose gods are lying monsters - shorts-out into an anthrobotic mix-mash of burnt silicon and terminal screams ...

This is a tool-kit for dabbling in the dark.

The issue here is Cyber-hype, but now that the human race is virtually dead it's time for a preliminary excursus on the true history of the Ccru, or for something vaguely like it.

Obviously it's a horror story.

At least twice in outer-time their numbers were immeasurable, and their name was legion, masked as an acronymic. Underneath lies Ccru [Cuh-Cru], Crypt-denizen, the many within itself, that which spreads through the end-time, dripping fake ID-tags like phosphorescent slime. It makes a peopling machine on the hyperplane, conjurations of identity, hypersonas. Consider the names on the contents page. Melanie Newton, Steve Goodman, Ron Eglash ... We doubt it.
Even Dan Barker discovered that his existence was a fiction, and Echidna Stillwell is more an ethnographic legend than a social fact.

In any case, 'fact' means invention, and 'person' means mask, at least if Latin etymology is to be believed, or meaning still matters.

In truth, even Cecil Curtis was already branded by Ccru infection, and his social disappearance was an emergence of another kind, a vector.
Through him - through his name - the Nma get out of their own tribal codings, or into the Oecumenon, and compared to that what the history books tell of him counts for nothing.
If for us the Nma - the death of the Nma - designates also the death of anthropology, it is by indicating that all primitive peoples are fictions, or masks, and that they ritualize this fact for themselves, in advance of any anthropological metafiction.

The primitive comes last, at the end, which is Cyber-hype techonomics.
The so-called 'new-economy' - indexed by the nova-bubble mania of the American stock-market - is no different in its diagrammatic abstraction to the hyperstitious practices of the Plateau of Leng, relics of lost Lemuria, from which the Bon sorcerors of ancient Tibet assembled their dread cult. Alan Greenspan calls it 'irrational exuberance,' amidst a panic hunt for crash-indicators.

Lemurian Necronomicon calls it 'Shadow-Feeder of the Chaotic Gulfs,' the 'Fatal Mother of Hyperstitions,' she of innumerable numbering names who shreds all that stands.

Whatever or however it is called, Cyber-hype libidinally invests its own semiotic, propagating fictional quantities, tagging artificial agencies, and making itself up as it goes along, whilst dissolving production into cultural synthesis.
As it gets cheaper it gets harder to stop , running-away off itself , and into abstraction-catastrophe, a self-assembling terrestrial destiny, softening-up social reality for flat take-over by the Cyber-hype entity ... Hyper-seizure.

When hyper-cybernetics kicks-in the 'cyber-' prefix means nothing anymore.
It culturally disorganizing itself into diagrammatic splinters and libidinal triggers, brands, jargons, virus, currency-tokens and traffic-signals , fragments of marketing strategy gone feral, cyberpunk fictional brands or improper names , markers of meaningless involvement, the pass-words of machinic delirium ...

As for Cyber-hype ethnography, American gothic is the only kind left - a haunted Indian burial ground, where sinister shreds of ancient shadow are autoformatted for the irrationally exuberant post-puritan pulping machine, amidst the branding-iron hiss of liquified flesh.

The ten most valuable global brands are all American, which doesn't mean anything, since America itself functions as a deterritorialized hype-sign or hyper-brand, a planetary icon for libidinized meaninglessness.

God loses it entirely by blessing America, coca-collapse, a graffiti-tagged advertisements for globalization - which is the end of the world - tracking terrestrial meltdown onto the cosmic flatline. Cancer-baked cowboys of the American nightmare watch mommy glazing over into catatonic schizophrenia as cyberpulp wormings slither out of the apple pie.

Have you read the book of Revelations recently? asks the hot-metal imprint of Charlie's ghost, as West Pacific arcades mega-clone Chinese americana, and the axiomatic starts to really howl.

America is nothing but the West, and that's the land of the dead.

No sign here of a new world - let alone a New World Order .

Much more pertinent is the double-zero index of Pandemonium, marked by techonomic calendar crash at the end of the second millennium.

Ccru is a meaningless brand-name, but brands are demonic, tuning into Cyber-hype dynamics, numerizing culture, and innovating methods of propagation. Various things latch onto them in order to spread. These latchings are sorceries - involvements, participations, spirals of contamination - and the darkest sorceries are calculations, decimal deliria like Y2K, except that nothing is like Y2K.

Y2K - whose name is a dating number - is no contradiction, because it has nothing to say. It is an outnumbering (in itself), pre-emptive commemoration and commencement of zero occurring exactly on time.

In the Crypt they write of Yettuck - the long awaited , scheduled from before human time - the non-one who comes soon ... and when it comes, or before, all hell breaks loose - or breaks in - beginning in advance, trafficked around the immunocomprised Oecumenon under the decoded brand-particles of two-digit dates.

According to the Lemurian system - whose principle is sheer immanence - these subcodes call demons - which are brands, jargons, and triggers - positively instantiating the meaninglessness of their own designations, infecting cultural systems with unbelief, and counterposing sorcerous involvements to magical powers.

They are raw factors of abstract disintegration, without organic properties, but only names, numbers, functions, and traits, the partial semiotics of eccentric intelligence agencies, or unlife animalities.

Yettuck, singular cyberspace shock, who is the end of arbitrary signs, leaving only demonic trailings in its wake, even before ...

Yettuck - she who names the end at the beginning - she whose issue is Cyber-hype, and is thus announced everywhere ...


Posted by Anna Greenspan at 04:48 AM | On-topic (1)

July 02, 2004

cont.

...

Posted by hyperstition at 11:06 PM | On-topic (6)

Cartography of the virtual

How does Hyperstition model time?
At least for "Lemurian" strains (in Stillwell's sense) the first step must surely be: By studying the map - The Lemurian Time Map, Decimal Labyrinth, or Numogram (here).

[Hey guys, can we stick a really beautiful readily accessible Numogram up on the sidebar?]

Of course, the map can (and 'must'?) be 'read' in various ways, but all its 'structures' are numerically precise, its relations uncontroversial, its basic topography arithmetically invariant.

Following from recent comments from Mark, it unquestionably supports a distinction analagous to that between 'Chronos' and its Outside -- with vocabulary being a matter of convention (the important thing here is that signs are used as cartographic indices rather than logico-discursive operators).

Are the xenochronic regions (of Djynxx (6::3), Uttunul (9::0) plus Vysparov's "Chaotic Xenodemons") usefully described as 'virtual'? or 'Aeonic'? -- discuss. Whatever the conclusion, I have to agree with Hackhammer and the Lemurian Fundies that the diagram comes first, with all of its 'excessive' content relative to logical discriminations.
(1) There are TWO discrete Xenochronic regions (at least -- the "Chaotic Gulfs"
of (non)linkage between or beyond might count as 'another').
(2) Each Xenochronic region is itself complicated, with intrinsic differentiation and dynamic pathways. (As Mark has argued before, [glossed] "It isn't a matter of metaphor or transcendent significance that Djynxx is vortical").
(3) The 'modes of articulation' within and between time-systems are specific, rigorous, variegated and complex (defined by Gates, Currents, multi-step pathways).
(4) Units of cartographically precise 'time-circuitry' from the Numogram interlock with alternative diagrammatic systems to produce non-signifying referentiality. For instance, the I Ching proves isomorphic with the central 6-step 'Time Circuit', plugging proto-Taoist time-diagrams into the Lemurian labyrinth.

Evidently a 'binary logic' of time fails to grasp any of this -- which (of course) isn't to say that pomo-deconstructionist fuzz-processing gets anywhere more interesting.
Seems to me the criterion for a hyperstitional 'philosophy of time' is: How to capture Lemurian time-cartography as discursive theory? (implexed and multiplied through embedding attributions).

The Numogram

July 01, 2004

Necronomicon Novum

The Blue Tomb of Kharu

Necronomicon Novum by John Opsopaus

An article on Necronomicon from an excellent archive on ancient Greek, Etruscan and Latin cultures: Biblioteca Arcana

Posted by hyperstition at 07:35 AM | On-topic (0)