Disolver Eco Resonar ∴ Haunt Manual
∴ Sine Wave Serpents III ∴ The Echoed Ma'ii-Being ∴ The Dissolved ThreeSeen (∴)
“DISSOLVE ∴ ECHO ∴ RESONATE”
The following is a scene from ZOZOBRA1, an in-progress long form fiction work concerning a late 1800s ramshackle vagrant (and my audiomantic alter), Dakota Slim, battling through the disparate BARDOS2 of the afterlife. You can read more about the long-labored work here. This scene’s magickal and pragmatic tethers to my Hauntomantic Praxis to follow.
“Before Therefore There Was May-be”
∴ Excerpt from ZOZOBRA
While Slim searches for his hat in the burnt earth of the black mesa, three spherical tears in the atmosphere rip the skies. The pink tears form a tether-less triangle hovering above a crouched Slim. “Salvo, siempre salvo,” Slim mutters in wide-eyed awe.3 Slim would not consider himself a pious man, as a matter of fact, many considered the troubled boy a heretic, but the words that were written on his orphan basket always find his tongue in times of duress.
The hypnotic trance of the crackling ghost-orbs breaks as Slim notices an iron taste in his mouth. His nose is bleeding. But he cannot look away from the psionic siren-song of these magnificent mauve black-holes.4
Through the psychical hum of the untethered tears’ breathing, slim notices whimpering coming from two small legs dangling from the top sphere. It looks as though an armless child in a white sheet and over-sized “shitkicker” boots is trying to find their way down to the Black Mesa. The sheetghost hits the ground in a dustdevil of ash as the orbs blip into a deafening silence, as if a cathode-ray television was turned off. Slim’s bloodied face scrunches as he tries to see who, or what, just came through.
“Every fucking time…” a voice from behind Slim startles him into a mad turnaround, but nothing is in front of him.
“Helloooo, down here, asshole.” Slim lowers his gaze to sheetghost clad being less than half his size. Slim lets out an audible squeak as he pulls himself back.
“I always get the fucking high one; I’m bringin’ a damn ladder next time, I swear.” The sheetghost’s unnaturally large human-eyes meet Slim’s, they are ordained in an orange hue radiating under a glowing circle on the pinnacle of its forehead. His eyes and forehead-circle create the same three-dot-tetherless-triangle that birthed it (∴).
“Use your bandana to collect the blood from your face, kiddo.” Slim snaps back and realizes his nose is still bleeding. He unties his orange bandanna from around his neck and wipes. Slim glances at the blood-riddled bandanna, and just as he was considering throwing it away the sheetghost halts,
“You’ll need that blood, and that bandana. It’s one of your vajras.”
“Vashra? Who…are you?”
“Oh wait,” the sheetghost turns its head and emits an ethereal projection of young Slim chasing a coyote from the cyclopean dot on his forehead.
“Ah, dammit, wrong ghost, wrong time,” the sheetghost ends the projection, “I get all you damn wayfarers mixed up. Hello, hi, how are you… I am many-named, but you know me as a being of Ma’ii, the smiter of symbols, the scolder, the ruiner, the plains-drifter, the not-late-for-dinner-er.”
Slim tucks his blood soaked bandana into his vest pocket,
“A Ma’ii being?”
“Maybe!”
“How do I leave, May-be?”
“Sweet Absolute, nevermind, but I’m glad you asked! Now listen to me, if you do not heed my instruction, this black mesa, built upon the ash of every decaying world of which you are so humbly standing upon, will be your forever.”
Slim recoils in a shiver.
“Maybe I came off too strong,” the Ma’ii-being mutters and shrugs his arm-less form.
“I wish to leave, Maybe.”
“Okay, the name is growing on me,” the Ma’ii-being snickers.
“Wish, eh? Interesting word that,” Ma’ii-be bops up and down on the ash, “You have nothing to trade me, but you will, and when you hop, hop, hop through my ThreeSeen between the Narrows, remember I taught you how to leave this place. And all others…
Trailed off and despondent in a realization, Slim whispers, “Ranni said I was dead.”
“Dead Ranni said you were dead? Fancy that.”
“Am I dead? Is this hell?”
“Yes, no, no, yes, mm-hmm, usually I get asked if this is a dream.”
“Is it?”
“Row-row-row-your-boat, hoss! Ask yourself if it matters. Are you here?”
“Am I here? Where is here?”
“Trick question, you are nowhere where we are. Understand that the Black Mesa is a thoroughfare through the Narrows. A definitely a lock-your-doors kind-of thoroughfare, however, as all things are here one way or another…”
“So I can leave?”
“Well if you’d stop interrupting I’m trying to tell you how…”
Slim closes his mouth and waits with worried eyes.
“Take that bloodied bandanna, and mix ash from the Mesa into it.”
Slim grabs a handful of ash and smothers it into the blood. “When you are ready, you will breathe this mixture, long and deep. Don’t worry, brain cells aren’t really a thing here…”
Ma’ii waits for Slim’s reaction to no avail, “Little joke, little joke, listen, you will know when it is enough when you begin to see the inbetween, the place you are, the place above, and the place below, the ThreeSeen: three unseen means to leave the in-between (∴),”
Ma’ii-be continues, “Search for the windows, like the ones that brought me here and quickly make a decision to choose a ThirdScene of the ThreeSeen (∴). This will be hard because the ectogasm will make you weak in the knees like that good ol’ sasparilla or moonshine or whatever honkytonk drunk you’re accustomed to.”
“Ectogasm?”
“Dead seed, the in-between juice, the seersauce, ThreeSeen lean…”
Slim raises his shoulders in confusion.
“That shit in your hand, cowboy.”
Slim looks down at his bandanna and sees that the mixture has become viscous ooze with a noxious heat, as if it were gasoline soaked rag with burning vapor.
“Breathing this will help you see in-between, The Narrows, of the bardos, it will help you perceive where my ThreeSeen is laid. But you must act quick, it is easy to be enraptured by the ectogasm, and lost in The Narrows. My ThreeSeen conjures quickly and disappears even faster, and boy-howdy is it sure a pain in the ass to do it over.”
“Where will it take me?”
“I of 3 (∴), 3 of 9, and that’s for you to decide. You must be strict in your choice of window, kiddo, no choice and BAM! Black Mesa. Second-guessing a choice already made and BAM! Black Mesa. And if you run out of blood, and you will, you will not be able to conjure this craft if you were to get stuck on the bloodless Black Mesa. Also, not every place has the bounties of ghost-ash like the Black Mesa, so you must deadash to conjure the Narrows…”
Slim, gobsmacked and broken, stares on…
“You know, to make the ectogasm without the Black Mesa ash, you gotta burn bardo detritus to mix with your blood.”
Slim stares on.
“The deadash? You must create it, but you can’t just use the ash of any ol’ burnt thing, you must sacrifice a talisman to create ECTO-GASM…”
Slim remains wide-eyed, mouth agape.
“Oh for fuck’s sake, KEEP YOUR BLOOD SPARE AND BURN SPECIAL SHIT TO MAKE BYE-BYE JUICE TO HUFF AND GO TO BYE-BYE PLACES. I can already tell this is gonna be hoot…”
Slim raises the ectogasmic bandanna to his face and breathes deeply. The black mesa begins to turn unnatural shades of radiating neons, the black star-less sky begins to burn in a Mauve hue.
Slim’s respiration begins to buzz and shake. Ma’ii-be’s eyes aglow under a chainsaw laser burst emanating from his forehead, the rays and source resemble that of a Zia.
“Little word of advice, kiddo, Adventurers Always Go Left…”
“The Serpents Resonate, The Coyote Dissolves”
∴ Sine Wave Serpents Division III
“Keep light on them feet!” Sour John laughs behind his makeshift sandwich board that reads “GOD GONNA GET ME RIGHT” as I drift through train lobby. I give him a smirk and a salute, psychically showing I’ll get him his daily pence on the way back as I am obviously running late. The gaggle of miscreant transients, shoulders low and heads draped into the mirco universes of their headphones become an obstacle course of “excuse me’s” and “pardon me’s” as the train doors open in their digital timbre. I’ve gotten quite good at the aggressive gentlemanly conduct of the push and shove - for the grump race of a city transit system isn’t made for the passive, but could still use the pleasantries.
The concrete jungle is a trans-dimensional war-zone compared to the heart-rhythms of the forest where I spent the last month. Oregon’s wilds had the warmth of an ancient hum only pierced by my interaction with the atmosphere, where as here, in the circuitry of a metropolis, it is my heart-hum that provides solace among the calamity and cacophony.
Now downtown, near the infamous Pike’s Place, the spiritual wharf of the pacific northwest, I am met with the asymmetrical punches and pulls of organized farm marches within the symmetrical erasure of human ingenuity and architecture. For a place known to the world as the hotbed of tech-gnosis, I find it brilliantly contradictory that I race upon the ruins of terrible failure in city ingenuity, only built atop of the harrowing ghosts of a city that exemplifies human error.
On Halloween my partner and I decided to dance with these harrowing ghosts in the infamous Seattle Underground, the burnt and abandoned ruins (∴) of the first iteration of Seattle, the relics of sheer egoic desolation and failure, something our tour guide called the “Seattle Spirit - having a terrible idea but seeing it through to its fullest extent anyway…” I feel home.
I am racing to a major 5 star hotel, a hotel, an aesthetic I would think I’d never be introduced to if it wasn’t for this new career path. I’m racing to run sound and video for a major high-end event. As I make my way through, carving the disgruntled asphalt and crouched preta5 sneaking tinfoil highs, I am constantly reminded of the sheer contradiction of the Haunts and the Hautes - the Haunts of the lower bottoms, of human error, the colorfully complex, the dregs, the destitute and the disaffected, and the Hautes of the elite: always seeking to eradicate human error, technology maddened, hyper-minimalists and automaton design, clinical and poised, non-controversial… the cogs versus the computer chips, respectively.
How did I go from my past month in Oregon, drafted into a reality tunnel brought about by my audiomantic rituals concerning 2017 existing in the past among the archaeology of the natural world, to here, plugged into a futurist paradigm concerning the present in a monolithic metropolis of an unwritten future? Which ThirdScene of Ma’ii-being’s ThreeSeen portals (∴) did I jump into?
I suppose the choice was easy once I discovered that my objective of my time in Portland had been completed. The path became a terraformed earth once I realized why I was there in the first place.
My month in Portland proved to be a tether-finder, a frayed and unruly tuft of my past that needed true exploration. Because of the synapses I had soldered concerning my wants to invoke the bounties of that time, I was thrust back to those quadrants to understand everything that still needed grounding. I was given a second chance to rescue a lingering ghost. And I did.
Around the third week in my body started to buckle. I had been carrying around a gnawing ache; the ache started as menial inconvenience but after the stress and psychic detritus built up, it became insurmountable. My body was only allowed to be back in Portland, on this mission, for an amount of allowed time and my body was the timer. The possession of the 2017 ghost was shifty in this present skin and itching to be removed from the confines of what-was. It needed to hitch a ride outta town and was burning to go.
A lot of the agenda, or so I assumed, was to rekindle ties and interpersonal tethers left frayed and unfurled. I was half right. I was able to conjure a rekindling of a few Portland beings that had remained steadfast friends, but the raucous relationships lay still in waiting. I made efforts with repeated but poised texts and messages, windows of availability, notices of whereabouts, but few answered the call.
I realized the turmoil I had for leaving my Portland life open-ended was incredibly one-sided, as the city itself is a mircro-universe of pulp fiction dramas with beings sauntering in and out, treated as if they time traveled when seen again, never realizing they left in the first place. No one was seance’ing my ghost whilst I was away so it was left knocking on doors, waiting on benches. So I picked it up. I took it in.
My ghosts and I were awarded a new career trajectory, back home in Seattle, meaning that my Portland haunting was just a sojourn instead of a relocation. This was not a surprise, as throughout the stress, the constant illness, the heavy saunter through the memory graveyard of my Portland stay, I was scheming a way out.
Portland, amongst the ruins of the past, was the necessary thoroughfare, ThreeScene, to find the exit into an unlocked ThirdScene.
I lived in Portland longer than anywhere in my life. And like any relationship that has run its course, we simply fell out of love with one another.
I had revived haunted spaces, wrestled with unrequited loss and barked at the potential maybes I once thought lost. The ThirdScene was clear to me. It was time to Haunt On.
The Rose City permeates as a crusty memory-husk in my chest, filled with dramas and comedies. And now I am ready to bury that husk in Lone Fur Cemetery, the cemetery that helped birth my relationship with Mary. Perhaps later we will dig it up and tear it open, but those ghosts have been released.
And with that, my 2017 ghost and I flipped off the rose city through the rear-view mirror on our way back to Seattle.
But this offramp, this ThirdScene, needs to settle and close the ThreeSeen while also laser-beaming a recalibration into another. It was time to both Dissolve and Resonate, finding the thirdmind of two hauntological workings. Without bleeding into a new one, Goddess knows what kind of trans-dimesnional ickies will thump their way through if neglected.
As one ThreeSeen shutters, its ThirdScene tethers another:
∴_∴ therefore /\_/\
DISOLVER ∴ The Spectre Working
A ThirdScene Between Two ThreeSeens is ∴
∴ The Hauntomantic Talisman
For years I have been guided by the Therefore symbol (∴), first using it predominantly as a common sigil to connote magickally-minded in my Portland group, Spare Spells. The ∴ symbol, commonly used in logic equations to sequence causality, has shivered my brainwrinkles for quite some time. The tetherless triangle ∴, three triumvirate dots ∴, denote the consequence in a logical rhythm, or a continuum of cause and effect. Each point representing the equation itself, as 1 is to I and I is to 1 ∴ I am 1.
But that’s boring.
I think anyone involved with the piecemeal construction of actualization assumes this. But I say nay. WE are THREE = ∴, a ghost of aspects and prospects!
One is so, what’s the word, stale.
However, it is in this perceived logical argument that I find it fascinating in its metaphysical values. For 3 is the of the third mind, but it is up to us to construct the tethers as the points remain as beacons and conduits. The micro and macro of the three components not only construct the bones of any artistic communion, but communion itself. Source/Language/Destination. For my uses, it is transposed as not only the concept of the third mind, but of birth/breath/decay and concert/communion/decomposition.
∴, more fittingly, also denotes ruins in map keys. Considering the hauntological aspects of communion with a past self to create a new will, this subjugation is more fitting. This very praxis concerns the third mind of this communion, the cavalcade of collective ruins of the self working in congress with the present and the future. A wonderful relation to my common reference to my dharma-bum stasis, burning, returning, and rebuilding. A ruination of what was in into the spires of what may-be, ∴ it is the symbol of this hauntomantic communion.
The symbol has haunted me with the deep foraging of trifect’d arrangements in both artistic expression an magickal praxis. As mentioned in Neither/Either/Or, this triumvirate of micro machinations in utilizing both digital and analog prisms to create works of art, or the great work of consorting with past ghosts with future ghosts, buzz buzz buzz. 6
I should note that the symbol was used as an abbreviation by the Free Masons, and the Crowley created magickal order Argenteum Astrum, or the A∴A∴ as it is commonly known. Another tether worth mention is that Argenteum Astrum translates to Silver Star, which also happens to be the name of my grandmother's first New Mexican business which logo was two S’s inside of a Zia, the Navajo symbol for the sun, and the ThreeSeen beam from the Ma’ii-Being’s forehead in Zozobra.
It is haunting that my wide use of the symbol was with the birth of We The Hallowed in 2012 and my 2013-2017 Portland project, Spare ∴ Spells, which also used the abbreviation S∴S∴ and Zia symbology. AO Spare, the namesake for SPARE SPELLS , was also the caster of the “Neither / Neither,” a tundra-debris bardo, that correlates to the Narrows and/or the Neon/Noir aforementioned in the Zozobra scene.7
In tandem with setting the haunted pris(m)on of Portland to a generative memory instead of the ruins of what-was, I was writing profusely about the symbol. Notes scribbled and scrawled everywhere in the same setting (Portland) where I ignited ∴ into a magickal talisman. I found myself invoking the magickal inspiration that ignited in 2017, and through my Audiomancy praxis and evocation that brought me back, my intention was realized, my ghosts were consoled, and the inspiration ignited constructed new advances on long-time works of fiction (Zozobra), relations (We The Hallowed)8 and the haunted ruins of an audiomancy project (Ectogasm)9…
Invocation of the Ma’ii-Being
∴ Medjed, Masks & Magicks
As I maddeningly recharged ∴ with heavy tethers, I had also found a patron saint in Medjed. A bare-legged, sheetghost Egyptian ferryman with a lazer eye. I see Medjed as a saint, an aesthetic and a magickal mascot for We The Hallowed; as individual metaphysical artists (referred to as Haunts), our anarchic ghosts act as ferryman through the Bardos of the Here and There, discerning what to eviscerate with a laser banishing third eye, and as tricksters that wander and wonder through psychical resonances fishing tools to create and commune. I see a ritual mask with Medjed’s energy, a sheetghost mask with 2 wide eye holes cut, and a large third eye dot on the head. One eye to look forward, the other eye to look backward, and the thirdmindeye and ThreeSeen Beam (∴); the ThreeSeen visage of an invisible Smiter.
Fellow Haunt and We The Hallowed Seer, Eric Millar, is constantly hounded by my blips and burps of inspired ramblings. Our thirdmindeye is represented in the taxonimy of We The Hallowed as a whole, both of us anarchic trash-mages that express ourselves through the WtH conduit. Eric, in all of his brilliance, was touched to construct such a mascot for our thirdmindeye. And from ∴, Medjed, and my 2017 invocation, a new being is written:
This of course bled into Zozobra via memory necromancy and divination, as evidenced in the scene at the beginning of this chapter. The Ma’ii-Being, or “May-be” as Slim refers to them, is inspired by Medjed, but convulsed through the trickster lore of the Coyote (Ma’ii being Navajo for coyote) and the shit-kicking sprite of DC Comics’ Mister Mxyzptlk - a trans-dimensional trickster with omnipresent abilities. However, “May-be” opens portals (∴) through Zia rays of his ThreeSeen Beam - though each of the three access points’ destinations are unknown until traversed: The portals are simply “maybe’s” through a “therefore” (∴), a push past an absolute.
The construction of this character bestowed me my own access points through the termed ThreeSeen, or Bardo thoroughfare, both creatively and magickally. A single access point of the ThreeSeen is the ThirdScene (I like to think of the ThreeSeen as a highway and the ThirdScene as an off ramp.)
I have a daily reminder at 6:10 pm to work on Zozobra, as this work has haunted me for over a decade, but before the Hauntomantic workings I had hit a creative snag and grew a disdain for Dakota Slim. I’ve been trying to kill him for years through the publication of Zozobra, a fitting end to a magickal mask that blurs fiction and reality, a pris(m)on of expression. I just needed the gusto to create a thoroughfare through each chapter’s radically different Bardos. I needed humor, wit and a construction of a narrative device that stood outside of time and dimension. Thus May-be the Ma’ii-Being was born. A ghost was born.
This personal folklore, praxis and inevitable creation is my ThreeSeen.
Now to conjure the ThirdScene…
DIVISION II:
DISOLVER ∴ ECO ∴ RESONAR Continues…
∴ ECO (the Praxis) & RESONAR (the Rebirth)
Released Tomorrow!
The the ‘Eco’ (Praxis) and ‘Resonar’ (Resonance) quotients of the D∴E∴R∴ and it’s Hauntomantic Audiomancy Workings will be explored in depth. A ThreeSeen will be traversed!
About The ‘Divisions‘:
This Multi-Media Grimoire is a living organism, and as with all living organisms, there is evolution and change. Because I am creating this Grimoire in many artistic mediums, I am still learning how best to compose the literary chapters into readable Substack and Article forms.
Because of Substack’s layout, I have decided to parse out the chapters by Divisions, but the organization on Substack will not entirely be reflected in the print version, as these were composed as literary chapters instead of Newsletter or Web Articles.
The entire exorcism of Haunt Manual is threefold: To experiment and create with all my favorite artistic mediums (Disolver), to have all mediums birth consistently (Eco), and to collect the workings in compendiums when the organism reaches the macro of the Resonar.
After Posting the second Division I’m off to wear my broadcasting and videomancy hats for the other artistic vexations inspired by this psycho-romp, and then? Rinse & repeat!
Haunt On
A collection of Zozobra writings and sources: https://wethehallowed.org/category/zozobra/
The most recent Dakota Slim album, BARDOS, tethers the ideas and themes of Zozobra within an audiomantic narrative. You can now listen to BARDOS on every streaming platform:
“Salvo, Siempre Salvo” is a song performed by my musical projects Dakota Slim (From ‘The Bungled’) and Spare Spells (from the album, ‘Neon Noir’):
The saying stems from a self-professed Mexican Anti-Christ, José Luis de Jesús, who you can read about here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Luis_de_Jes%C3%BAs
A wink to Kenneth Grant’s book, Beyond The Mauve Zone, which correlates to the Black Mesa in Zozobra, which I also commonly refer to as the ‘Neon/Noir’ and ‘The Narrows’ - somewhat interchangeable terms associated with A.O. Spare’s concept of the “Neither/Neither”
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/580297.Beyond_the_Mauve_Zone
A Hungry Ghost specific to The Bardo Thodol
Spare Spells’ “Neither / Neither” from 2017’s The Narrows:
When I returned, the talisman charged the collective heavily! We reformatted the hub, WE THE HALLOWED .ORG and Conjured a new ThreeSeen of Articles, Art and Livestreams!
The Ectogasm Bandcamp with a Dakota Slim placeholder song. After the Audio & Videocasts of this large chapter, I will be releasing the Dim Session as the first Ectogasm record!