Haunt of the Aspectre ∴ Haunt Manual
or "The Aspectre Of Christmas Present" ∴ Part 2 of 2023's Hauntomantic Works
With the Year Of The Chaoyote’s Gregorian transmutation around the corner—this second of three chapters aim to tether, or construct a sinew, of this year’s Haunt Manual workings, the integration of my personal Disolver∴Eco∴Resonar method for ritual examination and recalibration, October’s Taos Eclipse tarot reading & recent musickal travels to examine the Spectre of 2023 while midwifing the Prospectre of 2024: The Year of Neither Either/Or!
2023’s Hauntomancy Workings and their correlating October Taos Eclipse D.E.R. TAROT cards that frame these Haunt Manual writings.
Previously…
PART 1. DISOLVER (What to dissolve, make opaque, see past): The Spectre Working & Temperance
THE HAUNT
∴ The Aspectre of the Hanged Man’s Echoes
During the Moon∴Revel tour in October, Mary was finally able to meet my birth mother — a Leo-hearted half-Italian southern belle clad in leather boots and a Johnny Cash t-shirt. I could spend paragraph after paragraph on the Arizona hexorcism of that tour (and the half of my genetics that still haunt on there)—especially regarding the enigma that is my mother…perhaps another time. I did manage to procure a trunk filled with haunted artifacts and ephemera; the only material tethers left of my childhood and young adulthood. I asked my mother to store it when I finally found my way out of the year-long desert prison of 2011 and, honestly, haven’t seen it since:
I figured I was ready for the sentimental saunters that lay within, and namely, to investigate the many cassette tapes I obsessively created in my youth. You see, the Moon∴Revel tour was not unlike a prodigal-son-waltz through the annals my history—my steady migration from southwestern origins to northwestern expansion retreaded. My manifest destiny—figuratively and literally—and its trail of disrepute; the horrors of war that linger there still. After unboxing the desert-dirt riddled time capsule, I spent an evening investigating these tapes. I was disappointed to find that certain tapes, tapes that still ring in my mind, were not in the bunch! However, I was surprised that others were. I will admit, I wasn’t ready for the self-spectre-time-travel, these mini-Spectre Rituals and self-chronomancy, and their unintended invocations of random memories documented on these kid-thumbed cassette recordings.
The Spectre Ritual and its trans-position of coordinate-based quantum leaping scares me still—and this specific generation of the Hauntomancy workings is one I will most likely not return to so willingly as I had in the beginning, no matter my gusto expressed in the previous chapter to do so! Honestly, I am not ready to shake loose the haunted ephemera my lore shields me from remembering, even if I muster the courage to press play.1
The cassettes were, however, part and parcel to the second Hauntomancy working, the Aspectre Ritual, which was concerned with a thought-lost aspect-of-self rather than The Spectre Ritual’s exact time-frame of 2017. And I did well to conjure that “dark tinkerer” (sounds worse than it is!) aspect of my youth—the one dancing with artistic experimentation in the quiet and safety of the night.
The Aspectre now echoes through the revelation of my compulsion. Through my search for the inherent and the absolute, I’ve realized my compulsion to create, to generate artistic expression is, in fact, inherent. Through recent conversations with my dear friend, artist and animator, Noah Pfarr—we realized this ‘obsessive creator’ aspect is a communion with this inherent. This isn’t to say the compulsion to create and conjure artistic works creates works themselves that are at all worthwhile; quite the contrary, most of this compulsory need to express, no matter the medium, is rife with as much exhaust as it is relevant work. And this compulsion probably ties into the neuro-divergence and trauma vehicles that ruggedly calloused our respective roads. All this to say, the revelation was not an ‘ah-ha!’ but more of a somber reciprocation shared by two drivers’ whose respective jalopies are still sputtering their worn mileage about the cobble stone’d highways of life.
This inherent compulsion’s archetype truly is the Aspectre: The kid gnawing away at the night with bloody fingers and fits of nascent witchery among broken instruments, VHS hums, radio buzz, cassette tapes, and scribbled notebooks—without direction or instruction—tinkering on the dark side of the moon within revelatory moments made by mutant creations. To celebrate the Aspectre’s re-emergence, and its conjuration into the 3rd workings and culmination of the Prospectre’s prospective, I’ve obtained the same 4-track cassette recorder I had when I was a kid. This early 90’s Yamaha 4-track cassette machine would celebrate the Aspectre’s magnetic conjurations, it’s analog tethers to the somatic, and the cassette itself became a vajra, a Spectre Sceptre, a magnetic tone-tustler that aches with outmoded servos and outdated plastics, again a tactile vessel for midnight revelries and sonic experiments.2
Via Patreon, I’ve shared recent experiments with the intention of constructing another iteration of the PragMagick Radio Hour—episodes constructed by cassette containing bits and bops of monologues and conversations sinew’d with sonic collages. This is a testament to the thirdmind of neither fully analog or digital, whilst also injecting the current Podcast paradigm of nonlinear, over-edited digital production with magnetic and somatic elements to illicit human error’s irrefutable honesty and vulnerability.
My current songwriting variations of mutating cycles, or hauntological samples-of-self, and even sonic ephemera utilized to illustrate an episode’s theme seems like the perfect permutation of this years long broadcasting venture that is PRAGMAGICK. A “true commune” with the Aspectre of my midnight 17 year-old kid-spectre tinkering with broken sonic-tronics while Coast-To-Coast lurks faintly in the background, finally married to the present for that new-new of rebirthed Revel Rosz’s Prospectre Ritual’s witchy potentialities.
To celebrate the Aspectre, I’m releasing this truly audiomantic, hauntomantic and sound magick episode of PRAGMAGICK before the New Year. An episode that portends the Prospectre of 2024’s magnanimous projects within the magnetic and somatic creative abandon far missing within contemporary constructs of Audiomancy, and especially Podcasting, at large:
∴ The Ma’ii-Being’s Transfiguration into Little Wind
My work with Listening Post Alpha generated quite a profundity of ghost-bumps this year. My April 8th initiation, on the first of the Thelemic “Feast Days,” was a raucous rite into furthering my dalliances with the other.3 Outside the many creative projects exalted by the Midnight Tinkerer archetype of the Aspectre, it also reinvigorated magickal late-night dispatches and experiments, and Listening Post Alpha offered quite a perfect schema for my anarchic roundabouts.
After mutilating this Spirt Box & ALW Cipher schema within my own Audiomancy as I had with the Prospectre Ritual, I had agreed to follow instructions for induction into this mysterious sect. Bob-Ra’s instructions were simple: On the anniversary of Aleister Crowley’s channeling of the Book of The Law, perform a Spirit Box session and draft a report of the session’s communion, including a deciphering of the Box’s messages utilizing the New Aeon English Qabbala (or ALW Cipher). Not being a Crowley-ite, nor a Thelemite myself, the dates conjured a specific tremor in my personal past as early April had been a perennial rough-and-tumble through my life. I figured, “Hey, why not fill that mental irk of that early Spring history with something magickal?” and went forth. Goes without say that the invocation of the Book of The Law’s channeling anniversary and the use of the Crowley-based ALW Cipher made sense as a framework for the process no matter my personal lore.
My somatic self, however, wasn’t quite proper-headed the night of 4/8/23—sometimes, there is no accounting to how I feel and all is damned for its mercurial shifts—I did, however, trudge on and even recorded the sessions. However, the initial session had me bent! I felt that my correspondences amplified my inner-doubts and the nebulous negativity that surrounded the day, and it was as if it (the Spirt Box’s ramblers) knew I wasn’t fully involved and fucked me around! The rather upsetting feedback from the Spirit Box’s spits and spurts curbed any inch I gave for a true communion. I recall a the prevailing feeling of being tricked or played around with like prey:
Keats Ross: Are you a trickster?
Spirt Box: God, Miracle, Hey, Black, Guy, Now, ROSS
KR: Do you speak to me in my dreams?
SB: If I’m reading them…
*From LPA Agent 333 Report 4/8/23—The “Disgruntled” Initial Session*
After thirty or so minutes, I vexed to the Ghost Box that “this doesn’t feel right” and that I felt as if I was being hectored. This compounded the sour energy I had brought in, and I left the Dimming Room in a huff and went to the bathroom—forgetting I was still recording.
In the video you can hear my petulant griping and moaning out loud as I stomped out of the Dimming Room door and into the adjacent bathroom. Faintly, you can hear me mumbling to myself, in the mirror, the greatest hits of negative self-speak (e.g. You’re such an idiot; What spirit would want to talk to you anyway?) And as my bathroom spiraling continued, a shrill and syncopated beeping began to call out from the Dimming Room… The ‘temperature reader’ was wildly beckoning me back into the room, and the video caught it’s full Morse Code as I wide-eyed back into the room at sat back down for a second session.4
During this second 4/8/23 session (which the full videos and reports are available to Patrons) I proceeded to have one of the most unflinchingly wondrous paranormal communion. And the being I was conversing with told me its name Little Wind:
The [Spirt Box] frequency shifting feels different this time—more rhythmic, more musical and less brash [compared to the earlier session]
KR: Did you enjoy when I played music?
Little Wind: SUPES!
KR: What is your name?
LW: Little Wind
KR: Do you like my music to you?
LW: YES!
KR: Do you play through me when I play music?
LW: Fortune, Yes
KR: Did you have anything to do with The Book Of The Law?
LW: Just a bit, Today
*From LPA Agent 333 Report 4/8/23—The “Little Wind” Session*
Little Wind, since, has become a personal vector, an avatar of pure creation, and the archetype for creative abandon and generative artistry. I would find out, retro-causally of course, that the confluence of Little Wind and my southwestern beginnings were a lore long storied, especially within the faith of the Navajo peoples:
The Little Wind, the force that gives people the ability to breathe and “stand erect," is initiated during conception, when a man lies with a woman and they share breath. At birth, with the infant's first breath, wind is given to the child again, and it is this wind that will guide the child’s life.
According to Navajo belief, Little Wind people are seen as benevolent deities and offer advice to people in danger. Wind puts himself in the folds of the ears, and whatever it speaks for advice is true. This ties the individual strongly to the natural world, with the notion that a person's thoughts and actions do not belong exclusively to the individual but also to the holy air.5
I had constructed the Ma’ii-Being character in my fiction work, Zozobra, and introduced them within the preamble of the Disolver Eco Resonar chapter (and subsequent “Radio Play”) as a personal archetypal other that embodies the lore of the Americana sheet ghost, the elusive Egyptian being, Medjed, and the trickster archetype of the coyote (or M’aii in Navajo) as a vehicle for my own Bardo-jumping—and now—this M’aii-Being has revealed itself in this very Bardo! Naturally, one of its many names is Little Wind - as they are the keepers of the liminal and the preternatural, such as creative acts.
I now exalt Little Wind before every creative endeavor, and allow his gust to whisper through me within the Aspectre’s haunting of creative abandon, such as audiomancy and its tethers to the neither/neither.
∴ The Hanged Man’s Embrace of MU
Eclipse ‘Disolver Eco Resonar’ 2023 Eclipse Tarot Reading:
Disolver—to dissolve—Temperance
Eco—to echo—The Hanged Man
Resonar—To Resound—Death
Revelator—The Subject Revealed—4 of Coins
The correlative aspects of this year’s Eclipse Ritual Tarot draw, and specifically, it’s second placement, the Eco card, with this year’s Aspectre Rite has had its missives, too. I often find myself tinkering long into the night with daily responsibilities and health objectives made moot through the Aspectre’s unbridled experimentation. I understand this. I’ve quite enjoyed the upside down view, and have been echo-ing the bloodrush of the Aspectre’s creativity and a bit too much!
It is fine to stretch my back, hung upside down from a tree, but there must be spurts of right-side-up allowance for blood to return to my toes! It is my aim to ordain, to allow space for the abandonment of things in lieu of creative jus-jus, and annoyingly contradictory, to never abandon the MU of No-Thing:
Make your whole body a mass of doubt, and with your three hundred and sixty bones and joints and your eighty-four thousand hair follicles concentrate on this one word “Mu”. Day and night keep digging into it. Don’t consider it to be nothingness. Don’t think in terms of “has” or “has not.” It is like swallowing a redhot iron ball. You try to vomit it out, but you can’t….Gradually you purify yourself, eliminating mistaken knowledge and attitudes… You are like a mute person who has had a dream…Suddenly Mu breaks open…At the very cliff edge of birth-and-death, you find the Great Freedom…you enjoy a samadhi of frolic and play.
(trans. Robert Aitken, quoted in Ford, and Blacker 2011 p19).6
This Hanged Man is perfectly embolic of the liminal, and the meditation of this MU—no-thing made some-thing. And, as frustrating as it is to be hung from your toe, it allows the world to flip on its axis with a purview now askew. I suppose to echo, as it relates to the Eco card in the Eclipse Tarot reading, also reminds me to enjoy this view askew ushered in the expectation-less haunter saunters of the Aspectre, and Little Wind’s, evocations.
My Marseille Tarot’s use this last Eclipse Rite has its own connotation that I am wont to share: The Hanged Man being a symbol of rebirth. And the Aspectre’s present communion has shown me a tether throughout my entire life, the use of this inherent creative compulsion, has alway been a tool for rebirth and renewal. This inherent compulsion needs seclusion to digest and construct not only an artistic project itself, but the hypersigil intention of each project’s documentation of its respective aeon-of-self.
We can imagine that Hanged Man is a fetus inside card number II. He hung himself in a suspended way between the Sky and the Earth, waiting to be born. - Tarotx.net
But the pragmatic, nay, the somatic of existing outside the Aspectre and within this shared universe is the r-e-a-l grump, here. And when utilizing this D∴E∴R∴ Tarot Reading’s Revelator card to reveal the subject of the reading’s meaning, the overarching hurdle of financial stability barks within the Revelator’s 4 of Coins.7
I am literally stuck betwixt two worlds, a liminal space at a pathway’s bend within my outside career. I’m caught between the stability and benefits of my present status, and the remarkable, all be-it raucous, opportunity to take the leap to a likely swath of wealth within freelancing that won’t be as consistent during the winter or offer the health benefits I’ve grown dependent upon. I have taken quite the time since beginning my solitary introspection of these decisions, and I believe I have made the decision that best purports a benevolent future for me, though sacrifices will have to be made in 2024. But for now, I echo the Hanged Man, suspended in the liminal state of rebirth and renewal whilst capturing a peekaboo at our shared universe from the upside down.
The Aspectre and my new outer-spectre, Little Wind, will haunt on in 2024 within but within Spectre Ranger Megazord of the Prospectre—a sort-of supra-self, or Holy Guardian Angel of potentialize’d communion of all that came before, all that is now and all that very well may-be (or M’aii-being!)
I am excited to share with you all the creative constructs and Prospectre’s gold, arduously panned from the rubble of this past year’s models. If the Spectre Ritual invoked the ghost of Christmas Past, and the Aspectre—The Ghost of Christmas Present, then what better way to usher in the new year with The Ghost of Christmas Yet-To-Come: The Prospectre! Also fitting that Part 3 (and the conclusion) of this Hauntomantic look at 2023 will also convey the Resonar portion of the D∴E∴R∴ method, the resonance mustered and married within the Prospectre’s resolve during a time of resolution! Thus, the Resonar / Prospectre 2023 Haunt Manual chapter will be out by year’s end with a very, very special announcement.
Merry Christmas &
HAUNT ON!
Revl∴ Keats Rosz
PRAGMAGICK.COM
Patrons are already privy to this secret opus I’ve constructed, a work that will bridge the community of We The Hallowed, the confluence of PRAGMAGICK, and the constructs of metaphysical art-barfing—I can not wait to show you just what I’ve been building in here…
PATREON.COM/PRAGMAGICK
NEXT WEEK: The Hallowed Prospectre
∴ Part Three of 2023’s Resonance & 2024’s Hauntomancy!
I want to give a big thanks to Eric J. Millar for his invaluable partnership in weathering the proud tides of human error. And of course, all the amazing patrons that have stayed with me as I swayed these past couple of months. Thank you Temple of Babalon Choronzon (Bobby, Leah & Groucho), Saroth The Mage, Sam Shadow, Lya & Azure Edwards, JJ Reine De Blanc, Jenny Rocky, SorcerersHomie, Cal Desmond Pearson, Alex Leadbetter, Bibi, CW Chanter, Jonicide, Jilly Beans, Corrie Anne, Spooky, Derek Hunter, Carl Abrahammson, Tony Davis, Arnemancy and you, dear ghost, for your ongoing support.
How’s this for a Hauntomantic synchronicity of 20 years past: a NYE 2004 young Keats rambles alone into a Tape Recorder in Southern California at a party somewhere…
From SPECTRE ASPECTRE PROSPECTRE Haunt Manual: “I’d like to consider my Audiomantic Artifacts, Musick Gris-Gris, as Sceptres (A communion of Spectre and Scepter) as both Vajra (Dharmic legendary and ritual weapons, symbolizing indestructibility and an irresistible force) as most of these are musickal talismen marry the shades of both.”
“Three Days of the Writing of the Book of the Law (April 8, 9, 10) - Over these three days in April 1904 e.v., Aleister Crowley received the three chapters of The Book of the Law. These holidays are typically celebrated with readings of each chapter on its respective day.”
You can read my full reports, both my ‘Disgruntled’ & ‘Little Wind’ sessions in the forthcoming published Listening Post Alpha Journal 3, including my Morse Code deciphering of Little Wind’s call for me to come back to start a new session!
Excerpted from an excerpt! Great essay, nonetheless: https://westernchanfellowship.org/dharma/dharma-library/article/meaningless-that-makes-sense-working-with-mu/
I do find it hilarious that my Disolver Eco Resonar method, or D.E.R. Method is, consequentially, the DURRRR Method