Prisms Tethers Talismans ∴ Haunt Manual

Sine Wave Serpents Division II ∴ The Dimming Room Ritual ∴ A Ghost Is Born

This chapter of the Haunt Manual, Sine Wave Serpents, will be released in literary form in III separate divisions. The third division will conclude with the audiocast. This is due to the length, structure and last minute somatic changes concerning a major relocation and absence from my Dimming Room (Production Studio, Magickal Space).

Haunt Manual Artwork By Eric J. Millar of NO GODS BUT MY OWN

∴ The Video Chapter of Sine Wave Serpents (Divisions I & II)

∴ The Audio Chapter of Sine Wave Serpents (Divisions I & II)

DIVISION II ∴
The Dimming Room ∴ A Bardo Is Born

“The Dimming Room”
∴ Hauntological Audiomancy Praxis

The Dimming Room

“Music gives shape to the way we perceive and process our actual life experiences” Ezra Szandzer-Bell, Audiomancy

My nostalgiamancy-centric audiomancy session (I refer to as Dims, or Dim/Dimming Sessions)¹ concerning this 2017 serpent was quite simple. The parameters set would distill down to three: Prism, Tether and Talismans.

The prism of self is 2017, the year of the witch.² I was in Portland, Oregon. I was exiting a relationship, a home, a band. I was celebrating a new relationship, totemic wanderlust, magick, a black dog from Hekate and being pulled by this very sine wave serpent. The tower card strikes again, and from the ash and rubble, the dharma bum spits and whistles.

Every audiomancy session is improvised outside of these simple parameters, there is only a musical tether, or in this case, a chord, a common chord, that is both a literal and figurative key to unlock the dimming.³ Meditating on 2017 takes me to a literal tuning, and a chord where most of my writing during that time would orbit. For the sake of this session I knew I would begin with a simple Gminor chord.

Gm, as if it was a lesser G-d, a minor G-d chord!⁴ An unintentional correlation but it begs a mention. Minor is also in lunar alignment opposed to major’s sun alignment according to Ezra Szandzer Bell’s Audiomancy, a supplemental text to his first book, Astromusik.⁵ Lunar is key, not only to my personal Aquarian/Piscean rhythms and literal lunacy, but because it was the full moon before Halloween 2017 that my partner and I met. Gminor: This musical tether is the sinew that ignited the musickal magick session; the key to generate my psychic engine. A minor ghost.

Instrumentation is intentional down to the animistic qualities of the objects themselves, history, relation to 2017, and deep meditations on all of the above. After heavy consideration they are chosen and placed in a circle of the Dimming Room. In this case, my dimming room is my music studio and magickal space. In the past, it would be a walk-in cupboard. Things have changed.

My main talisman, my exhaust pipe for this psychic engine, would be my baritone electric guitar (named Ectogasm), a haunted artifact superbly customized through my chaos over the years. It was gifted to me by a collection of friends who I am no longer close with. Every time I play it, it allows me to channel the whirlwind heat of those magnanimous years after beating drug addiction and relocating back to Portland, but the bittersweet haunts of the impermanence of those relationships; the harbinger of cycles’ end. It was also my main tool in my now defunct magick and musick project, SPARE SPELLS, who’s last album, The Narrows, was released in 2017, as well as the main writing tool of my first major hyper-sigil, Cactus Crown, as Dakota Slim, which would be released the following year in 2018. It is a testament to laying to rest an era, and embracing a new one. 

Dimming Room Ritual:
Delay ∴ The Sinew
Amp ∴ The Star
Keys ∴ The Lunar Common Chord
Acoustic ∴ The Sacred Feminine
Baritone ∴ The Sacred Masculine
Altar ∴ The Deific Audience/ Magickal Microphone
Rhythm Box ∴ The Chiron, The Wounded Automaton
Haunt ∴ The Seancer, Invocator

I have added my partner, Mary’s, weighted, 88 key keyboard. 2017 was also the proto-birth of our, now five year, relationship. It is also something I am not terribly used to playing, which instills a sort of responsibility in adding it. And like the generation of our relationship, it is a microcosm of new, exciting, awkward-come-boisterous trepidation. When I reviewed the session I realized why I went for this instrument long before I picked up my familiar, Ectogasm: it was a maneuver in intent and focus on the adjectives I just described about my relationship’s generation in 2017.

The fact that this talisman is 88 key’d reminded of Ezra Bell’s Astromusik, a text that deeply correlates western esotericism with the language and theory of music; Astromusik mentions that the 88 keys correlate with the 88 days in a Mercurial orbit. And Mercury is in direct communion with the general Rider-Waite interpretation of the Magician in the tarot. Yet, I would argue, though a magician’s true work is within the experimentation and evolution of the language of all things, the trade can also prove the most self-deceptive and egoic of communions. A fitting form and symbology considering my entirety of 2017: from Fool to narcissistic-wielder-of-will in one swift move!

It… symbolizes Portland, as an idea, to me quite clearly: Its unnecessary weight for what it does, its finicky buttons, its overt aesthetic over its simple function and the survivability after all it has been through. Wait, did I just describe Portland, or did I just describe myself?

These DIMS breathe and shout as ordained by (or lack thereof) rhythm. This session yields both live percussion and a 70’s analog rhythm machine. The machine is not unlike the drum modules found on old church organs, yet, it is just the standalone component. Its boxy switches, schizoid tempo-fits and dark hum is an entity all on its own. This odd talisman was acquired trading gear with a close Portland confidant and friend, Bryan Bruner. It is haunted by the creaky old punk house we used to reside, and symbolizes Portland, as an idea, to me quite clearly: Its unnecessary weight for what it does, its finicky buttons, its overt aesthetic over its simple function and the survivability after all it has been through. Wait, did I just describe Portland, or did I just describe myself?

The accompaniment of an automaton generated rhythm from the archaic gadget also shares in my need for a third mind communion as stated in the previous chapter. Grumpy and gallivant Henry Miller has often used the idea of the automaton to villify artistry. Due to his mid 19th century arena, he was understandably in a punch-funk against literal automation and the dissolution of the wayward artist or the working class. A quote I often carry from the book is:

“The creative spirits are the fecundators: they are the lamed vov who keep the world from falling apart. Ignore them, suppress them, and society becomes a collection of automatons.”

Henry Miller, Stand Still Like The Humming Bird

I gift the book Stand Still Like A Humming Bird to nascent youth ready to whiplash the world for it’s profundity of heart-fists. Though, perhaps he would be hard-pressed to know that now the automatons are igniting and working in congress with most modern and artistic and spiritual praxis, but I will not assume. I’ll commune with his ghost another time.

My audiomantic practices excise all of the pre-made, preset, sample-library, quantize’d, beat generator and VST oscillator digital automatons. I am not anti-digital production, as a matter of fact, the digital audio workstation is the greatest empire a pugilist composer can rule over.

When it has come to digital voices or samples, I have a strict want and need to create my own, to customize from the ground up. I feel the reliance of out-of-box sonics to construct music, let alone audiomancy, cut out a large quotient of my audiomantic and composition processes.

I am no absolutist about this ever-evolving, productively amorphous personal praxis and can see myself allowing artificial intelligent bleeps and bloops to hold some of the weight in an intentional praxis as time slithers on.

All and all, the haunted and brutally imperfect artifact that is an “automaton” (in the classic sense of the word) suffices a multitude of intention. When it is stammering with my physical and somatic manipulation, and the human error is tripled by wear, design, and my herky-jerky fits and spits, it seems absolutely fitting within a hauntological path working.

The allowance of a (somewhat) simple machine (non-digital) heart beat and its almost human heart murmured spasms are intentionally considered and celebrated. I also toggle the rusty “tempo” knob when the ghost barks, or digitally delay with a cacophonous banish with a classic Boss DD6 delay stomp box. The point is that the rhythm machine is intervened with somatic, or physical, percussive bursts.

All of these talismans are placed as such so I can dance among them and physically interact. Often, the tether will tug toward me silencing the beat box every so often to focus on a psychical tempo rubato a term Ezra Szandzer Bell expounds upon in his text, Audiomancy:

“Tempo rubato, which means ‘robbing of time’, refers to playing at one’s own pace without strict tempo, was incorporated into compositions of the Romantic period as a way of defying the dogma of Classical rhythms and exploring musical ideas with greater freedom.”

Tempo rubato was the entire score for my past audiomantic sessions, here it is played as if it were another talisman.

In my previous Dims, I would sit in a dark room for at least an hour, getting lost in tape loops, glossolalia and repetition.⁶ However, because I am using these hauntological Dims as the soundtrack for each of these Haunt Manual chapters, it has given me a way to channel a performative aspect seldom exercised. Since experimenting with such a vulnerable practice via unannounced live streams I have been more psychically aware to be pithy and direct in churning through a multitude of synapses that bridge forgotten ARTifacts, forgotten emotions, forgotten self-speak.

The performance aspect of it is as if I am performing for the “other”, not just an audience behind computers, but by a pantheon of deities, anarchic, imaginative, or cultural, that I have consorted throughout my life. And you might be listening to this charged ARTifact in your headphones on a train, through your car speakers, on your laptop while you cook - the ghost is in the machine and it haunts on.

“A Bardo Is Born”
∴ Manifest Destiny

The writer as ghost in 2017

2017 haunts for the magnanimous bounties of that year, yet also of the unresolved frays that linger still.

The meditation revealed the quadrant, or destination, of 2017, and my audiomantic praxis was my trans-dimensional craft to commune those dimensional rifts of back when. 2017 lingers still; it is not a random result considering the Sefirot meditation’s spelunking of the self. 2017 haunts for the magnanimous bounties of that year, yet also of the unresolved frays that linger still.

When 2017 reared its ghostly silhouette to me in that meditation, it was on the anniversary of the Oregon total eclipse, the celestial event that spurned this current reality tunnel⁷. A magickal five year itch. This was not intentional, and like poltergeists knocking about to be heard and considered, all the synchronous events began to rollick and roll. I would even say, admittedly gun-shy about the full woo of what I am to admit, that the pathways laid in these processes were as divinatory as they were revelatory.

Future-casting, or planning for us pretentious types, had been quite hazy prior to this investigation of my discography of actions pertaining to 2017; I was heading towards an equilibrium in my second year, here, in Seattle. My outdoor education summer season had just ended, and I was gearing up for the autumnal swing of a slow and steady fall.⁸

did my fascination with the extremes of the 2017 magick infect and haunt my future, or was the reveal of 2017 a divinatory guide for the oncoming synchronicities?

I began to absorb into a constant, finally, yet hectically, nestled in a sustainable rhythm. Yet, the confluence of this audiomantic praxis, the haunt manual oeuvre of a self-hauntology and the expectant of unknown twists howled on through magickally interacting with this 2017 ghost. A true communion of extremes of stability and kerplunk’d. This is why I can’t have nice things.

However, one major, concussive, question is beginning to itch loudly: did my fascination with the extremes of the 2017 magick infect and haunt my future, or was the reveal of 2017 a divinatory guide for the oncoming synchronicities? The similarities between the Discordian nature of 2022 and 2017 are personally staggering, but they are about to become flat-out gobsmacking.

…A cast-line from the future, an ad-hoc, non-linear life preserver from my supra-self?

I am writing, now, on the precipice of a literal return to the environment and occupational community that existed in 2017. After completing my summer semester of outdoor education, right around the time of the meditation in late August, I had a week to collect myself before jumping into the Fall semester. However, before I could wipe the lichen from eyes, I was told that fall registration was too low and I would need to find supplemental income, so Seattle already began transmogrifying into a stressful brain-fog replete with teeth-chattering uncertainty.

I kept focused on my creative work during this forced vacation, almost celestially sure that things would fall into place. This is when I was offered a higher position at the outdoor education headquarters back in Portland but it would begin almost immediately. I had little to no time to deeply consider this amount of blurred dust-deviled machinations taking the position would incur. But I knew I needed to accept it, if only for a longer interim. My partner, Mary, and my Hekate-hound, Dzarro, would stay in Seattle as things are sorted in the long game. But where would I stay whilst working full-time in Portland indefinitely?

Before I could even comprehend the heap of heavy heading my way I was offered a room in the exact house where I kindled my relationship with Mary at full moon Halloween Party in, that is right, 2017. I will not only be back with the organization and it’s familial familiars from that era, but I will be existing in the house that birthed the relationship that fateful year.

It is as if, in a psychic effort to hold sanity and quell anxiety, this 2017 sine wave serpent acted as an animated echo, a trans-dimensional belaying agent readying me for the oncoming toils and tussles ahead. Perhaps a cast-line from the future, an ad-hoc, non-linear life preserver from my supra-self? From my future self? From my holy guardian angel? A ghost-line outside of time.

In the appendices of Dr. Robert Crookall’s The Study and Practice of Astral Projection he notes very peculiar piece from Geoffrey Hodson’s The Science of Seership pertaining to “thought-forms” of deceased children resembled Orthodox angels to grieving parents, “Occasional forms and, by vivifying it, add to the prayer-force by which it was originally created and inspired.” Had I interlocked on a prayer-force, an egregore, a thought-form of past self? Did my meditations and audiomantic praxis create a sort of seance of a still vibrating spirit?

Did my time in the tetrahedron-multiversal-Sefirot of galaxy ghosts create this pragmatic tether that is now future casting, future conforming? Did my haunted dances of audiomancy charge this tether and conform the conduit to what need be or shall be? Is this a wanted or warranted change? Is this what I asked for?

I am not perturbed by the cascading dominoes that seem sourced at that five year anniversary Sefirot meditation⁹. I am impressed. Impressed so much that this probable misfire or overshot illustrates that this Nostalgiamancy or Hauntomancy (I’m still spit-balling a proper term, kitschy portmanteaus always will out!), this hauntological magickal praxis of the self is allowing the ghosts of the past to run the asylum of the future. And hopefully, lay the rough ones to rest.

In this shared somatic realm we baseline perceive time as wholly linear within the alchemical cycles of birth, breath, decay. This praxis of charging a certain era of the past to cull an era of the future seems to understand this. Outside deep meditation into memories and relishing in subconscious haunts, it has afforded me the quadrants to literally be back here.

The same places, the same people, the same occupation, yet, as every sine wave snake of self is immovable from the construct of literal decay… time-hopping is not afforded!

It’s as if this praxis can bring me back to the unchanging variables of then, but could not court the inevitable change, either in breath or decay, to the shared somatic minds of now.

This system is brutally imperfect, as are the results. And I have no idea the ramifications.

Next week…
Division III ∴
The Long Goodbye ∴ Lunatics ARE The Asylum

1. “Dim” refers to “Dimming the Tzim-Tzum” - a treatise on my anarchic audiomantic history and explanation can be found here:

2. This is in reference to ex-Disinfo.com editor, Thad McKraken. A publication I loved and wrote for. I speak to Thad about our times, which began in 2017, on Pragmagick:

3. The common chord, macro and micro, as it relates to We The Hallowed: http://wethehallowed.org/the-common-chord/

4. G-d, the absolute creative energy as written, and not worthy to fully spell, in the Talmud.

5. Folks message me all the time pertaining to the praxis of audiomancy asking permission to use the term for their own unique sound related magickal praxis. I always tell them that the term was introduced to me by Bell’s text, but should be utilized as a general, umbrella term for any metaphysically minded sound composition and performance. You can not trademark a pseudo-scientific “family” orientation of magickal practice! Right?

6. Glossalailia, or “speaking in tongues,” the true channeling of non-written and heart-felt language.

7. Any time I can sneak a RAW, I will. Robert Anton Wilson haunts on.

8. History barks and gruffs: https://wethehallowed.org/november-news-2018/

9. Again, a meditation gifted to me by Elizabeth Kennemer and mutated by me that I use weekly: https://wethehallowed.org/podcast/pragmagick-13-oracle/