Hexorcism of the Spectre ∴ Haunt Manual
Hexorcism of the Spectre ∴ Haunt Manual
Part One of 2023's Hauntomantic Works and Their Tethers
Haunt Manual Art by Eric J. Millar
With the Year Of The Chaoyote’s Gregorian transmutation around the corner — the following three chapters aim to tether, or to construct a sinew, of this year’s Haunt Manual workings, the integration of my personal Disolver∴Eco∴Resonar method for examination and re-calibration, October’s Taos Eclipse tarot reading & recent trip to Portland, Oregon as a means to examine 2023 while midwifing 2024, the year of neither-either-or!
2023’s Hauntomancy Workings and their correlating October Taos Eclipse D.E.R. TAROT cards that frame the following chapter:
PART ONE: Disolver (What to dissolve, make opaque, see past)
of The Spectre Working & The Temperance Tarot Tethers
THE HEXORCIST
∴ The Spectre’s Tempered Dissolution
The Spectre of 2017’s hexorcism rests through communion, not burial.
Mary and I, sometime after the October Moon ∴ Revel tour’s final show in Long Beach, had began to rhythmically settle back to our Seattle lives. Both of us changed and itchy; reared and rendered by the dynamism of travel and musickal entanglement. But the reintegration wouldn’t last long as my old musickal cohort and friend, Adrian of Ash Plains, asked if we wanted to jump down to our old Haunt of The Waypost in Portland, Oregon for a December gig in support of his album release.
Although the majority of the Moon ∴ Revel tour was laid to rest along the southwestern hauntological highways of our past, we bypassed Portland as a stop due to our understanding of its ease-of-travel in the future. The complex relationship we both share of our emotional ley line of Portland also had a play in ducking the city, but we knew it would come-a knocking soon. We just didn't count on how soon.
I’m mixed up about Portland. When I began the Hauntomancy workings, namely the initial Spectre Working, it had thrust me back into the confines of a probable relocation to Portland last year. The Spectre working aimed to evoke 2017’s bounties — namely the generation of gusto that birthed not only our relationship & my doggo’s entrance into my life, but the many projects that felt flux’d in a fugue state such as PragMagick, We The Hallowed monthly salons, the Cactus Crown Audio Sigil from Dakota Slim and more.1
I called on that hauntological coordinate because I felt amiss and aimless in the throes of another new city, and I felt I needed to investigate 2017’s generative path-workings as a means to reinvigorate the present. I would find the Spectre Working’s schema and hauntological talismanic conjurations would force a reintegration to 2017’s coordinates and landmarks in the present year — like a botched time machine jump that got the place, but miffed the year! That Portland jostle afforded me a lot of closure and a reassessment of my self-lore of that time. I managed to utilize the time to reinvigorate the present, sure, but I was still roughshod about the working’s unexpected results. I was happy to leave, finding a new career trajectory and reinstating my life in Seattle, and hurrying out of the fog of 2017’s war-zone.
But I was somewhat cowardly too, all too focused to conjure the sweat equity of creating a new Hauntomantic practice of the Aspectre Working, focusing on an aspect of self thought lost instead of a year, and leaving Portland and 2017 behind. And lo — the Spectre’s confluence into this year’s minutiae held fast, and would finally erupt in a re-do...
You see, there are still cacophonous ghosts of old relationships, bailed reality tunnels and embittered ruins that permeate my cinematic memories of the city —Portland, or Oakland, or Los Angeles, or whatever city that reverberates my past, really. These cities are surly; these places are annoyed by my relentless and callous treatment of their importance to me. And this year’s Hauntomancy, the audiomantic magickal rites within the hauntology of the self, became baton death marches for afforded resolve of the traumas and guilt that linger still. There will always be work here and there, and I am always afraid I don’t have the tools to bury these hatchets. But I am closer to communion rather than burial, anyway.
Mary and I discussed Portland’s resonance as we traveled down to our show at Portland’s Waypost — and the deep tethers that gift us toe curls or sky fists. I declared I wouldn’t let the enraptured past dictate my personage this trip, and Mary agreed, yet, we couldn’t duck the city’s schemes for our reunion.
Our show with Ash Plains helped commune with the Spectre Working’s tendrils, it gave us a new look within an old temple of my magickal and creative endeavors in the Waypost. Friends new and old came to see our Moon Division and Revel Rosz sets, and my old friend, Adrian’s Ash Plains, performed a cinematically brilliant and wholly inspirational set that was sonically corrosive and visually cohesive. I came home inspired from injecting this year’s third Hauntomancy working, The Prospectre Ritual (conjuring a potential self-spectre), and its rebirth of the Revel Rosz heteronym and its new musick into the Spectre’s temple of The Waypost. During the show Adrian mentioned he hadn’t performed in over five years. I asked Adrian when the last time he performed was, and to my bewilderment, he said it was with me (and my former project Spare Spells) at the Waypost in 2017 during one of our We The Hallowed monthly salons — The Spectre Haunts On!
Our present stasis, now within a changed and refurbished venue that held so many echoes of our past artistry, was beautifully evolved, older, more crafted and resolute in our respective lives. It was communion with the Spectre of 2017 rather than banishment; it was a hexorcism of the sour Spectre haunts, the sour and neglected parts for fear of emotional sparks, the embrace of the inevitable change of everything, and the evocation of the Prospectre’s resonance of communion of the past to create new. Of course it would take audiomancy performed in those coordinates for true communion, of course it would!
Mary, our doggo Dzarro, and I managed to finagle an Airbnb facing Lone Fir Cemetery, the site of our first date amidst 2017’s spectre. We relished in the memories of how hard we had fought the outer world (literally and figuratively) during that initial communion, and cherished the macabre beauty around our union, whether it was this cemetery, or our anniversary of Halloween. And we attempted to retrace our beginnings of our relationship with rediscovering a special piece of lore that lay within those cemetery gates: the legend of “DANGER 666.”
∴ DANGER 666 & THE GREAT MYSTERY
One of our first dates was centered around Lone Fir Cemetery in 2017, if not the very first (we attempted to visit on our anniversary of Halloween night but the gates were closed!) Back then, we waltzed around and meditated aloud about the generations of lives and the living below our feet, the great mystery and its inevitable gift of change. We would casually brush the maple and walnut leaf detritus off numerous headstones and investigate their names and dates.
Mary had discovered one, however, that would shape a personal lore that haunts still. She called me over, “Keats, wow, look at this one!” I sauntered over and saw the reddish stone revealed under leaves that read simply, in Olde English font, “DANGER” with the dates “6/6/60-6/23/97” — a tombstone that would eventually send Mary on an investigation to find out its origins, and with it, our deep connectivity through the heavies and raditudes of the Great Mystery.
Here, in 2023, the day after our show — Mary and I had a mission. We would walk the cemetery grounds in exaltation to our history, and attempt to relocate this elusive DANGER 666. We both had lost it’s coordinates so many years ago, and even attempted to rediscover it after a few years to not avail. While hunting the rows upon rows of leaf-shrouded headstones, we recalled what Mary had found out about this “DANGER:” An online friend of the deceased revealed DANGER’s final years as a transient who lost his battle with addiction. I won’t give any more details for privacy reasons, but I will say that our recent attempt at finding the headstone offered a solemn shade. And as we waltzed among the casualties of the Great Equalizer I thought of this year’s loss, namely an old friend who met a similar fate due this year.
I had a dream a few months ago — I was in a ramshackle Victorian house, every level and room filled with murky ankle deep water, yet I could feel the presence of artistry all around. The walls were riddled with graffiti and tags in various forms, and instrument amp and cathode ray television buzz filled the halls. My old Oakland friend, Devin, was a host to my visitation — and I knew in the dream I hadn’t seen her or this ramshackle house in many years although I had been there before. I immediately recall believing this was some anarchic artist home, like the ones common in Oakland during my years there over a decade ago. Vibrant and decaying, yet in some sort of dimensional aspect of Oakland, an astral Oakland built by the ruins of my memory of 2007-2011.
…if Portland was any resolve, it was that both life is too heavy for everyone to remember but a city never forgets…
Oakland, when I had lived there, was a vibrant community of anarcho-artists and creators, and I was lucky to be a drug addled ghost among the halls of those memories. In the dream, it felt as it did then, and I was set on investigating this sinewave buzz’s location within the deluge of its Escher-like construction. Eventually, Devin would tell me the house was Josef’s — an old friend and roommate. I would find Josef tinkering with a synthesizer in a large room, and knew that Josef built this astral temple, similar to the spaces he had run in corporeal Oakland.
Josef was a mayor of Telegraph Ave. during those years, unquenchably restless and collaborative through artistic mediums and community building. He had always helped midwife tenements and art-spaces that housed the multitudes of artists, nevermind warring aesthetics and personalities. We had become friends through the mutual hub of Mama Buzz Café, and eventually I was allowed to haunt the “belfry” of Telegraph’s Saigon Market, a burgeoning open-door’d intentional space above a Vietnamese corner store that loomed over Telegraph avenue. Although I had started as a fervent creator and collaborator with him through various artistic endeavors, those years also contained my solemn battle with un-diagnosed mental disfluencies (brain miscommunications and bad translations) that I escaped through a gradual degradation of drug use.
Josef and I, before I began to lose myself in vicious cycles of drug-addled mischief, had road tripped to New Mexico, our joint birth state, for Thanksgiving in 2009. It was a magnanimous trip, and although we always had somewhat of weary-eyed sizing-up of one another — often joshing and hectoring one another — the trip had helped reinforce our shared and disgruntled histories and our compulsions to create. Upon our return to Oakland we began disparate paths that would rarely intertwine, but not through any direct sours. Both of our disparate journeys concerned mental and drug anguish, albeit never together, and as my hedonism culminated under the Phoenician sun on the year-of-disrepute of 2011, Oakland and its inhabitants would largely be moved on from.
I awoke from the dream of Josef’s astral Oakland temple, and discovered an Instagram tag from another Oakland cohort I have not spoken to in a long while — the tag was a picture of Josef and I with esoteric words that could only connote that he was gone. I shot up in bed, replied to the old friend’s post in shock, and he confirmed that Josef had recently dispatched. I immediately shared this dream and the sad news with Devin, the astral host, and even messaged a mutual friend (and one I would consider my closest of those years) about the dream and my apologies for his loss. I know now that sharing the dream, and the amazement of said dream during the grieving of a lost friend was probably poor form concerning the old mutual friend. And Devin, after some back and forth, mentioned that it’s interesting I still dream so heavy after all these years and that she “doesn’t dream at all.”
Another Spectre coordinate was reared and the need for communion of Oakland, my past in it, and the lost friends of the time, here or there, is needed. I don’t know how to initiate those conversations, or apologize even, but if Portland was any resolve, it was that both life is too heavy for everyone to remember but a city never forgets — so a move must be made, but its resolution can only be made of the move itself. The inevitable looms for all.
I wonder if I forever am in all of the above; shards of my self and my escapades entrapped by the memories of me in others, haunting on and beating still within echoes of a parsed past.
I am reminded of my grandmother’s leaving in 2020. During a roughshod caravan of my father and I zooming down from Colorado to New Mexico to visit before her consciousness left, I spent the silent sojourn amiss with heavy regrets of missteps I had during my drug debacles and their affect on distant family. We had come to a clearing and forgiving, years before, but things never felt the same between us — and still don’t concerning that side of my family, whether or not forgiveness was and is actually afforded.
When we arrived at her Sandia palliative place, I couldn’t shake the disarming of regret for ever causing any strife during those past debacles. And as I kissed her forehead and told her I loved her, she awoke to tell me about this wonderful dream she just had about Finland. I quickly asked her if she had ever been, and she told me, “Only just now, in my dream” — her sardonic humor still at play. Through hushed tones she told me about this crystalline Finnish kingdom of healthy residents and happy asides and pleasantries she made with them. I’ll never forget the immediate correlation of Heaven, of a white kingdom not unlike Donner’s Radiant White Krypton, and perhaps, through her fathom-ability of her life experience, she was visiting her Heaven, albeit only viewed through window breaks on this train she was to the Other.
I kissed her forehead, we said we loved one another, and then the morphine send-off did its quiet work and sent her through the tunnel — back to her Finland. I told her I loved her as she took her last breath and cried.
Funny that, within working this hauntology-of-the-self, the spectre of the great equalizer, or bio-dematerializer, would finally be consulted. Santa Muerte’s constant consultation through my practices, the ghost of “Little Wind” whom I met during my spirit box session, and the framework of the afterlife-while-alive would always parlay the Great Scythe. The lurking inevitability of this skin’s expiration date is always here, and 2023 saw my bones start to feel the wear and tear of a lifelong pursuit of erratic living within dodgy means.
As we combed the graveyard for DANGER’s tombstone, however, I could only think of the atmosphere we all gulped and will become one with — I thought of Grandma’s Finland and Josef’s Astral Anarcho-Haus with vectors of those that went. And I worry about my vector-of-self that persists in some others’ dreams, and what that summation is, and whether I’m in Finland, or an Astral Oakland Art House, or within the Waypost’s wood, or, frighteningly, a decaying Phoenician drug den. I wonder if I forever am in all of the above; shards of my self and my escapades entrapped by the memories of me in others, haunting on and beating still within echoes of a parsed past.
The Spectre Working revealed I can not attune to every miffed soul I have ever grazed, or even every miffed memory, but the process to attempt to do so is absolutely necessary. I will remain a hardwired vector of a spoiled-self in the minds of some, no matter what. I can’t change their recall, whether skewed and untrue — but that shouldn’t matter. These cities, be it Portland, Phoenix, Oakland, etc. all have these shards of hard-luck and desperate self-spectres clamoring among their concrete jungles; only through praxis and action can I commune with those shards of self, as an exorcism is never absolute, and can’t really rid anything. But I can change them, and an attempted hexorcism, a banishing of poisonous traits and the ridding of dark maneuvers, however, is necessary.
∴ Death from Above and Below
Temperance overcomes mundane, and he/she can soar into subtle areas. The golden pupils in his/her eyes glowed with clear consciousness, evoking a verse of Rilke, “All angels are scary.” - Tarotx.com
The temperance of financial stability and coveting, as revealed by the reading’s Revelator card of the Four of Coins, has parlayed well since the Eclipse. I have tempered heavy career decisions amidst these seasonal churns. The dissolution (being the Disolver card pull) of this temperance pull concerning this possible career change is but the furthest reach of its initial installation; the liminal rite of temperance dissolves before a cycle of “change” ushers in with it’s better angel, the angel of Death (The Resonar card) — and Rilke is right, change is scary — but perhaps it is the only absolute.
If these shards the self-spectre, whether combing graveyards in love, drug addled alone, or performing at venues with friends — if these shards continue to haunt on within the annals of memory, not unlike Josef behind the synth in that Astral Anarcho-Haus, then what is changed exactly? If these shards persist to exist, yet sequestered in small loops, then is there ever really leaving?
I suppose that the shard of memory, this vector of the self-spectre, the personified haunt — is changed by the resonance of all of the above. And this resonance, this lingering — how does this inform my life now?
I’ll attempt an answer with leading questions: Don’t I want to be punching more experiences into the aether? Don’t I want to disperse whatever shards I have left through dynamic experience — to haunt on within the benevolent memories of dynamic creation? What good is a restless shard, or vector-of-self lurking among the ruins of only comfort and stability? And how do I afford the stability to continue punching these shards into the ghost-aether of memory without charging the shards with anxiety riddled choreography?
I suppose a change is coming, and it’s one concerning the communion of dynamism in my daily life, and its exaltation to the absolute of Death’s impending change. But the Disolver card of Temperance, and the Spectre Working were always the first stage of a three act hyper-sigil… the Eco & Aspectre’s generation and the Resonar & Prospectre’s 2024 hallowed haunts are forthcoming…
We never did relocate DANGER 666 this past visit. We both surmised that this was a fitting resolve; the ouroboros of that lore from our first date hasn’t quite met its tail yet — hasn’t quite lapsed its tale. Not that rediscovering it would be like opening the seventh seal of our relationship eschatology — us not obsessing over discovering it was merely a measured understanding through listening to its hushed tones of not yet. And if there’s one thing Hauntomancy and the Haunt Manual has taught me, it’s to listen to those ghosts when they tell you something.
Until next week…
HAUNT ON!
Revel∴ Keats Rosz
PRAGMAGICK.COM
PATREON.COM/PRAGMAGICK
NEXT WEEK: HAUNT OF THE ASPECTRE
∴ Part Two of 2023’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.
These 2017 salons and creative, community frenzied variety shows were a residency at the very Waypost we would return to perform at: https://wethehallowed.org/salons/