Spektre Sans Specters
An examination of the hauntological aspects, semiotics and transmutations within Hauntomancy
∴ HAUNTED (Spektre Prelude)
Over ten years ago I allowed myself to escape the demon-parade of a hollow hedonistic desert doomlayer—previously resigned to followthrough on the “disappointer” heteronym I embraced by cutting myself off from everything I was passionate about in what seemed like a fitting resolve: the slow lonely death of a drug-addled fuck-up, back in the place that bore most of the childhood traumatic events I spent years running away from. This was the lore I built for myself—whatever the opposite of a prodigal son was, I was it. Another Phoenician self-fulfilling prophecy.
I recall crawling on the carpet to TV static in a naked apartment, hunting for pens, afforded just enough energy to scrawl a couple pages of sorry’s, regrets and if-only-I’s on the back of a paper bag that held my only change of clothes. In a fevered mess I came-to with an honest assessment of why and what had occurred to bring me to this end. I recall signing my declaration of soul deportation with glyphs; signed sigils that communed my prayers into a small alphabet—a rugged map for anyone who cared to decipher this ragged end of someone they once knew…but who would care to chart such a map from a then-desolate alienated-cum-alienator? These were the sigils I had and would continue to have stick-n-poke tattooed all over my body in a magickal cartography-of-the-self, a language known only to me, in seemingly sketchy skin-ink that looked as unfinished as my business pm earth had always been. I remember thinking how foregone my intentional and creative self was, and how far I was removed from it. I wondered that if I weren’t to wake up, who would decipher my alphabet of why? Not one name came to mind. I passed out on the rugged carpet.
Through machinations beyond my deserved being at that time, I came-to in a hospital, comfy, yet not totally assured that I ever truly was awake, and perhaps purgatory is a hollow hospital—a cavernous faint green room haunted with beeping monitors and distant moans. Though I felt swell, I was well; well enough to understand that the neighbors who dragged me here did me a lifetime of solids by giving me the needed assistance to disrupt that limbic animal hunger I poisoned myself with. Neighbors discovered me at my end (the mental images of how still haunt me) and my reprieve was this desert hospital, a sort of purgatory, but one that was more reprieve than horrorshow.
I was given yet another chance, again able to reclaim the self that carried me before all that sad bastard misery took hold. And now clear-headed enough that the echo of that once fervently creative kid, that Spektre of self, the one that cheered bravery behind and before the stupidity of it all, finally hollered back; that kid that took hold during my most primal desperation, long enough to scribble alphabets on trash right before the demondoor kicked wide. I’ve come to accept this salvo as a sort of channeled post-script, a possessed message from the aching and lost self for my then-present eyes only…
…the hospital staff thought the bag was a deletion note and tossed it. The paramedics don’t keep such dark totems of truncated exits for the passengers left still on the ride. “It wasn’t a deletion note!” I told them time and time again. They didn’t believe me, and at the time, I wasn’t so sure I believed myself, neither. That is to say, I believe it to be so much more now, and quite a power totemic device would have surely done me good with recent pursuits…but I digress…
That Spektre scrawl, the frenetic sprawl of a last gasp at a self-singularity, kept me enchanted even as terribly embarrassed, unkempt and crooked as I was in that hospital bed. It was by all means a talismanik reclamation of that long-lost purposeful part of myself.
I asked a nurse for a pen and paper (in between fits of chocolate pudding) to try an attain that preternatural focus yet again, only this time, I’d tune to survival: That night I wrote and conscripted sigils, both tattoo’d and tried, brand new and true, of what could be, should be the next chapter. To attain guidance from that Spektre about a way out. I would be proactive, yet somatically static, and choose where this body would wake up next. “Anywhere but Phoenix.” The Spektre barked. “Okay,” I said, “New Orleans or back to Portland?” I wrote and wrote, until the Spektre resolved: “New Orleans will kill you and Portland has more friends. Just get the fuck out of Phoenix…”
That simple, magickal act—devised in the wake of recovery and destruction—illuminated a process of reflection, calibration, and honesty that birthed this era of the self-spektre I currently attempt to commune with. What I didn’t know then is that this act was the first Dim Session—A somatically driven artistic ritual seeded in communion with the Other (or Other Self, even) and mired in recovery, recalibration and resolving the wounded widows of possibilities I left at the altar. This session was carried forth by the tools and talismans of my self-lore (such as my tattooed sigils) and a communion with the brutal and honest, now transfixed with the Spektre of then, and through a viewpoint and an ability to see behind and beyond my then stasis.
That IV of essential nutrients was not a poisonous talon pumping dark fluids, it was a liminal bath refreshing my somaticks in a sorta-baptism. That hospital bed was but a threshold to a thoroughfare to reclaim a self—a sort of hauntological invocation through causal repositioning in a retrokausal retooling: My poisoned past would no longer have authority over the addict of now, it would instead dance with the kid I thought I had forgotten, to proclaim no business is unfinished, just merely transformed. In Hauntomancy the lost futures are not gained, but satisfied within reverent transmutation…yes, even the dour dregs of our lore can service us…
∴ PRESENCE (Aspektre Currents)
I’m currently finishing the design of a micro-press Hauntomancer Primer: a deft zine introducing the art magick of Hauntomancy—its lexicon and succinct ruminations within anarchic diagrams, infographics and art—to be included in the next Somatick Magick parcel for Patreon subscribers. In turn, this ‘Primer” also assists in the continuing edit of these Haunt Manual writings into a collected print volume introducing the praxis quite thoroughly.
Creating these media sigils is all an act of communion with the Gheiszt1 of this fevered ontology itself as it continues to assist in tethering a coherent signal path within the lore of my life while also, perhaps, a signal path for any new looky-loo that could possibly transpose these components into their own: Zine design and printing, book editorialization and overall sinew tightening—these unquestionably parallel processes within creating this anarchic magickal art praxis, especially as an aspirational hex-orcism that is beautifully grounded through their compression-model modalities. The niche and sentimental mediums of something like the Somatick Magick initiative has continued to exalt and prove-positive a foundational ontology, albeit an anarchic and rather messy one at that! It all seems to further define and ratify itself within revelatory processes not just within my own development as a creator, but also in its behind-the-scenes evolution of a praxis oroborous’ing the sinew of how I map this reality. It’s become quite daunting trying to capture the revelations, honestly!
But this need to thrust Hauntomancy through the processing and compression tools necessary for Johnny-hohum to understand it has, in it of itself, become another Hauntomantik process: instead of incessantly spewing art-barf conceptual pieces ad-nauseum (pun intended) here on Substack, and remaining arrested within the development of a system by languishing without necessary definition, I’m now allowed the breath to expound on certain aspects of this heart-beat maxi-magick. That is to say, all these disparate parts are revealing themselves to me back then as presently portending salvos—making Hauntomancy’s trans-temporal noirs all that more neon. So, up the process punks and all hail the ramshackle…let’s continue to over-examine, shall we? First, let’s start with the semiotic tether to Hauntology, in name, in contrast, and in deviation…
∴ THE SPECTER OF HAUNTOLOGY
A Brief Overview from a Pauper Philosopher
Deconstructed, all linear history is lost and man isleft to a hauntological state of retro-realities… (Mark Fisher…probably)
Hauntomancy’s namesake was originally a cheeky portmanteu to mean “hauntology of the self magick”—and what the fuck does that mean, you may ask? Through the Haunt Manual writings I’ve definitely wax’d poetic on this art magick system I utilize to commune with forgotten eras of the self, lost synapses and creative projects, and forgotten futures without explaining the hauntological tethers overtly. And although the wide-net of flippant hauntological connection has deviated quite a bit within Hauntomancy’s own mutations, we should probably discuss Hauntology in a pauper philosophical broad stroke, first…
Hauntology was originally coined by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx—originally a philosophical riff on the persistence of Marxist philosophy after its apparent political decimation and loss of dominion within the west. Derrida envisioned a future that would always be haunted by the failed promises and missed potentials of the past. A rather somber revelation of unfulfilled quests within the vector of “ghosts with unfinished business”—these specters haunt on under the capitalist regime with the shaking fervor of a cheated and marginalized societal faction who bides their displaced time in unrelenting anguish. The overt analogy to the folkloric “ghost” is all too fitting here, thus the specter or spectre imagery: forever caught within a liminal tryst of contrasting states:
“The specter is a paradoxical incorporation: the becoming-body, a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit.”— Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (1993)
Derrida uses the specter as a metaphor for how certain ideologies or historical moments—like Marxism—refuse to vanish. In this way, hauntology critiques the linear, progressivist notion of time promoted by Western metaphysics. Instead, Derrida suggests that the past is not dead and the future not yet born, but that both linger and overlap within the present.
Hauntology in Derrida’s original context is not nostalgic, but more ethico-political, highlighting the necessity of being accountable to the specters that modernity would rather ignore. It's a call to responsibility for the ghosts of unfinished histories; a call to those whom modernity and capitalism have silenced or left behind.
However, it was cultural theorist and Hauntomantik Hallowed Haunt, Mark Fisher, who brought hauntology into the world of pop culture, using it as a lens to explain the “slow cancellation of the future.” In Ghosts of My Life, he wrote:
“The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations.”— Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life (2014)
Fisher’s hauntology laments the aesthetic and political stasis of late capitalism. In Ghosts of My Life, he argues that modern culture is defined by corporate retromania and the obsessive recycling of past styles without generating new visions. Creature comforts poised as purposeful sustenance rather than novelty: the slop machine slops pastiche. Fisher famously described this as a "loss of the future"—a sense that the radical possibilities once imagined (particularly in the postwar 20th century) have been foreclosed.
This version of hauntology reared through the Haunted Graffiti of (the late) Ariel Pink and was acknowledged through the figurative and literal loop structures and sonic-skewed yesteryear punches of Burial and The Caretaker. Boards of Canada, although a sentimancy project before the Fisher Hauntological mold took edific,e is also thrown in the, ah hem, loop. That is to say, artists who exalted obsolete media and foregone technological blips with broken temporalities such as using physically degraded analog sounds to paint a multidimensional canto of sound were aesthetically hauntological.
Fisher contrasts this with capitalist realism, the idea that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. In hauntological works, we witness the mourning of futures that neoliberalism has effectively buried.
Fisher’s analysis is especially resonant as he describes a culture stuck in an endless retro loop, a nostalgia feedback system where nothing new truly emerges—only clever reassemblages of the past that are endlessly marketed as the new. His concern was that capitalism had rendered cultural innovation nearly impossible, turning art into hollow thumb-sucking comfort fare, rather than the hallowed existential motivators necessary to push culture forward. We hit a fulcrum point, a dead end, and now we’re just and hungry ghosts with a vacuum-gullet for endless nostalgia, nostalgia that folds onto itself, mining the mined, orouboros’ing the vomitorium.
A rather bleak observation that is harder and harder to deny. The hauntological specter here is the future we were promised by past-modernity: a technological Utopian individuation, forever looming yet never arriving, like an endless charade in a purgatory of phantom pains within a homogenized memory factory.
How do we ascend a shared somatic limbo of spinning remembrance? I believe it, as with most things, should start with the self. It should begin within. Through my study within the confluence of art and magick, and their undeniable tethers transfixed and transposed between them, I have found a way to mine a true hauntological array of forgotten synsapses, lost eras, faint aspects of who we were, are, and possibly, could be. This is the fundamental departure of Hauntomancy.
Hauntology’s main vain is one of criticism; hauntology is a way of identifying cultural patterns and aesthetics, deconstructed to into a cull-factory of tried and true trends. It’s powerful and necessary, but passive as it observes and comments. Hauntomancy, by contrast, is active and kinetic. It is not merely the noticing of ghosts that haunt and bind us, but the deliberate conjuring and communing with them for personal evolution. It is art-making as ritual, creation as exorcism, and identity as invocation.
I propose the only valid and constructive hauntological communion is one through the sentimental constructs of art and media, one that is self-sampled and rebirthed by the sole creator themselves... whereas the sum of most hauntology rhetoric is pop culture vapidity, or political fallout, Hauntomancy takes the Spektres (now with a K!) of a creator’s history and transmutes in congress with them to attain satisfy the lost future in a transmuted resolve.
While hauntology tends to deal in collective memory such as society’s lost futures, dead media, shared cultural loops, Hauntomancy deals in personal epochs. It asks the practitioner to engage with their own past selves, imagined futures, and artistic lineages. The result is an embodied mythology, a hauntology-of-the-self that is generative rather than diagnostic.
Hauntomancy, in turn, keeps the current hauntological timeloop not solely as a societal reaction, but as an evolution, still allowing for a revolutionist philosophy, an answer to the slop machine—albeit within the self, rather than a critique of the public. Hauntologically it still exalts dead tech, but largely as part necromancer, resurrecting the tools and talismans and the processes utilized in a creator’s past to create anew while exalting the microtonal affects, especially their opportunity for error: to magnify mistakes as divinations within these forgotten processes as means for intentional expression or revelation. And after years of experimenting within the confluence of art and metaphysics, I’ve come to associate the inherent need for calibration and communion within sentimental constructs of the past—especially if one were to attempt any sort of pragmatic divination to create, commune and conjure.
Through the quick shout of hauntology, I’ve found my own development within lost and/or transfixed eras of my own artistic evolution; through eras of technology utilized to create, to the lost timelines of my own developing eras. Hauntomancy may share hauntology’s specters within the supposition of being haunted by patterns and disgruntled cycles outside of time, especially comparative to modern technologies in both creative and magickal mediums, but it speaks with them as means to supersede aestheticism or nostalgia. Hauntomancy is not concerned with aesthetic over function, nor is it concerned so much with nostalgia over personal sentiment—where hauntology catalogs spectral symptoms in pop culture, Hauntomancy conjures and communes with the self—through art, ritual, and mythopoetic self-re/invention.
Hauntomancy uses media—old notebooks, half-finished songs, childhood drawings, past journals, family stories, obsolete technology—not as aesthetic trinkets but as sacred tools. These become the bones in the ritual circle, the cartography of one's past selves. The Hauntomancer is not an archivist of nostalgia, but a necromantic artist-ritualist, invoking their own personal archetypes to transform lost time into lived art.
Central to the Hauntomantic process is the idea of the SPEKTRE—a constructed persona made from the ghosts of one’s own history. Where hauntology often highlights how the self is shaped passively by media and memory, Hauntomancy calls for active authorship. The SPEKTRE is not a mask—although masks (especially heteronyms) themselves play a large part within the rituals—it is a mirror made of many faces, some forgotten, some imagined. It is a tool for shaping intention, channeling creativity, and consciously inhabiting myth.
∴ The SPEKTRE of HAUNTOMANCY
Hauntomancy’s Ritual Semiotics and the Troikatych of the Gheiszt
At the core of Hauntomancy lies the Troikatych:
More than a symbolic gesture, the Troikatych ∴ is the spektral signal flow—mapping macro and micro cartography through from thought to action to revelation. It’s an alchemical architecture transposed through many nodes, ∴ , and wherever cited: ∴ it is a portal for the Hauntomancer—a psychick glyph that allows the Hauntomancer to dissolve, echo and resonate beyond the noted subject, such as the past-spektre of the Gheiszt, or active metaphysical self. Not unlike the symbol’s use within actual cartography to denote ruins, ∴ is the beacon of echo-location radiation that emits ideation, expression, and transformation beyond the noted cites, connoting a resonance not present. The system is not fixed, but fluid; designed to collapse boundaries between mental process, physical ritual, and the semiotic signifiers we embed within both. It is phantom-tethered, allowing the Hauntomancer to discover and generate their own thoroughfares through the noted subject, or Tych, and its contradictory parallel, or Contrych, and finally, its revelatory Vertych—sat above the linear tych bounds and able to peer behind and beyond its binary alliterations:
∴
Each point of the Troikatych performs a distinct spektral function that could be mapped within each of its Tych Phases and its relation with the Hauntomantik triadic formula (Dissolver ∴ Eco ∴ Resonar) relative to signal-flow and intermingled through Psychickal and Somatick constructs to acheive communion with a Spektral Phase:
Tych: Thought→Meditation→Disolver→Memory→Spektre:
The Psychick cycle: dissolution of memory into raw symbolic feed; the unconverted thought and the experiential history; the unfiltered building blocks of the self.
The Somatick cycle: Base functions and active adherents within an intentional working by beginning with the Hauntomantik triadic formula’s Disolver (Dissolve) function—dissolve memory through meditation to commune with the Spektre of then.
Spektre: The raw signal—unfiltered memory and past self built from experiential and sentimental resonance.
Contrych: Action→Divination→Eco→Heteronym→Aspektre:
The Psychick Cycle: Active modulation of the signal through feedback in its contradiction—psychick resonance, experimental processing, and recursion.
The Somatick Cycle: Physical interactivity with atmospheric resonance through call-and-response (Eco / Echo) communication with the ideas and aspects of self to in/evoke the Aspektre.
Aspektre: Modulation and feedback—psychic reverb, experimentation, processing.
Vertych: Resolve→Communion→Resonar→SupraSelf→Prospektre:
The Psychick Cycle: The generative act—the overarch intention, a resounding revelation and communion with an ulterior and deviated creation.
The Somatick Cycle: Futher piece-meal’d construction, calibration and conversation with the supraself; a resounding attainment achieved and archived through the Prospektre.
Prospektre: Output—ritualized creation, creative artifact, hauntomantic transmission.
This Spektral Signal Flow, or Holler-round (to connote its feedback intentionality) ∴ mirrors sound signal path routing, but also aligns with a semiotic process: signifier (raw signal), signified (processed meaning), and referent (expressed outcome). The Troikatych bridges symbolic systems, creative media, and magickal rites. It offers both a map and a method, charged rumination, and an explodable and exploitable system for the Hauntomancer to operate within its boundless tethers.
Unlike hauntology, which lingers in melancholic abstraction, Hauntomancy posits the Phantokon: a vertych synthesis of both spektrality and ritualized form. It’s an alchemical signal of becoming. The Phantokon also deviates from Derrida’s pharmakon (poison and cure) and Burroughs' Third Mind (emergent synthesis beyond singular authorship) into a principled Other, seemingly untethered-yet-construkted with phantom limbs; beyond temporal and somatic constructs, but behind as well.
We can examine the pharmakon as utilized within Derrida's hauntology but through the lense of the Hauntomantik Troikatych: Neither either a poison or antidote, but both—as defined within the pharmakon—can transpose within a Hauntomancy paradigm with, say, the tych of memory as both poison and antidote, and communed and consorted as such. Therefore (∴) this self-spektre Phantokon is both a deviation and homage to the Hauntological prism but specific within the Hauntomantik construkt. The Phantokon of Hauntomancy is one of unified transience that utilizes its contrasts within each working to commune and create with the Gheiszt, but results may vary, and sometimes dancing with those Spektres can prove an immediate poison, or tarot tower card, for a longview inoculation.
As with Derrida’s sense of the Pharmakon, each point in the Troikatych can function as both remedy and toxin through its base functions between the tych and contrych, or even as whole: Dissolution can be catharsis or collapse. Echoes may clarify or distort. Resonance may liberate or trap. The Hauntomancer must interpret and navigate the polarity of each, and weigh the gray tundras that emit through every cartography point the ∴ may emanate.
This instability is not a flaw, however. Like Derrida’s pharmakon or Burroughs’ Third Mind, the Troikatych is designed for transmutation through contradiction. In this sense, it becomes a semiotic engine, collapsing dualities through spektral interplay. The instance of the vertych, its reveal, its attainment, is not a singular objective sought without its coupled signal flow functions of its tych and contrych.
To forge a vertych without heavy introspection and experimentation through its tych and contrych, actually resolves to become a tych to begin with. This is the only true sequential mapping that exists within Hauntomancy, as it is inherent in the linear cartography of a life, with past always preceding the present, and the future proceeding the present. However, the present is never truly present, each access point to the present always resolves to be in the past, thus, working within the sequential troikatych system allows one to delineate and distill the separation of past and present by Dimming the somatick through Dim Sessions and allowing one to tangentially conceive of a stasis beyond or above the forever haunted now.
The Troikatych is not just a cosmogram—it is an engine of becoming. It insists on activity over observation, on feedback loops over the ad infinitum, on authorship over passive interpretation. Tethering the Troikatych is, graphically, where the processes of Hauntomancy lay, and how those are tethered, graphically, is the maxim of which Hauntomancy engages its full Gheiszt: when each node is engaged fully, it reveals a praxis capable of reformatting memory into myth, trauma into servitors, aesthetics into somatick weapons and the self into a resonant emanation.
“The self-spektre signal, though converted and manipulated through personal signal converters for clarity, resampling or intentional degradation, is a largely unconverted conduit path from practitioner to the shared somatick.” — The forthcoming HAUNTOMANCER PRIMER, Troikatych Section
Hauntomancy doesn’t seek to merely preserve; it seeks to generate. The ghosts aren't curated as with current artificial intelligence, or what most modern technology seeks to do: feign creation assistance while really becoming a proxy curator, rather than assistant creator, if even, at all. That is the bounty of which, collectively, we have come to deem of paramount use: aggregation of transcribed art playacting as the creator alone. Bahumbug!
Hauntomancy is actively conjured, embodied, and transmuted into new works, novel to the self and materialized through the practice. The Spektral Phasing is central to this: It is a psychick tool made of multiple selves—forgotten, imagined, or obscured, in a piecemeal ritual garb fitted for a superposition.
Creation becomes séance. Zines, tape loops, broken camcorders, soft light projector constructs with corrupted analog video signals, 4 track machines with broken pitch wheels, obsolete software, dead hardware and through the somatic anchorage of activity within videomantic / audiomantic dim sessions, function as tools—not aesthetic props, but as hard, constructive channels through the talismans once yielded to venture towards the Other in supremely divergent abandon. What Hauntology theorizes, Hauntomancy enacts.
It incorporates Somatick Magick: dimensional ritual via the body, voice, sound, and analog interference. Dim Sessions—ritualized recording invocations—demand bodily calibration with psychic signal.
Where hauntology surveys cultural spectres, Hauntomancy constructs ritual channels to commune with internal archetypal Spektres, phantom timelines, and the ghosts of one's own lore.
Dimming of the Tzimtzum—making the construction of fathomability opaque to allow for the indescribable to peer in, is paramount through Hauntomancy. We re-expand the divine through the dimming of the conceivable, exorcised through somatick sight and sound. The physical interactivity with spektre sceptres, or hauntomantik talismans, is the anchor for the psychick exhaust system to run amok
∴ HAUNTR (Prospektre Post-script)
Perhaps this is my afterlife. A bardo of one-hour shifts. A desert plateau straddling the ghost of death and the glimmer of a new self. The cartography of Hauntomancy was mapped through that moment. It began in ruin and ritual. Through sigils scratched in an Arizona ward and Dimming Sessions taped onto warped cassettes. It continues now—through audiomancy, the haunted self-lore and coordinated phantom loops, and especially, through the forgotten selves now remembered and resurrected through art and communion.
Hauntomancy gave me the tongue to commune with the self I thought I buried. And in doing so, it gave me the spell to forgive myself for surviving.
HAUNT ON ∴
RKR
ALL LINKS: http://pragmagick.com
WE THE HALLOWED (Multi-Media Collective): https://wethehallowed.org
PAYPAL (One Time Donations): http://www.paypal.me/keatsross
SUPPORT VIA PATREON: http://patreon.com/pragmagick