Hamlet. Faustus. Frankenstein. Raskolnikov. Love how the “university turns people into depressed, feral, ahead of their times overthinkers”-thing is perpetual. College just does that to you. For centuries now.
david cronenberg at the typewriter like i ❤️ sex i ❤️ mutilation i ❤️ the shaping of the body due to machines i ❤️ hole i ❤️ doubles i ❤️ two things conjoining into one lalalalaa and my sister will do costumes
Ominously, it was on New Year’s Day 2020 that I found out what was the deal with Nick Land’s Twitter avatar. I had already been dealing with an escalating psychosis around repeating numbers for the past ~month. Now, thanks to being asked its meaning by someone themselves pretty deep into investigating the links between the far right and the occult, I learned that the 3:33 represented in Land’s avatar was an occult reference to the Demon of Dispersion, Choronzon.
Actually, according to Land’s own post on Xenosystems, it was the gematria for Dark Enlightenment. 333 is also gematria for Choronzon, the connection suspected by the person who contacted me searching for this information, and made by one or two people in his comments - though Land genuinely seems not to know when he picked it, or chose the fateful words for his movement. Which is a little frightening when you realize Land’s been talking about nothing but dispersion for the past several years - or arguably his entire career, going back to the essay on “stellar dispersion” in Trakl. “The best current cosmology is accelerationist or disintegrationist”, he writes in Jacobite, proposing the Dark Energy driving the unexplained expansion of observed space as a cosmic principle underlying the inevitable separation into isolated “light-cones” of nations, sovereign corporations and informational nodes.
Choronzon in Thelema is not such a universal principle: it has a very specific role. The “Abyss” it occupies is the realm separating the rest of the sephirot from the “Supernal Triad”, the highest level of reality in the Kabbalah (the highest three sephira - Binah, Hokhmah and Keter). To achieve knowledge of and oneness with this Supernal Triad, the maximum of one’s human, spiritual and magical potential, an aspiring magus must “cross the Abyss”, a mysterious ordeal understood as entailing a complete dissolution of one’s ego and identification with the pure spirit of love under will. Choronzon is the principle of dispersion that makes this dissolution possible, but also the last roadblock to Enlightenment; if the initiate fails to give up everything they are, not only their ego but their higher self will be dispersed throughout the Abyss instead of crossing; more prosaically, by most accounts, they will go insane, becoming perhaps permanently incapable of correlating the contents of their prematurely expanded mind.
The standard procedure for initiating the crossing involves taking the “oath of the Abyss”. The principal, most unique point of this oath is that "I will interpret every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with my soul”. It’s fairly easy to imagine how one would either go insane or become enlightened from doing this. But as someone who was more or less unconsciously holding myself to this epistemology for years, and then did a chaos magick ritual for invoking the Holy Guardian Angel under the mistaken impression (fuck you Peter Carroll) that it required taking this oath (Crowley does not recommend it until after you have attained the Knowledge & Conversation of your Holy Guardian Angel), I can specify the immediate nature of the crisis it forces on you: a dizzying overload of information. Information onto which it’s possible to project absolutely any pattern you might consciously or unconsciously be looking for: “any unnecessary or imbalanced scraps of ego” that “bloat…. into grotesque monsters known variously as the demon Choronzon”.
Sound familiar? I can’t find it any more but there’s already an article - it might have been an Erik Davis? you can find more of him saying this - arguing that the online world of information overload, accelerated by the isolation of the pandemic, is a social-cultural form of Robert Anton Wilson’s “Chapel Perilous”. Robert Anton Wilson doesn’t share Crowley’s exact ontology but was familiar and conversant with him, and Chapel Perilous seems to have been deliberately his equivalent to the Abyss (which he even describes himself as crossing in one chapter of Cosmic Trigger): the apparent choice it poses to “become stone paranoid or agnostic…. there is no third way” is certainly parallel. (Crowley I doubt would describe the state of being reborn in the womb of Babalon in terms as mundane as agnosticism, so feel free to argue about which of them actually made it across, if either.) But digital media psychosis is only an aspect of the broader pairing of “capitalism and schizophrenia”, the disintegrative force of modernity that Marx summed up in “all that is solid melts into air”; a dynamic that isn’t even purely psychological, at least as pertains to the psychology of individuals, but relates in the exact same way to the psychology of individuals and the distributed psychology of the civilization producing them.
I have increasingly come to think that mapping those phenomena to the Abyss clarifies a great deal about where we stand, what our current epistemic-societal breakdown actually is, and what its stakes are. Nick Land seems to have figured this out, consciously or unconsciously, and decided there is nothing beyond the Abyss, that Choronzon-Capital-Information, arbitrary power asserting itself contingently over disintegrating abstract units, is the only possible reality; and the future he imagines in which this principle becomes universally dominant is the civilizational equivalent to becoming a Black Brother. If Crowley is right, there is an alternative, one whose benefits are more than proportionate to the risks, and one that’s surprisingly formally similar to the relation of dispersion to reintegration in Marx. (Well, look at dialectics and Kabbalah.) And as the early accelerationists argued the only way out is through. But that way is supposed to be a) almost unthinkably hard and b) not really even describable from the other side. To this point the crossing of the Abyss has only been attempted, much less succeeded, by rare individuals, but now whatever our level of attainment or realization as individuals, we are part of a planetary civilization that has been dissolved in it. And may have done so before it was ready - I have no idea what “ready” would mean on a trans-individual scale, but my tweets about science and alchemy are a half-joking speculation on where we may have gotten off on the wrong foot. More plausibly, going into the dissolution of everything into abstract exchange, mathematical science and digital information with fixed concentrations of capital stored up from slavery and enclosure might be the equivalent of going into the Abyss with unresolved psychological complexes, which is exactly what you’re not supposed to do - but by all accounts, once you do, there’s no turning back.
The very principle of dissolution of the ego that the Abyss represents would suggest that this is possible, that there is no difference between an individual ego and a functional social aggregate in relation to the scaleless underlying principles of reality, the sephirot. This may not imply much different from being in the Abyss personally to an individual; it probably makes the practices of attainment prerequisite for entering the Abyss, like knowledge & conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel (or whatever you personally believe in as analogous to that), indispensable to hoping to make sense of the world you’re participating in, let alone changing it.
“Bataille writes of ‘the virulence of death’. Expenditure is irreducibly ruinous because it is not merely useless but also contagious. Nothing is more infectious than the passion for collapse.”
— Nick Land, “After The Law”, in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007
put simply you walk into the room with your pencil in your hand you see somebody naked and you, you say, “Who is that man?” You try so hard but you don’t understand just what you will say when you get home because something is happening here but you don’t know what it is do you, Mister Jones?
