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The world you reside in was by no means disenchanted. The curse of disenchantment, in any other case referred to as the Age of Reason, achieved solely a confusion of the sacred and profane. One explicit manifestation is that each one standard entertainments and media have their roots in shamanism, ritual, and divination. The incontrovertible fact that theater originated in sorcery, although broadly unfamiliar to the general public, is well-known in academia. In Phyllis Hartnoll’s A Concise History of the Theater (1971): “The origins of the theater go back far into the past, to the religious rites of the earliest communities. Throughout the history of mankind there can be found traces of songs and dances in honor of a god, performed by priests and worshippers dressed in animal skins, and of a portrayal of his birth, death, and resurrection”.
What is much less recognized is that the affect of the occult on theater and different types of media by no means waned, up till the fashionable period. From theater to movie, from images to tv, occult affect has been embedded within the cloth of our media panorama. The mixture of magic and the mass media will be traced again to the time of the Nineteenth-century sexual magician Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825-1875) or influential creator and politician Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), who have been as a lot entertainers as they have been masters of the arcane. The occult continues to lurk beneath the floor of mainstream media — not via coded symbols, however moderately via memetic engineering, an indefinably highly effective but paramount facet of the alchemical psychotronic order, Reality, Inc.
The Occult Revival was a motion that emerged within the mid-Nineteenth century, characterised by a renewed curiosity in spiritualism, necromancy, and ceremonial magic. It was also a hotbed of modernist faith, valuing artistic expression and non secular expertise as a lot as adherence to particular spiritual texts. Theosophy, popularized by the Theosophical Society, was a major drive within the popularization of Hindu and Buddhist traditions in Western tradition. Occultists throughout this era believed that their work was linked to a pre-ancient, transcultural spiritual custom that predates and underpins the teachings of present religions. They sought to revive this custom to realize greater non secular consciousness or gnosis, which transcends the rational and scientific and factors towards a grasp of elementary relations that exist amongst varied ranges of actuality. The Occult Revival was a various motion related to notable figures equivalent to Kate and Maggie Fox, Eliphas Lévi, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Katherine Tingley, Rudolf and Marie Steiner, Aleister Crowley, and Gerald Gardner.
Some playwrights, equivalent to W.B. Yeats and August Strindberg, aimed to penetrate the magical and esoteric of their works. They typically included symbolism, mythological themes, and references to occult practices inside their performs, blurring the boundaries between the pure and the supernatural. This custom discovered its means into the world of movie when auteurs equivalent to Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage and Luis Buñuel started experimenting with symbolism and creating atmospheric occult-inspired works.
“Lucifer’s message is that the key of joy is disobedience. Isis (Nature) wakes. Osiris (Death) answers. Lilith (Destroyer) climbs to the place of Sacrifice. The Magus activates the circle and Lucifer – Bringer of Light – breaks through.”
—Kenneth Anger
Occult psychodrama and trance have been interwoven into the cinematographic works of Kenneth Anger, a loyal adherent to the teachings of Crowley, and personally entwined with such entities as Anton LaVey, Timothy Leary, Ordo Templi Orientis, the Process Church, and Charles Manson — a delirium-inducing deluge of doubtful characters. The connections between these outlandish people and organizations to the American intelligence neighborhood have been meticulously chronicled by esteemed researchers equivalent to Dave McGowan.
Anger’s brief movies, equivalent to Scorpio Rising (1963), Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1966), and Lucifer Rising (1981) draw closely on such conventional non secular practices as ceremonial magick and Aleister Crowley’s Thelema. He was also reputed to have directed quite a few snuff movies, and, as some researchers have posited, Anger could have been accountable for the primary public human sacrifice caught on movie.
The calamitous spectacle occurred on the so-called “apocalyptic” Altamont Speedway live performance on December 6, 1969 (exactly six many years following Mr. Crowley’s alleged consummation of his most potent evocation). It was at this ill-fated gathering the place quite a few people suffered accidents and an viewers member met his premature demise by the hands of the Hell’s Angels. This infamous Rolling Stones efficiency has been recognized by an important many because the terminal level of the “peace and love” epoch of the hippie era.
Jeffrey Deitch, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, was quoted as saying, “It’s not an exaggeration to say he’s the inventor of independent cinema, he’s the inventor of gay cinema, and my friend David LaChapelle says he’s the inventor of the music video”. Illustrious administrators equivalent to Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Gus Van Sant, and John Waters have acknowledged him as a major inspiration. Undoubtedly, Mr. Anger is among the many most consequential filmmakers within the annals of cinematography, but his title stays comparatively obscure. This circumstance parallels that of Crowley, whose theatrical Rites of Eleusis constituted the primary public exhibition of pagan rituals in England in centuries and have indubitably left an everlasting impression. Nonetheless, not a solitary department of scholarly pursuit has acknowledged their import and affect.
Crowley, a controversial determine, confronted quite a few private points equivalent to dependancy to heroin and alcohol, monetary issues, and sexual impotence, resulting in his loss of life in 1947. The Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), a company he was related to, practically collapsed however skilled a resurgence within the Nineteen Sixties and reestablished itself in 1971. Crowley claimed to have contacted the entity Horus, which led to the writing of the Liber Al, or The Book of the Law. The guide prophesied the top of the Age of Osiris and the start of the Age of Horus, characterised by the emergence of self-willed supermen. In his guide Our Gods Wear Spandex, Christopher Knowles contends that Crowley’s prophecy was extra rooted in Nietzschean philosophy than Egyptian theology, and a lot of his concepts discovered their means into standard tradition via comedian books that includes superheroes. Knowles argues that fashionable comedian guide heroes are a continuation of historical archetypes and tales, up to date for modern audiences. The guide explores the affect of mystics and occultists like Crowley on the creation of those superheroes, tracing their origins and analyzing the influence of non secular and philosophical concepts on their improvement.
The occult has been smuggled into our tradition from each vector conceivable, complicated the sacred and profane. The ubiquitous custom of shamanic efficiency has lent itself to many assorted types of expression, however none so vital as that which is threaded into the material of Twentieth-century theater and cinema. From the years 1908 to 1929, the extremely influential English theater designer and director, Mr. Edward Gordon Craig, revealed his periodical The Mask, by which he expounded his imaginative and prescient that the actor, as a psychological entity, should be eradicated from the stage and supplanted by the “über-marionette”, who would stay indifferent from his position and exterior to his physique. Essentially, Craig wished to revert the theater to its ritualistic origins, or moderately, its primitive, occult operate. These über-marionettes would have been exquisitely sculpted dolls, embodying the celestial, ultimate illustration of the character. “The Über-marionette”, he wrote, “will not compete with Life—but will rather go beyond it. Its ideal will not be the flesh and blood but rather the body in Trance—it will aim to clothe itself with a death-like Beauty while exhaling a living spirit”. Renowned English director Peter Brook, a disciple of the esoteric grasp George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1866-1949), describes Craig’s affect as reaching internationally, “into every theater with any pretensions to serious work” and burdened the futuristic worth of his work, saying in 1988, “Today… producers and directors are only just catching up with his ideas”. In a sure method, the latest creation of digital doppelgangers for actors might be construed as a distorted actualization of his imaginative and prescient.
Through the partnership of Craig and W.B. Yeats, shamanic efficiency frolicked its means into the depths of our tradition. Although Gordon Craig was essentially a mystic, there’s scant concrete proof that he belonged to a proper order of magicians. However, there’s each indication that he was superior to such issues. As an illustration, he was not solely the writer, editor, illustrator, and designer of The Mask, however also, by some accounts, the creator — underneath 65 pseudonyms — of most of its content material, together with the “foreign correspondence” and “letters to the editor”. He employed The Mask as his personal masquerade to create the phantasm that a whole neighborhood of individuals was advocating for his concepts. This kind of One Man Kulturkampf is reported obliquely by students of theater as a “performance”.
Moreover, Craig was nearly encircled by precise members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and different deviants, from Mr. W.B. Yeats to the illustrator of the Rider–Waite tarot deck, Miss Pamela Colman-Smith, even offering screens for Yeats’ ritual theater productions on the notorious Abbey theater — the place Crowley staged his Rites of Eleusis — marking a major second within the historical past of occultism and theatrical efficiency.
Edward was launched to the creator of “the Method”, Mr. Konstantin Stanislavski, by his paramour, the “first modern dancer” and intimate buddy of Crowley, Miss Isadora Duncan. Craig fathered a baby with Duncan, Deirdre Beatrice (1906-1913), who tragically drowned on the age of seven. (All three of Duncan’s illegitimate youngsters met their demise earlier than reaching maturity.) Duncan was a major a part of the Occult Revival and the Modernist reconstruction of formality drama being pursued by Crowley, Yeats, the varied theosophists, and neo-pagans. Modernism was, at its roots, an archaic revival, or moderately, a resurgence of historical archetypal types for modern functions. The Modernist theatrical custom opposed the pure presence of the actor and aimed to “mechanize” their efficiency model, to rework the actor right into a golem of the gods.
This goal is aligned with the revivalists of Greek mysteries in artwork and theater, which have been fascinated by mechanization and puppetry. Leading figures in modernist theater, equivalent to Edward Gordon Craig, W.B. Yeats, Vsevolod Emilyevich Meyerhold, Bertolt Brecht, and Samuel Beckett, all embraced this anti-life, anti-natural strategy. Modernist anti-naturalism in theater will be traced again to Nineteenth-century symbolism, the place marionettes have been promoted over actors, and actors have been inspired to imitate marionettes. Modernism is characterised by disjunction, incompleteness, and discontinuities, which will be seen as a mirrored image of trauma and the necessity for therapeutic catharsis after a cataclysmic occasion, just like the position of the clown-shaman in historical rituals.
After Craig and Stanislavski met in 1908 in Moscow, they continued to correspond for a few years. Their letters reveal discussions about their theories and concepts on theater, with Craig’s ideas of the “über-marionette” and symbolic strategy to design and staging piquing Stanislavski’s curiosity. His publicity to Craig’s concepts contributed to his curiosity in exploring extra summary and symbolic parts in theater. This will be seen in a few of Stanislavski’s later work, the place he tried to mix psychological realism with a extra symbolic strategy to staging and design.
It shouldn’t be controversial that Craig had an influence on Stanislavski, nevertheless, there’s a misapprehension concerning the depth of that affect, underscored by the continued dialogue of “psychological realism” and “emotional authenticity” sought via his “method”. Stanislavski was utilizing modern concepts about psychology to smuggle in occultic processes, as when he states: “The fundamental aim of our art is the creation of this inner life of a human spirit, and its expression in artistic form”, he drops the pretense of unconscious expression. He also used ideas from Eastern mysticism to explain the transcendent effervescence invoked by the actor which he as soon as once more smuggled underneath modern phrases like “radiation” and “irradiation” in his An Actor’s Work.
The biographer Charles Marowitz notes that each Stanislavski and his scholar Chekhov, regardless of all their technical disagreements, each framed optimum appearing as “something otherworldly, something that our language cannot easily define except by reference to preternatural causes”. The acknowledgement that theater permits viewers to expertise an ecstatic and transcendent expertise signifies the key existence of that reminiscence of “The Other” in our collective unconscious which, if understood, elucidates the performative facet of the occult.
Stanislavski utilized pranayama, a yogic strategy of breath management, together with Mantra Yoga to create a relaxed psychological state for experiencing an alternate actuality. Relaxation workouts, utilized by each performers and shamanic magicians, are related and serve to organize the physique and thoughts for conjuring spirits or embodying tutelary deities. Physical leisure workouts are a standard starting to any efficiency, serving to shift the main target of the thoughts to a extra receptive state of consciousness.
Stanislavski’s approach for appearing concerned creating an embryonic cavitation, an interiority for the fictive entity to inhabit, assisted by his precept of “I AM”, which implies current, residing, feeling, and considering in the identical means because the fictive entity being portrayed. This approach also emphasised the significance of liberating the physique from rigidity with a purpose to obtain “the highest truth” on stage. Coincidentally, the phrase “I AM” was also being utilized by the Theosophists, who have been creating their non secular beliefs in Russia on the similar time.
The Stanislavski Method, or Method Acting, has considerably influenced the appearing world, shaping the careers of many notable actors. Some outstanding examples embrace Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Meryl Streep, who’ve all studied and included Stanislavski’s teachings into their performances. The Stanislavski Method and shamanic efficiency each emphasize the transformative nature of efficiency and the necessity for a deep reference to the character (or spirit) being portrayed. They share similarities in connecting with an interiority, present process transformation, immersing oneself within the efficiency, and specializing in intersubjective realities. For instance, in each the Stanislavski Method and Balinese trance dancing, performers quickly droop their very own identities to immerse themselves within the roles they painting. This permits actors to totally embody their “characters”, fictive entities which are sometimes primarily based on mythic archetypes, whereas trance dancers channel the “spirits” they characterize.
The goal of the Stanislavski Method is to not entry the interiority of the actor, about which nobody cares, however to “perfect” the actor by turning them right into a residing masks, or moderately, a crucible for divination. In Greek mythology, Prometheus, a Titan, is credited with the creation of people. He molded mankind from clay, imitating the likeness of the gods, thus making people a simulacrum or imitation of the divine. Prometheus was recognized for his knowledge and crafty, in addition to his love for humanity. He not solely created people however also supplied them with fireplace, stolen from the gods, to allow them to advance in information and tradition. The thought of mankind as a simulacrum made by the gods is echoed across the historical world; man is universally referred to as a being of intermediate nature. His corporeal kind is imbued with the divine luminescence of the celestial ether. Consequently, he’s a microcosm. For inside his structure, all parts of the cosmos are mirrored: the ethereal heavens in his spirit and soul, and the abysmal depths of the aqueous matter inside his bodily vessel. Relating all this to the magical operate of appearing, the psychic organs and flesh of the actor turns into the divinatory microcosm.
Craig ardently pursued this ultimate kind, in search of potentialities of formation throughout the intrinsic legal guidelines governing the actions of the human determine. To him, these legal guidelines bore one thing absolute, one thing decidedly “cosmic”. In this vein, the actor’s flesh turns into a veritable crucible, a conduit for the mediumistic divination of holy or unholy inspiration. As they inhabit their roles, the actors aren’t merely enacting the passions and dilemmas of the characters they painting; they’re, the truth is, tapping into the primordial essence of the cosmic drama that unfolds via human historical past. The spray of their psychic guts throughout the stage turn out to be the means via which the director engages in scrying, a type of divination that permits the seer to glimpse hidden truths and entry mystical information.
The stage, on this context, is reworked right into a sacred house, a realm the place the earthly and elsewhere converge. The actors, akin to puppets of the shamans, traverse the boundaries between the mundane world and the realm of the spirit, channeling the energies and knowledge of the unseen forces that govern the cosmos. Their our bodies, and significantly their psychophysical entrails, turn out to be the focus for the scrying course of, permitting them to divine the messages and insights that lie hidden throughout the cloth of actuality.
The Sacred Theater
“We have forgotten entirely that the primary symbol of the theater is the mask…. In the mask lies a law, and this is the law of the drama. Non-reality becomes a fact.”
—Yvan Coll
The ritual principle of theater, supported by the Cambridge Ritualists, makes an attempt to hint the origins of theater to Dionysiac rituals primarily based on shared traits within the fictional world. However, an alternate speculation means that the origins of theater lie in shamanism, specializing in efficiency points shared by each the shaman and the actor. Shamanism holds extra promise on this endeavor, as efficiency is central to the theatrical medium. Ernest T. Kirby’s work, significantly his Ur-Drama (1975), explores shamanism because the supply of theater, aiming to differentiate between the performances of the shaman and the actor. Famed cultural anthropologist Victor Turner, after observing the real-world results of shamanic therapeutic rituals, said that “whatever efficacy the [shamanic] rite possesses — and it does have ameliorative effects on patients … resides in the degree of skill wielded by the doctor in each instance of its performance”.
Shamanism refers to a large class of medicine-men in varied cultures who mix therapeutic, mediumship, and magic. Shamans are believed to enter a trance, journey in different worlds, and grasp spirits for the aim of curing the sick. While Kirby emphasizes the therapeutic operate of the shaman, Mircea Eliade, the nice historian of faith, presents a stricter definition, highlighting the shaman’s spiritual and mystical roles. The shaman sometimes enters a state of trance and is a grasp of ecstasy; an ecstasy that reactivates the “illud tempus”, by which males might talk concretely with the mythic sphere of expertise. The illud tempus is a outing of time, a reminiscence financial institution of non-local reminiscence, “which is always the same, which belongs to eternity” (Eliade, 1959).
Shamanistic rituals contain the shaman enacting a personality (the spirit) in entrance of an viewers for a particular goal, equivalent to curing a affected person or, within the case of the clown-shaman, for social catharsis. As perception within the shaman’s talents decreases, the ritual could evolve right into a theatrical efficiency. Kirby means that the actor was initially a medium and that shamans, when possessed by a spirit, carry out a definite theatrical operate: appearing.
Shamans and actors each attain altered states of thoughts via trance-like consciousness, a method that permits actors to grasp, or give up to, their very own power and physique. The integration of shamanism into actor coaching has been studied by practitioners and theorists equivalent to Brian Bates. Drawing from his expertise in medical psychology and shamanism, traces the actor to the shaman, stating, “For thousands of years actors were regarded as the guardians of wisdom. And the way of the actor was a path to personal knowledge and power” (Bates, 1986).
Edward Gordon Craig believed that theater ought to be restored as an artwork kind, an summary, artificial, and designed totality. He proposed that the concept of impersonation and the imitation of nature ought to be banished from theater, because it hindered its improvement. Craig envisioned the actor as an über-marionette, specializing in the creation of internal life moderately than imitation, echoed by Stanislavski.
Craig’s artwork, with its emphasis on strangeness and magnificence, was Symbolist (or Neo-Romantic) and preceded the extra pronounced emphasis on abstraction. Two rules he shared with later summary work have been related to the masks. In shamanistic custom, abstraction performs a major position, significantly in masks. The use of abstraction in primitive masks will be linked to the operate of abstraction, which separates the work from direct illustration and permits the artist to create an autonomous system emphasizing the interrelationships of parts. This is the metaphysical and existential foundation of summary artwork, which Craig sought to use in theater.
An instance of a prototype of drama will be discovered within the ceremonies of Aboriginal Australians, the place performers use summary costume and easy, symbolic actions to characterize mythological ancestors. The summary types utilized in these ceremonies serve to create a connection between earth, plant, animal, and man, whereas retaining the thriller of the affiliation. The simplicity of those enactments additional contributes to their summary nature.
The aesthetics of those aboriginal ceremonies are intently related to their which means, as they emphasize the numinous and summary points of the efficiency. Craig’s ultimate of an summary theater shares related rules with these primitive artwork types, highlighting the significance of abstraction in making a significant and distinctive theatrical expertise. Kirby states, “the performer as mythological ancestor represents neither insect nor man, but a kind of superhuman mutant” — one thing past human that may solely be portrayed as an abstraction.
Totemic ancestor portrayal in primitive theatrical ceremonies, like in Aboriginal Australian enactments, depends on abstraction to keep up a way of thriller and which means. These ceremonies deal with simplicity and symbolism to create a connection between earth, plant, animal, and man, and resist the urge for fuller imitation or presentation. Shamanistic séances, which contain a shaman enacting a journey to different worlds whereas curing a sick individual, function one other instance of summary theater. The efficiency emphasizes nonreal parts and the supernatural, creating an phantasm or delusion for the viewers.
As an instance allow us to take Tom Cruise, a scholar of the Meisner college which is a spinoff of Stanislavski’s Method. The Meisner approach supposedly focuses on fostering reality and authenticity in a performer’s work by emphasizing “instinctive and spontaneous responses”. But we appear to note that Tom Cruise is similar individual in each film. However, is that this individual a “Tom Cruise”? The notion of the entity “Tom Cruise” being an über-marionette stems from the concept that his appearing model doesn’t present a variety of characterizations and feelings, typically resulting in the notion that he’s taking part in the identical character, or moderately an archetypal determine, in every movie. Craig’s über-marionette idea describes a really perfect performer who completely embodies the imaginative and prescient of the director, with exact and managed actions, and devoid of any private interpretation or emotional interference. It implies a degree of detachment from the actor’s personal feelings and experiences, specializing in the execution of the character’s actions moderately than exploring their internal life.
In the case of “Tom Cruise”, his roles are sometimes in action-packed blockbusters and charismatic main characters that the male viewers members are supposed to challenge themselves into. This strategy might be likened to the über-marionette idea within the sense that Cruise’s characters, right down to the best way he runs, are sometimes portrayed with precision and management, versus a extra emotionally weak and transformative methodology appearing efficiency.
Is “Tom Cruise” the title of a man-sized motion puppet, an über-marionette that’s merely loaned out to varied studios to play a common, archetypal position of The Hero? Though there could also be proof for literal mechanisms of management that will enable for such an association, we’ll humbly adhere to the philosophical. This idea of a puppet-actor will be related to the shamanistic origins of theater, in addition to the idea {that a} soul or non secular power will be transmuted into bodily kind.
The Roots of Media in Divination and Mediumship
Divination is like this: By the seen it is aware of the invisible, and
by the invisible it is aware of the seen, and by the current it is aware of
the long run, and by useless issues it good points information of the residing,
and it turns into conscious from issues that don’t have any consciousness. The
one that is aware of it’s all the time appropriate, whereas the one that
doesn’t generally is and generally isn’t. In this fashion it imitates
human life and human nature.
— The Hippocratic treatise On Regimen 1.12
In the holistic worldview of indigenous peoples just like the Australians and Amerindians, the pure panorama is intertwined with a legendary panorama, making a soundscape that embodies the non secular energy that formed it. This panorama holds ritual significance for the native tradition, with bodily matter perceived as important and cosmological. Toponymy displays the cosmogony by figuring out bodily areas linked to creation myths and previous creation-chants carried out by supernatural beings. In European folklore, the Otherworld of the faerie is accessed via hidden portals in varied geological formations — “fairy hills” and burial mounds. Certain “Missing 411” circumstances describe being transported into the facet of a mountain, via tunnels to a sterile, dimly lit room or underground cave. This expertise shares similarities with shamanic traditions, the place the shaman enters unseen “holes” or “tunnels” throughout trance to go to different worlds and work together with entities or spirits akin to the “little people” or purported “alien spacecraft” occupants.
In the mundus imaginalis of those traditions, varied geological supplies, equivalent to quartz crystals, flint, and obsidian, maintain non secular significance, significantly in shamanic rituals. These supplies possess the ability to heal and restore stability on the planet. The kingdom of Baiame, the creator god, is described as consisting of quartz crystal formations, which maintain a central position within the Australian animist custom. During initiations, these crystals are “sung” or “projected” into the neophyte’s physique.
Each Australian Aboriginal group maintains a deep connection to its distinctive panorama and legendary origins via totemic associations. Initiation rites require people to embark on a metaphysical journey, retracing the steps of ancestral heroes. These paths, referred to as songlines or dreaming tracks, are preserved and transmitted via tales, songs, dances, and work. The land itself serves as a holosonic hieroglyph, a geomantic airplane of immanence that represents absolutely the basis of existence, resonating beneath our toes. By reciting and participating with these sacred narratives, people can undertake astral journey, understand their panorama as an initiatory medium, and even affect the fabric world.
The genesis of media will be traced again to the primal relationship between people and genius loci, the god of place, of lithic cathedrals, from the enigmatic menhirs and dolmens, finally evolving to the extra acquainted stone tablets. This connection, solid via the shamanic bond with stones and crystals, allowed our ancestors to faucet into the spirit world and paved the best way for the event of early media. The dualities of stone (crystalline rigidity and magmatic fluidity, colossal and peculiar scales, stark actuality and dream-inducing) yield intriguing insights. Stone, with its weight and permanence, symbolized the soundness and endurance of the legislation. The Ten Commandments, inscribed on stone tablets, proclaimed their sacred timelessness, whereas menhirs and dolmens served as historical, astrotheological communication gadgets, beaming their message throughout centuries, conquering the ephemerality of their human creators.
Shamanic practices performed a vital position within the origins of media, as stones and crystals have been believed to be portals to the spirit world. This mystical bond allowed shamans to entry divine knowledge and steerage, which they then shared with their communities. The act of inscribing these revelations onto stone tablets marked the beginnings of recorded communication, enabling the transmission of non secular information throughout generations. The first “inscribed stones” have been possible fossils, which will be thought of a type of media as they characterize a connection between the previous and the current, the natural and the inorganic, and the residing and the non-living. As remnants of once-living organisms preserved in stone, fossils will be seen as a medium that conveys details about the monstrous rulers of the pre-human cosmoses.
Menhirs and dolmens, too, have their roots within the shamanic relationship with stones. These enigmatic constructions, discovered throughout Ireland, Britain, and Brittany, proceed to baffle fashionable researchers. While their actual goal and messages stay elusive, they undoubtedly served as each transmissive gadgets and neighborhood materializations. The sheer resilience of those historical stones stands as a testomony to the lasting materials alliance between people and the lithic world.
The thought of stones as entrances to the spirit world can also be seen within the vivid descriptions of gems in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies. He writes of smaragdus exuding an intense inexperienced glow, astrion shining with the gleam of the total moon, and enhydros gushing crystalline water like a fountain. Such depictions foreground the inorganic liveliness of stones and their capability to engender ecological interdependence and foster worldedness.
These early types of media — stone tablets, menhirs, and dolmens — arose from the magical connection between people, stones, and the spirit world. These media applied sciences have been gateways between atemporality and ephemerality, fostering human-genius loci reciprocity and making a towering, immortal type of company. Today, digital applied sciences proceed to behave as conduits to each the fabric and the supernatural, for in our on-line world, time and house don’t exist — or are extraordinarily plastic. The mysterious nature of the web serves as a recent mystagogic software, permitting us to discover a large number of realities and enter into contact with unknown realms.
In the Nineteenth century, William Carpenter, a outstanding creator of anatomy textbooks, launched the idea of “unconscious cerebration” in his guide Principles of Mental Physiology. He steered that a good portion of our mental exercise is automated and happens with out our acutely aware consciousness. He in contrast this course of to reflex motor actions and dubbed it “ideo-motor reflexions”. Carpenter even supplied a chart for instance the pathway of unconscious cerebration.
This thought of unconscious cerebration gained recognition and fascinated varied influential figures of the time, together with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mark Twain, and Alexander Graham Bell. Bell, the inventor of the phone, believed on this idea and famous that the mind works consistently, even when we’re not conscious of it. He typically introduced collectively all of the details associated to a particular downside earlier than going to mattress and was regularly stunned by the insights he gained through the night time. This intuitive strategy to invention might be mentioned to entry irrational dimensions of cognition, instructions of thought that department out into liminal vectors, on the occasion horizon of the observable semiosphere.
Bell had a deep private connection to the concept of speaking with the useless. His brother, Melville, had handed away at a younger age, and this loss profoundly affected him. Reportedly, the brothers had made a pact. In The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, Avital Ronell writes “[w]hoever died first was to contact the survivor through a medium demonstrably superior to the more traditional channel of spiritualism”. This eager for connection and transcending the constraints of the mortal world fueled Bell’s ardour for inventing a tool that might bridge the hole between the residing and the deceased.
The improvement of radio know-how within the early Twentieth century also had ties to the world of the occult. Inventor Guglielmo Marconi, a pioneer in wi-fi communication, was fascinated by the concept of utilizing radio waves to speak with spirits. Sir Oliver Lodge, a famend physicist and spiritualist, labored on creating a “psychic telephone” to facilitate communication with the deceased. The radio, like the phone, had its origins within the quest to discover the non secular realm and create a bridge between the residing and the useless.
Photography, as one other instance, has its roots within the pursuit of capturing photographs of spirits and the unknown. In the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries, spirit images emerged as a preferred follow, with photographers claiming to seize photographs of ghosts and different supernatural entities. This fascination with the unseen world led to developments in photographic know-how and strategies, additional blurring the strains between the tangible world and the non secular realm.
In the realm of recent know-how, the web and digital communication can also be seen as a continuation of the human need to attach with the unknown. The idea of the “world wide web” displays the concept of an unlimited, interconnected community that transcends bodily boundaries, very similar to the non secular connections sought by historical shamans and necromancers. Online platforms and digital actuality areas have even been used to conduct séances and facilitate communication with the deceased, showcasing the enduring affect of the occult on the event of media and know-how.
The annals of computing are rife with tales of wizards, alchemists, and secret societies. After all, cryptography, the wellspring of computing, was as soon as the unique area of those enigmatic figures. Legends equivalent to Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Charles Babbage, George Boole, John von Neumann, and Norbert Wiener have all dabbled within the mystical realm of cabbalistic metaphors. They conjured notions of One as Creation, Zero because the Void, and envisioned the technological singularity or synthetic intelligence as a golem (Peters 2016).
The line between metaphor and literal occult blurred for a few of these pioneers. Charles Babbage, as an example, descended into mysticism and mediumship (necromancy), resulting in a sequence of weird but enlightening visions. His desires and hallucinations would finally show instrumental in conceiving the primary pc.
While sleeping within the Cambridge Analytical Society, Babbage remembers how “another member” had requested Babbage “What are you dreaming about?” Babbage revealed, “I’m considering that each one these Tables (pointing to the logarithms) is perhaps calculated by equipment” (Babbage 1994, web page 42; Purbrick 1993). This prophetic imaginative and prescient would function the muse for Babbage’s illustrious profession in computing.
Babbage’s memoirs paint a vivid image of the non secular forces that guided his understanding of digital know-how. He spoke of a “reasoning being of a different order from man” who revealed to him the origins of computing in a realm far faraway from our personal (Babbage 1994, web page 406). He narrated an epic story of celestial races, cosmic disputes, and divine retribution, all unfolding throughout the infinite expanse of the universe (Babbage 1994, pages 407-8).
Anti-Media and Occlusion of the Sacred
The goal of anti-media is to occlude the analog and distort the symbolic custom, to deterritorialize the buyer, to predigest the viewers, remaking mass man right into a cyborg, a desiring-machine to be plugged into content-production-machines.
The “media sphere” will be considered the setting created by the varied media, equivalent to tv, radio, print, and digital platforms. This setting shapes our tradition, communication, and perceptions of the world, in essence, a form of “virtual reality”. We can divide this digital actuality into two elements: the media ecology which exists in analogue to natural actuality and the anti-media sphere of “Reality, Inc”, the conglomerate of these parasites that search to mechanically assemble tradition and remodel the picture of man.
Marshall McLuhan described the worldwide data setting as a diabolical phantasm, an ethereal imitation of Christ’s mystical physique. For McLuhan, the worldwide village, borne from the celestial spectacle of Sputnik in 1957, was a battleground rife with strife, unrest, and guerilla warfare. “Electric information environments being utterly ethereal fosters the illusion of the world as spiritual substance. It is now a reasonable facsimile of the mystical body, a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ. After all, the Prince of this World is a very great electric engineer.” (ML 72)
The progenitors of the Internet knew about network-assisted “spooky action at a distance”, or parapsychological results associated to networking human minds, from the very starting. Jacques Vallée has said such:
“There were many people researching interface between consciousness and computers for example with DARPA funding…we began to observe something very interesting… these people were very frustrated because they wanted to communicate with lots of people very quickly but they only had a keyboard. So they had –essentially there was a psychic component on top that we could observe on top of the typed communication.”
While on the Institute for the Future, he straight succeeded Paul Baran, the grandfather of the web, as principal investigator on the National Science Foundation challenge for pc networking, which developed the ARPANET conferencing techniques, Planning Network (PLANET). This was the primary community conferencing system — and it was getting used for psychic analysis, or “weird entanglement” as some describe it.
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The whole time Vallée was at NIF, he was also working intently with the Stanford Research Institute, the DIA, and the CIA on varied endeavors, together with the notorious distant viewing unit, Stargate Project. Many of the initiatives that SRI handled concerned “electronic perturbation” — the flexibility “to interact, by mental means alone, with sensitive electronic equipment, and to ascertain how this phenomenon might be utilized for Army-designated applications”.
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These initiatives weren’t unsuccessful. In 1976, Vallée revealed the next in a report titled “Remote Viewing Experiments Through Computer Conferencing” (1976), which referenced Russel Targ’s earlier work at SRI.
“The primary purpose of the experiments was to test ‘remote viewing’ under the altered state of communication enabled by computer teleconferencing-in which participants are individually isolated, communicating with each other only in the printed mode, but often in real time. We further wished to confirm that the use of the teleconferencing system would supply accurate and unobtrusive recording of the data…”
Vallée states, citing CIA-funded Project Stargate analysis, that the “results confirm earlier reports of successful remote viewing experiments while extending them to cases in which participants were thousands of miles away from each other… with control of communications provided by a computer network”.
Interfacing with a digital setting, with the display screen, is by itself an altered state of consciousness. Projecting your thoughts into the semiotic house inside is a type of sensory deprivation. You are decreased to the fabric and disadvantaged of the animal concurrently. Pseudo-initiated into the brute-forced thriller of hyperreality. The unusual mild hypnotizes, the sigils and photographs are crammed with the important fluorescence, the eye and intention, of hundreds of thousands.
Simulacrum made in secret, and curiously wrought within the realms of air, feeding on the flesh of the Real. Your natural senses disadvantaged, your thoughts outreached, entangled in a community of synthetic bodies-without-senses inside digital cosmos — comingling with these our bodies as types of synthetic life which are prolific, algorithmic, and coded. Artificial life is protocol within the sociopolitical theater, a protocol distributed all through the brains and our bodies of the actors. The environment has a mineral tinge, the viewers has metamorphosed into graphene antennae. This is the worth of admission, the price of season cross for Reality, Inc’s always-online alternate actuality recreation.
Reality, Inc seeks to solely preserve dominion over the media panorama and mass man for so long as doable earlier than the collective consciousness naturally recuperates sufficient to regain non-local reminiscence and entry to the symbolic custom. For this very cause, the stakeholders of Reality, Inc should reset the assemble each time the collective has regained ample consciousness. Because human reminiscence largely is determined by ritual and different collective acts of reminiscence, a reset of the digital media setting permits the erasure or enhancing of linear particular person recollections that are contained inside, and are a part of, the assemble. Yet, this determined endeavor by Reality, Inc is finally futile and unable to forestall the restoration of consciousness and non-local reminiscence by the collective. Anti-media, whereas agitating and dominating the discourse within the brief time period, can’t maintain itself via time.
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This dynamic is evidenced by on-line curiosity in The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) versus The Rings of Power. That small blip, which solely served to quickly bolster curiosity in Tolkein’s LOTR, price Amazon Studios a billion {dollars}. As you may see, curiosity in The Rings of Power has fallen to nearly nothing. In reality, Amazon’s Rings of Power and different anti-media don’t have anything in widespread with the media they search to deconstruct, they merely put on the trimmings of the mental property like a go well with. A grotesque charade that can finally be forgotten by historical past, whereas curiosity in Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings will stay fixed, perpetually. This similar statement holds true for each single piece of anti-media produced previously a number of years.
The purveyors of anti-media actually visitors in non-sense and non-sign, however this doesn’t imply they’re silly. According to techniques principle, we are able to discover the operative goal of a system solely by analyzing its final result. While anti-media doesn’t reach really remodeling the tradition, it does reach placing the inhabitants right into a state of irritation and occlusion. We expertise a delusion that one thing has been misplaced, we’re distracted and disheartened, and on this short-term state we focus our outrage on a phantom, on a non-event, a self-destructing cultural artifact. We lose sight of the sacred goal of media, the everlasting, and in that state we turn out to be manageable… and Reality, Inc buys itself slightly extra time earlier than it, too, self-destructs, earlier than its “Sentient World Simulation” hits its computational restrict.
With every wave of anti-media, with every reset, Reality, Inc experiences diminishing returns of management, and every successive iteration of the assemble survives for a briefer interval than the one previous. The anti-media reset scheme also suffers from mechanical flaws, which compound with every iteration: a rising noise-to-signal ratio, diminishing decision, and growing discontinuity. These “compression artifacts” seem at an experiential degree as hoaxes, psyops, and contradictions in cultural or historic narratives. Reality, Inc’s gaming platform, “The Screen™”, initiatives a picture that has been compressed and copied too many occasions, resulting in catastrophic lack of which means. These flaws lastly result in an inevitable collapse of all the assemble, inflicting inventory in Reality, Inc to plummet into the void.
This most up-to-date wave of anti-media is analogous to the widespread phenomenon of American “fakelore”. Think about Johnny Appleseed and Paul Bunyan. The solely cause about them might be from college, publicly funded edutainment or “fakelore” henchmen equivalent to Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, Vachel Lindsay, and Walt Disney, all purveyors of compelled memes. Compared to the eternally recurring folklore of the wild man, elves, forest spirits, and faeries so elementary that they return once more and once more to fiction, our desires intrude into our waking life as cryptids and UFOs.
Certain American “folk” heroes share a outstanding similarity, regardless of their various names and industrial occupations. These fictional characters, together with Paul Bunyan (lumberman), Pecos Bill (cowpoke), Kent Morgan (oil driller), Joe Magarac (metal employee), and John Henry (tunnel digger) are all media creations. Paul Bunyan, particularly, was an artificial hero created by an promoting government named Archie D. Walker and a contract promoting man named William Laughead. Unlike the unique Paul Bunyan, this new model spoke in printed pages moderately than vernacular English, and his exploits weren’t handed on in ballad or tune. Nevertheless, he emerged as an emblem of American measurement and ingenuity, although reconciling his contradictory portraits as each hero and buffoon presents a formidable downside for shills. Similarly, Pecos Bill is an effective instance of a copycat hero, modeled on Bunyan, created by Edward “Tex” O’Reilly in 1923, and regardless of being popularized in Walt Disney’s Melody Time, he has no actual people custom.
This is greatest illustrated by the failed fakelore challenge of Joe Magarac, a steelworker people hero who supposedly originated within the metal mill cities of Pennsylvania. However, plainly Joe Magarac was truly invented by Owen Francis in a 1931 journal article. For years, the story of Joe Magarac unfold and developed, with completely different interpretations of his character getting used to help varied trade arguments or political stances. U.S. Steel and Carnegie-Illinois Steel featured him of their ads, depicting him as a strong determine who embodies the energy of the metal trade. Joe Magarac had also been given a governmental enhance in a Federal Writers’ Project report, the place he was tailored by class-conscious writers who opposed companies and capitalism. Surprisingly, those that ought to have recognized most about Joe, equivalent to Slavic and Hungarian newspapers, native historians, and steelworkers, had by no means heard of him. Folklorist Hyman Richman interviewed quite a few steelworkers with out discovering any who had heard of Joe Magarac. It was found that “magarac” is a derogatory time period in Serbian, which means to “lower someone to dirt that is worse than the dirt left after pigs have passed over it”, and it appears possible that Slavic steelworkers performed a joke on Owen Francis, who unwittingly included it in his story. Folklorist Hyman Richman gave his conclusion within the June 28, 1953, situation of the Pittsburgh Press: “The best thing anyone can do with the Joe Magarac story is to forget it”.
Another instance of this course of is the World Fair’s the place a lot fakelore was propagated and myths of “heroic consumption” have been created. The World’s Fairs functioned as apparatuses for conceptualizing and encompassing a world-system of worth and energy. They have been laboratories of global-becoming, a space-time compression of the nascent cosmopolis. Hence using slogans equivalent to “the world’s university” and “the world in miniature”. Entire city facilities have been replanned to accommodate these mammoth spectacles, nationwide economies broken, wars postponed, and an entire lexicon of nationwide symbols spun out of the ether. According to some estimates, these have been the biggest gatherings of individuals of all time, constituting the most well-liked and efficient mass medium of the Nineteenth century. The unique 1851 exposition in London attracted over 6 million guests to The Crystal Palace, containing nearly 300,000 panes of glass.
The natural ethical theater of America and the West on the whole was uprooted and changed with “meaningful displays” of mass manufacturing, prefabrication, mass communications and urbanization. It was right now that natural American folklore — which included widespread understanding of cyclopean structure, three centuries of New World anthropology, people traditions of an unknown precursor race of larger-than-modern humanoids, and the primacy of scriptural historical past — was utterly demolished and changed with Darwinism, the modern imperial-racial order, and the cult of industrialism. Burton Benedict states in his 1983 guide The Anthropology of World’s Fairs that “[a] world’s fair can be seen as one of a series of mammoth rituals in which all sorts of power relations, both existing and wished for, are being expressed… In this contest all sorts of symbols are employed, and there are blatant efforts to manufacture tradition, to impose legitimacy”.
Within the evolution of the World’s Fair was a convergent improvement of propaganda disguised as mass leisure. The transition from education-focused occasions to entertainment-driven experiences at exhibitions and world’s festivals within the Nineteenth century was a major improvement in mass public rituals. While the Great Exhibition of 1851 was seen as a critical, academic affair, the introduction of standard leisure in later exhibitions turned more and more essential to attract attendees. By 1900, training, commerce, and propaganda have been disguised as pleasurable actions with a purpose to preserve public curiosity. Walter Benjamin mentioned that the Nineteenth-century Parisian expositions “opened up a phantasmagorical world, where man entered to be entertained. The amusement industry made this easier for him by elevating him to the level of a commodity. He had only to surrender himself to its manipulations, while enjoying his alienation from himself and from others” (Benjamin, 1970).
These mass public rituals performed a vital position in consolidating energy and legitimizing narratives for the elite. The shift from worshiping royalty to worshiping the nation and mass social order was a deliberate technique employed by the rising managerial elite, who used conventional rites of energy to subdue the plenty. The festivals supplied symbolic universes that affirmed guests’ religion in American establishments and social group, fostering a way of shared expertise and addressing questions concerning the future of mankind and Americans particularly. According to R. W. Rydell, “the fairs provided visitors with a galaxy of symbols which cohered into ‘symbolic universes’. These constellations, in turn, ritualistically affirmed fair-goers’ faith in American institutions and social organization, evoked a community of shared experience, and formulated responses to questions arising about the ultimate destiny of mankind in general and of Americans in particular”.
Organic media that resonates via time all the time has inside it direct analogs to divination and the scrying of parts. The first scenes will characteristic smoke, water, mirror, fireplace, bones or celestial objects. Incorporating these parts, it constructs the residing vines of being, the fullness of time skilled as an awesome synchronicity, in its highest kind, the viewers feels as if they’re being spoken to straight. The nice tales are rooted in everlasting human themes, within the very essence of our existence, and are embedded within the immanent airplane of life itself. These tales carry inside them the seeds of the sacred, the infinite interconnections of the media ecology, and the potential for changing into different. They resonate with the vibrancy of the world, with the ebb and stream of the Earth, and with the pulsations of the cosmos.
In the ageless narratives of King Arthur and his valiant Knights of the Round Table, we discern an examination of the virtues of chivalry, fealty, and self-abnegation. These tales, infused with the mystique of the Celtic lore, illuminate the importance of honor, probity, and the hunt for an exalted raison d’être. They unveil the inherent majesty of the human soul, the dormant capability for magnificence residing inside every particular person, and the prospect of salvation in our bleakest hours.
In the Homeric odyssey of Odysseus, as narrated within the Hellenic epic poem The Odyssey, we bear witness to the ordeals and hardships of a protagonist endeavoring to succeed in his native soil, beleaguered by otherworldly forces and the unpredictable whims of mercurial deities. This saga elucidates the tenacity of the human spirit, the efficiency of resolve, and the crucial of modesty coupled with the acknowledgement of 1’s personal constraints.
In The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, Tolkien aspired to weave a mythological cloth, imbibing the opulence and profundity of those time-honored traditions, intertwining motifs of gallantry, self-sacrifice, and the ceaseless contest between advantage and depravity. By this implies, Tolkien endeavored to solid a ray of hope within the shadows, an affirmation of the sanctity in a realm more and more besieged by the irreverent. In the 1910s and early Twenties, J.R.R. Tolkien created a mythology for England, initially referred to as The Book of Lost Tales, which later developed into The Silmarillion. The mythology included a cosmogony, a pantheon of gods and goddesses, and centered on the awakening of Elves and the approaching of Men. The setting was not Middle-earth however England itself. In reality, Tolkien in a 1956 letter to W. H. Auden wrote:
“I am historically minded. Middle-earth is not an imaginary world… The theater of my tale is this earth, the one in which we now live.”
Faerie encounters have been a persistent ingredient in human historical past, with hanging similarities within the descriptions of those beings throughout various cultures, equivalent to the traditional Celts, Norse, and Amerindian peoples. The shared experiences of those mysterious entities, regardless of the huge geographical distances and cultural variations, trace at the potential for an exterior phenomenon past our present understanding. Examples embrace the mischievous Pukwudgies of Algonquian tribes, the nature-guarding Chaneques of Aztec mythology, and the expert craftspeople, the Menehune, in Hawaiian folklore. The prevalence and resemblance of those narratives throughout cultures recommend that they might characterize real encounters with an enigmatic, non-human intelligence.
In direct opposition to such technique of mythopoesis, this convergence of fiction and the sacred, anti-media is an artificial narrative assemblage. It doesn’t have the arboreal construction of storytelling, it isn’t grounded within the natural setting, the kabbalah of nature, which exists in analog to the superordinate realm. Anti-media has no themes, it externally manipulates the nervous system, it propels itself mechanically via technical trickery, or state-mandated propaganda; it’s “required reading”; it’s “hate watched”.
The precession of simulacra, the hyperreal paracosm of Reality, Inc, has appeared to take the place of the storytellers, the shamans and bards. The media conglomerates have, with nice spectacles, appropriated their duties, however have drained these sacred tales of their energy and changed it with the banality of shopper tradition. At a cultural degree, the world has already ended. We are within the post-apocalypse. What Hollywood and the streaming services are doing — taking beloved IPs, gutting them, and sporting them like a pores and skin go well with — is akin to a post-apocalyptic cargo cult brandishing the detritus of a fallen precursor civilization as a fetish. They are the hole males, desperately making an attempt to recreate the rituals of a bygone period with out really understanding their significance.
All of the cultural manufacturing of those bedraggled scavengers is nothing however the hole mimicry of once-meaningful symbols and narratives. This is finished to ascertain dominance over the remaining survivors, who consider they’re compelled to eat this rehashed and desecrated content material in an try and cling onto the fading recollections of a once-great cultural panorama. This synthetically constructed world, with its synthetic boundaries of woke morality, replaces the splendor of fantasy with the vapidity of “representation”. It is a mirrored image of our present cultural local weather — a world by which efficacy derives from the “theater kid”-compulsion to be seen, moderately than the journey of changing into.
In this collective dystopian delusion, the bizarre paracosm of “modern reimagining”, the ability brokers of the leisure trade have misplaced their connection to the symbolic order that when fueled creative expression and cultural identification. They rummage via the wreckage of previous achievements, cobbling collectively disjointed fragments of tales in a futile effort to seize the essence of a world that now not exists. The result’s a shallow imitation, devoid of the depth and resonance that when enriched the collective psyche.
The storytelling capability of Reality, Inc has been changed by the toddler day-dreams of resentful, maladapted bio-golem; a tiny minority of L.A. strivers who’ve had their souls reconstructed by social media. The media conglomerates rule over these homunculi hordes within the ruins of their glitched-out simulation. They scavenge the remnant photographs of the previous, shards of photographs, repackaging and repurposing them to exert their affect and manipulate, not the minds or hearts however the gross matter of the plenty.
The simulation has reached its computational restrict. The nukes have already fallen. Dead web principle is confirmed. All of those establishments are nice statues of ash, the cosmopolis is derelict, the skyscrapers are all hole shells, each group is a mere façade, crumbling underneath the burden of its personal decay. The leisure cosmopolis has turn out to be an ironic simulation of itself, unable to generate immersion, abandoning even the pretense of a revenue motive, its whole existence representing a weird break from any coherent mannequin of actuality. This state represents what I name Potemkin Culture, the place solely mutants and weightless shells of humanity wander, entranced by the flickering illusions of progress, their gazes fastened on the shimmering mirage earlier than them, oblivious to the calcined construction that lies beneath.
The Rise of Ur Media
After 2016, the specter of Trump was used to reconfigure each search engine and media platform on the web to kind a exact imaginative and prescient of actuality that was antithetical to most individuals’s actual experiences. This new actuality was a simulation of lived expertise, 1000% mediated, and extra insidious than its predecessor as a result of it used the veracity of lived expertise in opposition to itself, macabre flesh puppets just like the “dancing nurses” phenomenon. The simulation was introduced as reality; the formulaic development of more and more absurd tales, rehashes of films, comedian books, and archetypal tales. The media was exacting in its mission to steer the populace of a sure delusion: “You understand what is real”. In response to this rising drive of anti-media, an growing variety of folks started to disengage from on-line platforms, retreating into their very own personal worlds, barricaded by obscurity and mutual abstention from the worldwide spectacle.
However, this distancing solely inspired the expansion of the anti-media trade and the “de-reality architectures” of the late 2010s. With no sense of the Real on the helm, these architectures bled the world’s media setting of any which means or nuance and started to create “modern reimagining” for a phantom “modern audience” that doesn’t exist exterior of “counter-speech” Twitter bots and an algorithmically deformed inhabitants of post-human “bio-ai”. It appeared that, in a single day, the world had turn out to be a closed ecosystem of sanitized data and interactions, with algorithms thirsting after false alerts. Every ingredient of the digital panorama was bent in service to the underside line of the ever-fattening knowledge barons, finally giving rise to a way of existential ennui manifesting because the “dead internet theory”. Every on-line expertise was drained of which means and resonance and as an alternative changed with a suitable vary of viscera — a type of synthetic life, designed for heroic consumption.
This suggestions loop has resulted within the collapse of media tradition and the rise of “anti-media” — digital simulations that don’t have any relation to any bodily actuality or reality. Unable to succeed in a world viewers anymore, some corporations have leaned into “micro- targeting” particular person customers with personalised content material primarily based on algorithms derived from customers’ knowledge and preferences. This personalised content material served as leverage to control person habits, creating psychological profiles that allowed a choose few highly effective teams to entry unprecedented ranges of knowledge and energy. The outcomes have been a perversion of actuality; a world the place the algorithm dictated the reality and any content material out of its management was systematically routed into oblivion.
In the midst of this cybernetic hallucination, a brand new era is rising. Born right into a world outlined by entropy and disillusionment, they’re the youngsters of the apocalypse, youngster troopers in search of out the remnants of Based World among the many ashes. They yearn for a way of connection, a return to the natural roots of storytelling and the real human experiences which have been misplaced to the endless tide of anti-media. In the phrases of Mircea Eliade, “Man desires to recover the active presence of the gods; he also desires to live in the world as it came from the Creator’s hands, fresh, pure, and strong. It is a nostalgia for the perfection of beginnings that chiefly explains the periodical return in illo tempore. In Christian terms, it could be called a nostalgia for paradise” (Eliade, 1959).
This is evidenced by the spontaneous rise of ur-media we’re at the moment witnessing. Where anti-media is outlined as bloated and decadent, misanthropic, ontologically non-human, ironic, missing themes, and being gleefully divorced from analogues to the natural actuality, ur-media is genuine, simplistic to the purpose of barbarism, exists in specific analogue to the Real, and is unself-consciously imbued with primordial irruptions of the symbolic custom.
There is a central level to contemplate in regard to ur-media: the kinetic nature of efficient media. You are interacting with all the nervous system, not Platonic, disconnected minds. This has been understood by “media experts” for many years:
“…Reception, both in terms of the physio—psychological impact of an actual physical effect on a human nervous system and in terms of the emotional or idea effect produced in the personalities, which are the recipients of the physical transmission.”
— “PSYOP Operations In The 21st Century,” Gary L. Whitley, 2000, Department of the Navy
The persuasive essence of ur-media is paying homage to historical rhetoric, embodying each violence and persuasion. This idea of rhetoric, which will be considered a type of “psycho-technology”, shares similarities with ur-media, as each depend on the “newest and fastest technology to do the oldest things”. McLuhan’s critique of cybernetics and media stemmed from a rhetorical strategy, emphasizing the “total message” of a medium by together with context, which means, consciousness, results, interpretation, noise, and our bodies. We determine ur-media as a hyper-rhetoric that employs all sources of the rhetorical custom for multimodal persuasion.
Ur-media depends on persuasion ways and applied sciences, remodeling ideological battle into an electrical battle of knowledge and photographs, focusing on the mind and nervous system. Ur-media goals to change the enemy’s picture and colonize psychological terrain via data know-how, specializing in metaphysical submission of the hole, derelict shells of anti-culture.
Ur-media disregards the phantasm of owned cultural house, takes up residence within the Potemkin Cosmopolis, tramples the one-dimensional, overwrought façade, and builds out what’s dimensionally, primitively, and firmly anchored in each cyber and meatspace. It identifies the pseudo-culture of anti-media, cannibalizes that half which resonates, which is actual and helpful, then, within the chiaroscuro of this twilight world, it vegetation a flag for humanity. In the hypnagogic, twilight mist of ur-media, the digitally constructed actuality of content material streaming turns into a portal to gatherings across the sacred fireplace of shared laughter and chanting. It merely builds the factor the anti-media was designed to occlude.
These protocols of ur-media consequence from an emergent, artistic intuition that evades co-opting, duplication, or the mechanical sterility of being “calculatedly trolled” by shadowy companies and cyborg puppets. Cultural artifacts which have been atomized and assimilated into hyperreal simulations are decomposed. The bleep bloop formulae are reversed, returning us to the Based Timeline, the place authenticity and vitality nonetheless exist, the place new symbols are generated from seething, elemental forces.
A associated instance could be “Scuffed Realtor”, a streaming sequence that epitomizes the philosophy of ur-media, current in uncooked analogue to the hideous terrain of actual property markets. The present stars the uproarious Nick Rochefort and Jet Neptune, who assessment properties submitted by dwell stream viewers, shatters antiques, and revels in chaotic antics. Rochefort masterfully crafts improvised comedic eventualities whereas concurrently providing sage recommendation for first-time homebuyers. The data he conveys, acquired via his personal hard-won exploits, is shared on stream, equipping viewers with the mandatory instruments to maneuver via complexities and sidestep the pitfalls he encountered.
The present probes the odd bardo layer of actual property websites, with Rochefort proposing outrageous acts involving animals in trade for property keys, launching into impassioned diatribes in opposition to Zillow, realtors, and even all the inhabitants of Australia. “Scuffed Realtor” embraces the uncooked, unfiltered chaos that defines ur-media and transforms it right into a wildly entertaining and informative present that highlights and equips us in opposition to the predations of “deep real estate”.
The seemingly spontaneous emergence of “influencer boxing” within the late 2010s acts as an illustration of the “emergentism” that usually characterizes the ur-media terrain. One might view it as an atavistic response to the corralling into tighter and tighter surveillance enclosures and the loss of life of the web which occurred at the moment; an instinctive repulse in opposition to psychic numbing and narratives of inexorability that instill a way of hopelessness, give up, and bewilderment, successfully incapacitating their targets. As an analog to dwell theater and bodily sports activities, it’s an antidote to the fractionalizing expertise of media tethered to an algorithm, resonant with actual stakes and clashing of wills. The symbolic flourish of getting battles happen on a networked stage, calling upon the intimate, telepathic qualities of a LAN get together writ giant, serves as a vivid illustration of ur-media at work — utilizing a minimal set of instruments to assemble one thing beforehand thought exterior the realm of chance.
One rising instance of ur-media that I’ve noticed is the underground realm of cabal publishing. One doable instance for such a kinetic affect operation is Conan’s Salon Cimmerian — a chat organized by unbiased creator Alexander Palacio. Their intent, in line with our evaluation, seems to deal with the institution of a complete community of people with a various vary of competencies within the sphere of cultural output. They appear to advertise sure widespread cultural values, indicating a possible initiation course of.
It’s notable that the formal educational habitus is allegedly absent of their operative process. Instead, they lean in direction of a extra conventional and surreptitious mode of data switch — particularly, affiliation and apprenticeship. The absence of a traceable studying establishment makes it tougher to light up their operations, however it also offers a novel angle as an illustration of ur-media.
Their community seems to comprise writers aiding one another in refining their craft, illustrators collaborating with these writers, and a seemingly unseen chain of editors, reviewers, and publishers. It has been described as a whole ecosystem, which means a extremely structured and organized entity, presumably working on a big scale.
Their final goal of such “literary cabal” networks seems to be creating parafictional narratives, and projecting them into the general public consciousness, with the potential to ship a particular story or creator into broader public consideration and, by extension, affect the cultural scene. This is suggestive of psychological operations that goal to disrupt the provision strains of normative cultural manufacture. The desired final result appears to be the affect or elevation of the broader cultural scene, prone to align with their shared cultural norms. In-depth evaluation and investigation are required to find out the extent of their attain and potential ur-media valences of this rumored group (however that lies past the scope of this text).
Other extensions of the ur-media ecology embrace samizdat native mesh networks for content material sharing, fan edits, a resurgence of “zines” and self-published works, citizen journalism, crowd-sourced cinema, and satirical content material utilizing AI and deepfake know-how. These instruments might allow ur-media clans to share genuine content material and experiences, with AI skilled on their very own bespoke datasets, peering into the shrunken skulls of previous shamans, fostering a connection to the symbolic custom whereas bypassing conventional gatekeepers and centralized platforms.
Ur-media, a kinetic drive of cultural barbarism and guerrilla media actions, detonates the striated house of typical media norms, dismantling the obtained knowledge of “how things are done”. It is the Faustian urge to disregard the timeline and experience your personal “pseudo-history”, construct your personal different actuality recreation and dwell inside it. One typically missed vector for ur-media clans fascinated with their very own timeline creation initiatives is Twitter Spaces.
Despite some folks dismissing Twitter Spaces for his or her ostensibly chaotic format and lack of options, they function a vibrant cognitive battlespace, evoking Tacitus’ description of the “lucrative and blood-soaked eloquence” (sanguinantis eloquentiae) displayed by the indomitable orators of the traditional Forum. The platform captures the essence of the Gallic Hercules, depicted in furs and brandishing a membership, but main males with gossamer chains crafted from gold and amber tied to his tongue. The Celts ascribed eloquence to not the weak Hermes, however to the formidable Hercules, asserting that the true energy of the demigod resides in his persuasive prowess. It is thru his oratory — sonorous, focused, swift, and soul-stirring — that Hercules prevails. Similarly, Twitter Spaces harnesses the untamed vitality of speech, offering ur-media clans with a platform to disseminate their subversive narratives and reshape the media panorama.
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Hercule Gaulois or l’Eloquence from the Recueil Crozat
Though the mediasphere seems more and more grim with “post-truth” parafictional occasions, algorithmic suppression, “counter-speech” bot-networks funded by charitable foundations, tech oligarchies, and refined AI-driven psychological weapons employed by deep state terror machines, the potential for ur-media to characterize an alternate mannequin of media not managed by industrial pursuits stays salient. Despite the centralization of the mainstream media trade, ur-media exists as a extra accessible different that has turn out to be more and more enticing to these in search of a type of leisure that isn’t made by horrible, resentful freaks.
No one is taking to the metaverse, VR retention charges are abysmal, NFTs of their present predatory kind are being rejected, AR know-how continues to be area of interest. Promoters of those applied sciences appear to have forgotten that what triggered the widespread adoption of gaming consoles was wildly good video games that resonated with folks and turned part of their social rituals. In this present desolate, derealized market, it seems mass man is starting to reject the following layer of abstraction, craving for a return to a less complicated time. This need for authenticity and connection to the previous is inflicting some people to inquire into unapproved “pseudo-histories” and “pseudo-archaeologies”. As a consequence, a rising collective effervescence is rising, one which seeks to reclaim the natural reminiscence that has been overshadowed by the relentless march of know-how.
The cryptocracy, the cybernetic syndicate we have now right here known as Reality, Inc whose energy lies of their management of knowledge and know-how, is changing into more and more alarmed by these developments. To them, the annihilation of natural reminiscence is important with a purpose to safe their synthetic, post-human existence. They consider that by erasing the previous, they will forge a brand new future by which their dominion is unchallenged and absolute. As this battle between natural reminiscence and synthetic management escalates, Reality, Inc is taking drastic measures to suppress dissent and preserve their grip on energy. Censorship, surveillance, and disinformation campaigns are being employed at an unprecedented scale, aiming to sow confusion and distrust amongst those that dare to query the established order.
In conclusion, the rise of ur-media appears to be an inevitable response to the hole, synthetic world created by the anti-media trade. As folks turn out to be more and more disillusioned with the sanitized, managed “dead internet”, they’re drawn to embrace the simplicity and authenticity of cultural barbarism. This resurgence of primal, atavistic instincts permits people to acknowledge the fragility of the present media setting and hunt down alternate options that resonate with their innate human nature.
The way forward for our digital panorama will possible be outlined by this inevitable return to cultural barbarism, as folks proceed to rediscover and rekindle the natural connections and shared experiences which have been misplaced to the relentless march of know-how. As the ur-media irruption good points momentum, it should progressively reshape our media tradition, dismantling the rigorously constructed illusions of Reality, Inc and revealing the true depth and vitality of human expertise.
As we navigate this emergence, it’s important to embrace our atavistic instincts and acknowledge the ability they maintain in discerning the hollowness of the world we have now been introduced with. We should harness these savage energies and reject the deceit and simulations which have been positioned earlier than us. We should do not forget that behind all of the masquerades and deceptions, there exists a wild, untamed world that’s prepared and ready for us to discover and reconnect with. We should be nourished by the feral drive of our collective reminiscence if we’re to outlive the dawning of cognitive cataclysm.
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