Spirit photography and its pivoting agency through time, pt. 2.

Rev Oct 19,20, 21,22,25 2022.

It is by what I call le Fanu eye, the fourth way in which the spirit becomes physical, that the in-the-head dreaming can become the out-of-the-head spirit world. Generally stated, I believe that in the three-nightmare eldritch formation the first two nightmares occur inside the head, while it is only in the epigogic, or third nightmare, that one pops out of the head into ambient space, to see monsters.

but, in the presence or under the influence of a tychonic figure, a Man in Black, the equivalent to a mesmeric operator, and the overall appearance of these Crewe photos suggest its ever presence. It is also possible that even the syngogic nightmare bounces out under the pressure of the figure eight, to end up in ambient space.

in this way, again by the ping-pong nature of the operator mind, this can lead to a strict binary division between the in-the-head, here and now, and the ambient spirit world, that is, the periacqueductal, depleted, haunted world IS, for the Crewe crew, the other side.

this tychonic-influenced distortion of light dream life, so typical too of the Eyes Wide Shut conceptualization of the dream world in modern life, pre 1980, means that, just as Burkert argues that Homer and the poets CREATED the mythology of ancient Greece, which only later came to be read as real; just as I argue that Stephen King CREATED the conception of town and national life that we now have, so too the Crewe circle created their own way of looking at the other side.

But, then, given the space in the photos, they also must have equated inside-the-head with inside the haunted house, and then the ghost living as if in the crawlspace behind or around in the ambient space beyond. Then they enlisted a convention that was even then descending upon the depiction of spirit space in ghost movies. That world came to be viewed as a world of veils, veils of ever decreasing materiality, getting sheerer and sheerer, in an mis en abyme, where you are not sure where you cross over, as the veils theoretically thin out to next to nothing. This appears in so many movies I need hardly work it out, it is ever present. So, when the veil appears, in Crewe photos, we are in ambient space, construed as the other side.

But, then, I mentioned in a post, the arch aspect of the veil. Very curious that Conan Doyle would call it an arch. There are two arches in my dream analysis, though this little wrinkle I have made less use of post 2020. This is when you enter into, by a retraction back to normal, but overcompensating of the Le Fanu Eye, the opisoentoptic space, or the space behind the eye, which then communicates with the mind, and leads one down in to deeper things. There ARE two gates there, the Heaven Gate, which is positive, and the Tannhauser Gate, and, it is true, I think Blake pictured these gates often, and his Antaeus lifting Dante down to hell, this is his rendition of the Tannhauser Gate (which I now see somewhat equates with the figure eight, lifting one down into the “moonfire” space of a “mondo”, that is, delusions in the mind, a false place). Both of these I equated with lifting the seen into a deep dream space below, to hell on earth. This more or less copies off of Platt’s construal of the layers of veils on Roman sarcophagi, allowing the mind of the grieving mother to waft back in to visit the deceased as long as the body remains remain there. Thus, the presence of the gate means that one is entering into this deeper state. It also means, because we are now dealing with behind the eye memories, a deeper, more beloved relative, held in a deeper place in the mind. The above posted comments were a periapt buy-in of the presence of Thala in the bottomless pit space, goddess of the inner chamber, the thalamus, as well as hippocampal places below. So, by the appearance of the arch, this photo goes deeper, with more feeling,

and, then, pictures where the veil arch or ectoplasmic arch only just appears as abstract wobble-wobble, this indicates two minds only just getting to the later stage in grief where they are able to move to that level and do that final grief work.

and then this one is slightly distorted, and not yet entirely fixed in place, because these two are a bit further along on the path, and only coming to settle the memory of the deceased in a deep place on the other side of the veiled arch, the Heaven Gate.

the added dimension of this form is that it copies exactly on the Roman visual tradition of the vellificatio. The vellificatio was a tossed up veiling device used in Roman pictures to indicate not just the presence of the supernatural, but the sudden appearance right this minute in the moment of the camera flash in the arrival of the supernatural, or a supernatural being. That is why gods and goddesses in Roman Sarcophagi appear furling a vellificatio behind them, they have been summonsed, and just like a genie, with his burst of smoke, so here too, the arch of veil indicates that the god, summonsed, has now appeared. It is all but an exclamation point, adding to the immediacy of the photo, which must have been doubly comforting to the sitter (who might at this point relay something like “you know I felt it, I felt her touch my shoulder, I am so grateful for that”).

But there is one more element to this visual convention. When the mind passes over the in-between, what I call the Luor, there is turbulence. If there is standard turbulence, it is just the wobble-wobble that signifies the passing over. By my reading, the vellificatio in Roman art, and the veil arch in dream art, represents the simple wobble-wobble. More turbulent forms are created by the arrival in advent of a switch from syngogy to epigogy of the CryBabyCry and the Savoy demons. And there is another kind of turbulence passing back out when the in-between is emptied out by the presence of a Tyche figure, and the wobble-wobble becomes an orontes form. But it does mean a crossing over. But, in this context, a different one too.

If the sitter is in the hypnagogic space of their own minds, and the spirit world as construed by the Crewe circle is in the crewsphere of the spirit world, in the crawlspace of ambience beyond, that means that in their black world a fear vector has switched to ON, as contact with that world was deemed generally scary to moderns, and that means that the face of the summonsed person takes on forms in accord with the out-in accordionizing of the figures on the fear vector

and in the various forms which the presences take on, they become involved in the flight of demons or angels in the fear vector, which, from another angle, brings into the picture skewographs of the spirits. I am having trouble incorporating a more skewographic dimension into my scirpographs. In my treatment of cattle mutilation, I called those construals of invisible presences to explain the mutilation by a nonobvious causation, “agoroskas”, sic, that is, plural, but also roving, aegis figures, presiding as an embrasure over the event, a delusion in moonfire space,

But in straight up skewographs a presence floats overhead and around, as in my treatment of January 6, Trump hovering over, comparable then to a hover dream too

then the Figment is a form of him seen as a pareidola in building and other ambient forms

but then, when the breach occurs, a Famulus form forms, and this as it were spreads the body in body tunnel form out over and through the whole reality of it, to grant then freedom to move

then the Conjure vector once again as if seeps into the building breached, to take it over first, very Gustonian level influx here.

and these parse as per the dynamics, the sleep demon having attacked, to the various figural forms of the psychomachia as I worked out in 2020

which is equivalent to possession, of form

then, as I worked it out, after the attack began to deplete, things dropped down out of the fear vector, into the zone of the Green Dragon, into hell on earths, so various distorted forms there too

casting one out into sentient space

and, then, where I spend do much time of late, the bottomless pit

not in this-world nonfictional state did any of the skewerings of the demon form body tunnels make an appearance in anything found by the Crewe Circle. But it is true that the ectoplasmic arch might be construed as representing the self in a Figment form, and that (as I already know I will find in other pictures) others pursued more kinetic and dramatic ideas of the spirit movement around the sitter, to suggest also Famulus invasions (I expect to see however no demonic or existential “oothecan,” below the pit, manifestations in any real world spirit photo).

But this means a skewograph sees body tunnels or figurals at all the points of the fear vector, throughout the “under the bed” space psychomachia, and then spinning down and out into hell on earth, and below. I just mark in yellowlots of possibilities, in terms of human beings “seeing” figures in the mind and in dream

So, this one, its wipe-like or smear-like nature, it feels like a Figment, with a lot of captured movement.

and this one, because of the odd light up top left feels like the figure has rushed up into view to get into the camera range as if photo bombing the couple

and there is, especially, in the group of photos I analyzed taken directly from those chosen by Conan Doyle, this real life picture of a very beautiful young Brit circa 1920

she emerges somehow as if on the tail end of a whisp of ectoplasmic veil sweeping through, a passing resemblance, gone as soon as snapped, very, very strange, I would call this a Figment having momentarily crossed over in, to make an appearance as a Famulus, to turn its eyes on you, and yet because it looks away (so not unlike the remark in The Innocents (1961), the ghost at the window is looking for someone else), creepy, but, again, the Crewe group, as far as I know now, stopped before any of this going where it always does in horror movies and ghost stories, to trouble

Indeed, after reading Conan Doyle, I turned to the catalog for the thorough show in 2005 at the Met, which I somehow was not able to get to, The Perfect Medium, and of the many, many, many images there, all of which must now be placed as per my system. I start with some which bring in more mobile body tunnel images to start.

In the Perfect Medium, Mumler is seen as a psychic, it is he who sees the ghost, and they work it out. But, then, in their history, the trend dies out in the US, and emerges in Europe in a different way. This can be indicated by this spirit photography of Frederick Hudson with Georgina Houghton

Houghton, of course, received some attention this past summer at the Milk of Dreams exhibit at the Venice Biennale, for her automatic drawings, which she thought were dictated by spirits. Reading her book, and even her daily ins and outs with spirit photography, the really crazy thing about her account is that she has, almost in the nature of a paranoiac, like Schreber, given away her personal agency to let the spirits make all her decisions, and they give her all her discoveries. In so far as Houghton believed all of this to come from outside her mind, this makes her nominable as a maker of genuine “foo.” Here is an early spirit photograph of her with her son and a ghost.

the odd thing about this photo is that it almost tilts the ground in reality over to the ghost side of the equation, as it is Houghton who fades into the background. Since she seems to have wanted her son to meet his grandmother, the fact that the ghosts drape twice touches him, in the same plane, at mouth

and toe

is problematic. But the real problem is all the drapery, It looks like a woman who has covered herself with all sorts of heavy drape and then stepped into the frame as a ghost. The fact that the drape below and above is extravagant beyond her needs if she were just toweling herself down after a bath, I suppose, is the vellificatio element that gives it its periacqueductal character of spirit, that is, wafts of spirit that somehow look like flowing cloth. (Though I don’t hear about the Psychic Arch until later, it is clear that that she intersected with and merged with that line of thought to resurrect another generation of ghosts in the 20^th century). It is both a wobble-wobble creature, and a Famulus form, if the fear vector is ON. I assume that under the influence of the moment, in a séance etc, the situation shifts from vigilogogic to hypnagogic. The child is on the lattice, and, then, two things happen, the movement from waking to sleeping is captured in a vertical shimmy-shimmy, and then the lower drape almost like a risen up carpet to touch the table, with a suggestion, then, of animating the inanimate.

this posits that in the European tradition the spirit did not exist in a peripteral walled off ambient zone, but came in on the sitter on the lattice, on the fear vector, in the Famulus position. It rears up in front of them, then settles in down and around them, touching the child’s toe. Then, too, as the child is placed as a go-between between Georgina and the spirit this might’ve been staged by her to as a “picture-in-picture”, that is, symbol of her relation to spirits, to describe how it is the spirits dictated her drawings, by way of taking on the mind of a child, and she then records, not with holding the child, but with holding a pen, the appearance of the rearing up spirit

then it is swooping around,

then the space between her and the face of the spirit is all aflutter. She sees the face inside the ectoplasmic arch, the symbol of ghost, and it is intrusive and scary

then registering the child’s fear, falling back, she scribbles her opting out too

and it is in drawings like this, which strike one as her imagining what it is like inside the arch, it is in some relational posture to said spirit that she developed her line and style which as a “yrrhes!” (rrh=flow, remains silent) my term for the visual expression of a raw psychological sweet spot which in prototype space violates the norms of classic or accepted beauty in an artistic practice.

it is also true, based on this, she developed a relation with the spirit in which it took the form of the dynamic of the crossing over of the in-between, and simply as if by dictation she just scribbled away until the event or messaging ended. This one strikes me as getting a better look at the spirit of turbulence, almost the demon Savoy, in fact.

On the other end of the spectrum, in Europe, were séance-based photographs that only caught a blip of energy, in an abstract form. This is captured in letterspace inside the second symbolic level of vigiloogy, materialized as psychic light come in

this idea, that the ghost is a figure of the crossing over itself, and seances and the like were primarily interested in describing the feeling of that crossing over, results in a mystified form of the simple wobble-wobble of falling asleep, but as if amplified by the emptying out of the here and now to be the divide between the psychological, hypnagogic, and the spiritual, conceived as being in the adjacent ambient space. In this photo by Hudson

the ghost is simply a figuration of the shimmy-shimmy of the nexus of the crossing over itself, a figurative fill=in of the psychic arch, where the psychopomp passed you over. And to add punch to the capturing of that moment, the man sleeps, and the energy of the space causes a levitation of a table, again, the step-in from the side involvement of a Famulus figure.

Scirpo, Famulus Spinning over the Luor, Hudson spirit photo 10 21 22

One of the theories of the time, going back to my original agency graph, believed in 5, and that in 5, spirits created spirit photographs by sending ghosts to the point of contact. Thus, these should be called photos by spirits. My above reading stays with point 3, the space between the photographer and the sitter is established in an externalized form, somehow, of the in-between, the space between waking and sleeping, and it is in this dream context that spirits manifest as the gap itself, and then come in on the sitter, and cause things like levitation, as a Famulus demon on the fear vector, in sleep.

given my argument that demons (of the mind) take on a psychodynamic form in shaping a dream, and as skewographs can even overcover perception of the real, in spins, spirals, etc– so in this I do practice a kind of abstract formalist form of spiritualism, viewed as only externalized dreaming–these are surprising, and yet entirely expected. What these photographs show are externalizations of people having various sorts of dream encounters with demons of the mind

I mean, if my graph of the “under the bed” psychomachia consists of a sleep demon, swirling around, moderated by the demon Telesphorus standing by, and then the rising up of a Blue Angel, these (even in sequence) would fit.

and then after the attack, this figure, left. is telesphorus, and the second one might be the Blue Angel,

the question then only being how did the seancer cause a group of men to drop into a dream and then experience a common dream form, transferred by Sleeper to them all, for it to then be photographed, in some way.

And, here is where I part company with the rationalism of the catalog forThe Perfect Medium. Its overriding goal seems to be to debunk spirit photography as fraud, and, for that, to relegate the entire genre to the ash heap of history. My approach is psychodynamic. That is, spirit photographs are works of art, enlisted in the overall mission of visualizing all states of human consciousness, as this would broaden human understanding of their own full nature. This is why I like dream-based and vision-based horror movies. I am interested in seeing consciousness stretched beyond the rationalist norm. The only problem question for me is why, why did those seeking “foo”, that is, the beyond, feel it necessary to declare their articulation of such things as REAL, in real space and time, and not as works of art. Ostension and reverse agency would theoretically describe this, the Sleeper phenomenon might explain it in terms of groupthink hypnosis, Why? Why the insistence on reality, and why? Why when you look at “foo” photos (and this of course hold for UFO photos too), even if you know it is obviously fake, how come it keeps refluxing so that after you look at it knowing it is fake it still somehow still looks real. And that would be in the yrrhes! which characterized a prototype zone contact with a real thing, of some sort, and it being not art or “brut art”. (I look into Emma Deane’s freak marks and her foray into thoughtography later)

In the catalog for The Perfect Medium it is claimed that interest in first generation spirit photography died in the UK due to the bad publicity of the Paris trial where it was discerned that all spirit photographs were simply tricks, that is, double exposures, and not evidence of real contact with spirits from the spirit world, or as envisioned in the minds of the sitters etc. To me, this is beside the point, as either way, a classic spirit photograph evinces a belief that spirits hover close to us, and this gives us comfort. And, again, it may be an element of the redressed imagination, something declared not real by the primary imagination, resurrects in a sequel over and over again.

I noted in support of hollow earth theory that the theory might’ve been believed in by some whose mind remained stuck in the extreme phenomenology of the childlike mind. The theory helped believers maintain as if a relation to life as an embryo in the womb to her mother, without any gap or rationalization, but totally self-safety. Cindy Hendershot in her book on paranoia in 1950s sci fi argues that advances in science precipitate as paranoia in modern men and women, a radial cult view would forestall that. The same thing could be said for this picture by Hudson of Alfred Wallce and his mother. Here is an old man (I once wrote a long paper on Wallace’s theories as they applied to Conrad), who still feels the presence of his mother hovering over him, even to the point of her realm closing around him on all sides. She is now in front of him, almost on his lap, and in this the psychic arch represents the crossing down to a deeper level of mind, and then the mother is there in the form of a cut out form portrait of the mother (this device intended to convey the idea that in periacqueductal spirit space things are less material, and her skin is indeed closer to fabric than to skin or beard).

This is Wallace, a naturalist, he has seen monsters, and nature in its monstrous form. His dream world, it would have advanced to the epigogic, if not the cosmogogic level, and he gets there by way of the Tannhauser Gate, Antaeus lowers him in. It has also fused into one conception in his mind behind a peripteral wall, where, deep down, she is placed, but maybe he worries that she suffers, on the place of sacrifice, and he wants to know, is she ok? And so the photographer comes in over the top of him as the tyche figure with his own rhabdom, that is, the camera, and either as psychic, 1, or in the manifestation of the space between 3, his 5, he sees her hover around him, 4, and that sums it all up, she takes the acqueductal less-materialized form, and he is happy. This is like a spirit photograph valentine to a core primitive mind that had to, to feel safe in life, know that his mother was ok. Like this,

like this

scirpo Alfred Wallace Rescues his mother from beyond the Tannhauser Gate, Hudson photo, 10 21 22

And the more “body tunnel” Blakean skewograph formation of it.

scirpo skewo, Alfred Wallace reunited with his mother, Hudson, 10 21 22

And, of course, once Hudson accepts the Psychic Arch as a form that precipitates into a cloth-manifest ghost, that ghost can like a skewograph dream of it, pivot any which way relative to the subject, spiraling as it is, in their conception of the spirit world as 5, behind, but also 3, in the space between, and seen by 1 and 5, to be real.

In these photos, the spirit space becomes 3, that is, exists in between camera and sitter, and camera 2 peers through it, perhaps fueled by 1, psychic photographer power, but the upshot is it sees a spirit now as a fusion of cloth, paper, 2-d, and the periaqueductal, and it like a skewograph interacts with the sitter in dramatic ways.

This one is fun because it imagines a Famulus demon having got into the hoop skirt of the sitter for then the ghost to manifest as almost a UFO of hoop skirt, with the light coming up out of her upskirt universe (again the pulse of frustrated sexual power in these photos makes them oddly erotic), and it is mano a mano,

something like this

scirpo Battle of the Hoop Skirt ghosts, Perfect Medium, 10 21 22

Then, from this photographer, having “reduced” the ghost to a light element it can travel in syngogy, searching, passing by or over, momentarily caught in its wanderings

or, indeed, in the fields where in the second eldritch formation nightmare, one searches for talismans, one can see a wandering soul, lost, unable to find his way. This might’ve, I imagine, caused the sitter some pain, to think of one’s loved one lost in the afterlife.

These all come from, I think, the William Pierce album, from various photographers, produced at such volume that it is clear that an occult theory had folded over onto the practice to allow of a large scale expression of possibilities without worrying overly much about whether or not they are literally in our world real It is the general belief in our day that Democrats are all educated rationalists and it is only uneducated Trumpers who adhere to conspiracy theories, but in fact personalized confabulations of bits and pieces of theory compose the minds of pretty much all people on planet earth, giving or taking amongst the options. And so, this is first generation spirit photograph in its decadent maturity where concerns over fraud were set aside (indeed, after being convicted of fraud the Parisian photographers Buguet did his time, then, when he got out, simply changed the framework of conception of his work, to call them entertainments, made for fun and amusement, and went right back into the proto-movie spirit photography business).

 But, in terms of the Pierce album, things, suddenly, become alarming, strange.

There are two phases here, pure miasmic ectoplasmic world, and then it settling into light forms coming forward out of it. The first group are alarmingly strange. They look like a large cloud of intestines come surging in the photo toward the sitter, who is oblivious. How to construe this? In second generation spirit photography, European version (though it spread to America at that point too), ectoplasm was imagined as a physical substance manifesting of spirit or energy in a person. In the Middle Ages, spirit was part of anatomy. Inside of one, harboring one’s heart, was a soul. That soul was made of as if a mist, the source of gas, perhaps, but a “spiritus” flowing through a spiritual body. It was that body, the soul body, the corposant, that escapes or just left the body upon death. In modern life, spiritus was reconceptualized parallel to discoveries of the entrails of humans. Thus, it looked like puke, and spit, and blood, and intestines, and gas, but all of that in a spirit form (transcendently outlining the physical). But then if you believed in 5, that is, that a spirit photograph rather shows the entry of the spirit world into this world, behind or beside the sitter, while it is true that that world could send ghosts over, if that world is in whole conceptualized as a miasmic melee, as nothing but a cloud of miasmic guts, then it in its pure form could spill over as spirit guts into the space of the sitter and be photographed. It logically follows from ectoplasm leaking like snot from noses or vomit from mouths or blood or cum from pussies under tables, that that whole ectoplasmic universe could cross over. In this picture, then, the sitter becomes as subject of the Antaeus figure at the Tannhauser gate, which is the photo, and we get a scrying sight of the very entrails of an entrailed world of ectoplasmia, Antaeus=ectoplasmia (and this obviously relates to some of the more extreme body horror movies made, I think of Society (1989)). Since this is a bodied form of miasma, I place this in fourth layer Hell on Earth, Mulciberium. Since this is a vision of the camera or photographer, I also see it as a mondo, a delusion, not constitutional to the world or the self.

Indeed, this glimpse into deep spirit world would be inherited by blood and guts display in horror movies, such as in The Lorelei’s Grasp (1973), where heart removal is seen as critical to understanding the perverse appetite of the Lorelei. Something like this

Ectoplasmia Encroaching on a Sitter, Pierce Album, Perfect Medium 10 21 22  

And, again, the secret charge in this sort of thing is that we remain in the pre-endoscopic period of time, that is, except for anatomizing and autopsy, there is no way for the average bloke to imagine these realms of intestinal spirit without having to go through the surface of the nude body, even of women of this age. It casts upon these strange visualizations a very superrepressed aura of sexual perversion. Indeed, I made requisite jokes of how the ectoplasmic played out in the second generation, after Rontgen had discovered real endoscopic sight of the internal body.

“Now, I’ve gone and done it, bumped into the catalog for the exhausting 2005 Met show on photography and the occult, The Perfect Medium (2005), and it is stuffed with crazy pictures of ectoplasm leaking from the most unfortunate places and orifices, aura, magic “od” fluid and other occult captures, all of which I will have to sort through (I see them as waking dreams, with a catch). Indeed, one fellow in the 1890s claims that by putting a treated plate to his wife’s forehead while sleeping it snapped a photo of her dream, an invention I still eagerly await. But it was not all fantasy, that ring on a skeleton’s hand is actually Berta Rontgen’s hand, x-rayed by her husband, December 22, 1895, the world’s first x-ray, launching humanity upon the endoscopic era. (pics, random selection, ectoplasms, Louis Darget, dream photo, the Rontgen x-ray, 1895)”

and this was, I concede, a joke on the unspoken nature of Liz Truss’ womanhood, as oozing ectoplasma as she imploded as a leader in six weeks, out of this podium, to momentarily return to the level of discourse of critique that dominated the Trump era

Then here the ectoplasm leaking from a vagina

and a mouth (I have been over these previously, but now have to figure them in in terms of the whole of the dreaming but later)

and then the image that ushered in the endoscopic age

I should also say this field of vision is friendly to multiple pareidolia sightings, I see at least five, and that then would give license to further envisionings, a popular thing, in a topic of representation that even came up this past month involving the realistic nature of the depiction of Marilyn Monroe talking to her unborn baby, the silly rationalists protested, in Blonde (2022). But this gives rise to sightings of a baby, maybe a baby that miscarried, or died, here next to an old man.

and this truly horror story frightening vision of a ectoplasmic baby floating in the air of a cramped little evil-wallpapered bedroom in Crewe or wherever, haunting a woman who maybe had an abortion, the Blonde (2022) plot.

and this was someone’s calling card, or shtick, see your dead baby in limbo1

then having Dickens’ description of the souls that no longer can influence us, we then step on to a further figuralization, active attempts by spirits to gesture at the sitters, seeking intercession.

and this crazy one almost reaching down into the room to pluck the sitter out, back into the ectoplasmic spirit world

which finally just become ghost storying, with no relation to “reality”

A variant on this is if the spirit world is envisioned as a mirror world of ours, where, that is, the spirit side of us exists simultaneously to the body side of us, and I have construed “sequituras” as exactly this ransom paid for eight alone minutes in a womb in the existence of a spirit version of oneself, held as if collateral in the spirit world beyond (but which can only exist in the human mind, as I construe it by these studies this far, in a figure eight oltre-eschelture formation, that is, under the influence of a tyche figure), then there is a double of you in the spirit world which you might be able to make contact with and thus somehow regulate or get answers about uncertainties in your life. This gets into the scrying of real ghosts that seem attached to places or persons in a mirroring way, this…to be continued

this double world was the subject of interest of Allan Kardec, who had a name for it. He argued that thought could activate that world, causing the substance of it to as if take a photo of itself. He called it the PERISPRITAL.

he believed that in photographer 1 or sitter 4, in the in between space 3, thought created an intermediary form of energy, “fluidic images”, these are then reflected in the spirit world, imagined as a PERISPRITAL envelope (this very much like my idea of the peripteral nature of ambient form imaginings), and this envelope is as if, vis a vis the real, a mirror, where it becomes in reflection embodied, the element then to as if take a picture of itself. Thus comes into it cameraless spirit photography that only requires the pressure of the medium’s hands on the plate, or the zap of the medium’s mind in thoughtography onto the plate, to form an image.

End of pt. 2.

Spirit photography and its pivoting agency through time, pt 1 of 2.

Rev Oct 19,20, 21,22,25 2022.

Circling back through the issue of photos of strange character, I return to address some issues with spirit photography.

“Darn, had I known that the inventor of Spirit Photography, William H. Mumler, had his studio at 630 Broadway, I would’ve included 630 in True History (1993, unpub) which is about 7 psychic incidents I had in and around Soho Broadway, including 2 across the street, in my first year of parenting. Though Mumler was debunked even by PTBarnum, a court found him innocent of fraud and no one could figure out how he did it; then Mary Todd Lincoln was so trapped in mad grief she travelled all the way to Boston for Mumler in his last photo to create his best photo, Abe behind her. But, I prefer the “ghost only” photos, excellent art, and, I think, they formally and visually relate so exactly to entoptic visuals ie the Silent Movie effect, that I think he some times, like Ted Serios, expressed a kinesistic heat from his overvisualizing entopty through the camera to create images on a print. I am even sometimes plagued by entoptic CEVs*of this sort, like the one I had at 6:44 this morning, a gent in a tux chatting away, turning his head, looking around, then he begins to collapse in on himself and one by one, all as if on a reel, he fades away into a cloud, then, poof……… (*closed eye visualizations aka hallucinations).(pics, thru the canopy, and a van windshield, to see the building, now housing a “Destruction” company which might’ve been influenced by Mumler’s ghost to create a large suction device that you can attach to your open front door to suck all the present out of time in the house until you end up with a periacqueductal space in which ghostly former residents are stuck)”.

The question is where is all this in the mind? My general approach is that all of the mental terrain explored in the whole of spirit photography, not to mention spiritualism generally, is readable. The overall premise I start with is all spirit photographic effects represent entoptic phenomenon that, by means of Le Fanu Eye, can also somehow flip to the external, to haunt.

This is the simple agentic arrangement:

I accept that there is some psychic element at work in this array, describing a photographer taking a picture of a subject in a studio. It all depends on where you think it might be located, 1 through 6. The fact that it might be in this array means that in general a psychic event takes place in a half-waking, stage three mesmeric environment. In that state, one sees ghosts and can scry a future from various -mancies, this is what is in play. That much I accept on premise (on this later).

So, either the psychic force is in 1) the photographer, 2) the camera, 3) the space between, 4) the sitter, 5) the space behind, or then, finally, the 6) overall, which is whooshing through the room. In history, it seems that in time one proof is taken up, and worked through; then, when that falls through, another is picked up, etc. And, over time, the source is kept out of reach of a final explanation because it pivots from one to the other, surviving all explanation in the end. Then too, for that, like a brush fire, it keeps coming back. This then allows the defense of the psychic to perpetually put off any reckoning relative to the premise that no psychic element is involved.

So, hat if the psychic element is in the photographer. The idea here is that the photographer has a camera, which is just a camera, and sits his clients down in a studio. They are normal; the studio is also normal, that is, it is not a haunted house or haunted building. And with all of the field evened out to nonpsychic, it is only the photographer who brings it in. Like this

That is, the photographer has a psychic ability, he then with that can read the mind or see images in the mind of the sitter, using his neutral camera to take a picture. In that, he sees a mental image of a departed in the mind of the sitter. This is in a counterreality to the reality of the studio itself, so this is the spirit photograph.

Right away I see that I have contradicted the basic spiritualist premise of the spirit photograph, which is that, rather, the photographer with his camera has penetrated the veil of this zone of reality to the reality of the spirit world beyond. This construal is a variant on 6, and in that world, in fact, which as it were forms molds of the passing forms of life of the spirits or ghosts of the departed that watch over us. He and his camera peers through that veil to that world, to see, yes, the departed still live, in the afterlife, just as promised at the funeral and in church, and all is well with the world, based on this comforting reassurance. Something like this

that is, well, this can be 5 too, behind the sitter, it is not just the thought or memory of the deceased that exists in the sitter’s mind, for that to then show up on camera, it is that the real person connected to that memory did for real in a real world of spirits depart into the spirit world, and is happy to be there, and that there IS an afterlife (remember the panic Nerval had, to find out if this was true). This reassures a spiritualist that the loved one does in reality watch over the sitter, and hang close by him or her, always keeping either company.

But there is a larger issue here too because a number of orthodox religious people thought that spiritualism itself was based on a kind of sorcery and therefore unchristian, and not really real. For them, I suppose, no spirit can come back ghostlike into the vicinity of a sitter to be photographed in this way. The spirit remains outside this array.

It is my understanding that William H Mumler, who is now being granted the title of the originator of spirit photography, thought he has psychic powers, which he cast into the machine, the camera, and then by momentarily giving the camera that second sight, him acting as if the operator to a mesmeric subject, took a picture of his ability to see that the spirit of the dead does hang around the sitter (so, 1 with a response in 5. This appearance then provides the sitter with some solace, knowing that there is an afterlife for a loved one, and that in the afterlife the loved one knows and is conscious of one’s life and follows and blesses and protects one. This formulation imagines the reality of spirit photography spirits as existing in the vicinity of the life of the sitter and thus still in that attached zone that serves as a sort of green room for heaven, a belief rooted in a pagan notion that a spirit clings to the bodies of the dead as they pass through the early stages of decay in a coffin.

And so, in general, Mumler’s spirit photographs are pictures that he saw in a psychic moment to assure the sitter that the loved one is fine and happy and with you and watching over you. As such he serves precisely the same function as a medium at a séance. It is for this reason that the attack on spirit photography, as the attack on seances, centered on the trickstering of the photographers, or the mediums. Contact was thought, for those who believed–but fragilely, hope against hope, as if also fearing that it might not be true, and one’s loved one might be suffering–to be very consoling. It was a good thing to know (and again maybe spiritualism exists in the gray area between faith and skepticism where one has lost touch with institutional religion to drift into a personal zone in a defensive posture versus a fear of it not being true).

An extreme case of this nexus is Mumler’s last photo, his most famous photo, Mrs. Lincoln with Abe watching over her.

Six or more years after his death, she is still in mourning. Since he was shot, and she was sitting next to him, one assumes, witnessing the assassination, it was also a trauma, so she is still triggering in life, and has what today is called PTSD, with flashbacks, reexperiencing, the like. That is, she is a troubled soul, and, I would guess, the most troubling part was that maybe she did not quite believe it all. So, the story is she was so interested in Mumler getting an image of Abe, even AFTER his New York trial, which had sort of exonerated him of the charge of fraud, but nonetheless destroyed his New York business, that she rushed to Boston to have Mumler take the shot. So, that is important. She did not have Mumler send her a magic camera, nor did she think any other local photographer could see Abe. She went to Mumler, he, his ability, his psychic ability, as a sort of medium with photography, he would be able “do a reading” of, really, her body energy, almost in the manner of a Kirlian photograph. And he would then zap a kinetic power into the camera so that it momentarily is enflamed by his psychic power to be able to photograph a ghostly presence he sees over her back and shoulders, and thus catch the image. For all this, this photo must have been very consoling to her, confirming her hope. It does, however, rather monumentalize Abe in a generic, public way. It is almost as if the image on a campaign bill or poster or a stamp, which circles around her, and that his appearing is only due to the fact that she spent time on earth in his time. Thee ghost is also rendered whitish, as per the norm of representation of ghosts in fictive illustration and art, so then how do we know Mumler only caught her thinking of a painting of him she saw once? And there he is.

In any case, this is NOT how I would have read the situation of spirit photography being born on Lower Broadway, when I explored Lower Broadway in the years 1991-1994 (since I lived on Spring Street east of it). In my reading, I take into consideration that William H Mumler did his readings in his space, in that building.

And for that reason, or a reason of incompleteness of experience, maybe the fact that his practice was interrupted by a fraud suit, the energy or ghost of his work remains behind to haunt the place. That is, in 3, the space between. Then, similarly, when I in 1993 stepped into what I thought was Matthew Brady’s studio on Broadway below Canal, (where galleries have of late returned), I read the space, I tried to feel the vibe, I read the clues or hints of what I was trying to reach in the surviving space, and then if an image came to me, that was a reading. That is, I was psychometrizing the space.

that is, I step into the space, knowing of its history, or at least that it is historical, that is, old, and from that time, however many other layers overlay that time, reaching back to that time as the ur time of the building. Then, I wait to feel a vibe, and the vibe would come as a form of reagency as if leaked out of the former furious and famous activity and visitors who visited the place. And the fact that HISTORY with a capital H once happened there, as opposed to the empty now, and IF I felt that vibe manifest by some sort of transference from it to me, that was my reading of the space. The uncanny encounter then created a residual energy, a haunted presence, a ghost of time, a time ghost, a “rhytchron” (a slice of self in time, so you in 1980, different from you in 2000) of the place, as I sensed it. Unfortunately, the famous Mrs. Lincoln photo was not taken on Broadway, but if it was, then perhaps there was a micro vestige of the onetime presence of the ghost of Abe around her there, like a hair, or something forensic, so 3a, the psychic jumps to an object. I remember at the time becoming almost cultlike in my search for “true history,” which was documented by an actual physical relic or evidence of the site, included in a work of art in an idea for a curated show. In this approach the art that most interested me, before I fully grasped the nature of agency, became as if a reliquary of a hair of Lincoln, for example (I think Charles Ray had such apiece), like a memento mori with a direct link to the “real” (this is why I soon after jumped on the YBA bandwagon).

In True History (1993, unpub.), then, I focused on the site, and a vibe in it, much in the way a psychic by way of psychometry will try to read meaning of the whereabouts of the subject through an object they held. In this reading, it is the psychic ability Mumler exerted in his practice that left behind the vibe that creates a vestige to be picked up on. In this sense, I see the exertion of psychic ability almost in the manner of an explosion of intense emotion that is emitted in a murder as something that sticks to a place, the 3, and which I then could, I felt, by vibe, pick up, in an object, 3a.

But, then, even situating the psychic in himself, that is, in 1, Mumler then muddied the waters by spinning off from the inconvenience that some people who contacted him hoping he could help them with their grief could not get to New York. And so, he said, well, send me a picture of the deceased, or of you, and I will see if I can read anything from that. He is still the source of the psychic power, but now the sitter is represented indirectly, so 1 to 4a. This practice results in some of his most poetic pictures, they show an old photo on a table, and then his picture is a reading of whether or not that relic or item attracts a spirit. Then he sees that it, in fact, does, a surprise.

This is by far the most interesting photograph

The special quality in this subgenre is that it aligns so closely to straight psychometry, that is, Mumler is reading a presence of spirits through the picture alone, and it then calls up sight of not one but a whole family of ghosts. I do not think the photograph itself is said to be impregnated with the energy, but that Mumler read the photo as a token connected to the person who could not attend the séance, and by making contact with the person, he then reads the presence of ghosts over them.

There is an anti-photography impulse too, to support this. In some of these the ghost figure comes forward blocking out the photograph.

The next one is even creepier because from a distance the photo in the photo looks like a blank, but upon closer examination you see it is one of those all-but reliquary-style daguerreotypes with the faint image of a man on it, and a frame which seems to already have the blessing of a half-life presence watching.

And then the surprise is, as if to carry over the small nature of the daguerreotype into the ambient space, there is a baby in the arms of the ghost mother.

It has to also be asked, then, why are the figures white? For one thing, they copy into a spiritual situation the way that ghosts were depicted in fiction and magic lantern shows going back then at least a hundred years. The idea is that life is a physical state with bodies, while the afterlife is a nonphysical state with spirits. This idea derives from dream theory, which (in my working out of it) places hypnagogic dream space in the head; ambient space circling around; and sentient space beyond. As you enter in dream into ambient space it is a convention of representation that things dematerialize by means of half-life recession, so that as I put it figures and things become cardboard, and the physical self dissolves into veils among veils, being halved every step it makes further out. They become, then, periacqueductal.

It is also possible that Mumler is working out an eldritch dream nightmare formation. He experienced a nightmare in his life, after that he lived in a syngogic state, where he could not tell very well what was dream and what was real. Also, in that second nightmare state, in which he lives, the primary task of dreaming or living at that level is searching for a talisman. His life therefore becomes a legend trip, and then he finds it and realizes it. At some point, he must encounter a test from the demon (of the mind) TIND-TIRH (“this is no dream, this is really happening!”–Rosemary Woodhouse)), from which either he rises to White Album (living a dream) or drops to Dark Wax (seeing monsters). These still lives of photos are talisman shots, in a state of syngogy, uncertainly awake or asleep, and the figure that appears in that state, if a psychopomp or a guide, would be wispy and dematerialized. This could very well be a “picture-in-picture” capture in principle of Mumler himself or the subject of the photo vicariously to experience the discovery of the talisman in the syngogic search, which would be very comforting.

Since syngogy equates, in my system, with third stage half-waking mesmeric state of mind, where scrying is the mode of thought, as well as the seeing of ghosts, defined as figures afar seen close at hand, at bedside, it is also correct for that phase that the ghosts are left vague and similar, if not exact matches, to leave the line and visage open to the seeing of pareidolia, which leaves the ultimate decision to one’s own construal.

To emphasize this aspect of such photos I devised a kind of spirit photos in which on my phone I set up with highlighter swipes the portrait, then close my eyes and wait for a punk to appear in CEV form in my mind. Then I tap the white highlighter into the space where the face goes, to tap out the presence of a figure. The result is highly susceptible to pareidolia, indeterminate, and as it is based totally on one’s construal impossible to deny.

(in this face I see, in fact, three faces, if the pareidolia anchor shifts from left to right, and top to bottom, I even see, between the face and the cravat a screaming figure, impromptu insight into the pareidolic origin, perhaps, of Bacon’s screaming figures, he was fascinated by Schrenk-Notzing’s ectoplasmic photos)

In looking through this corpus, I could not then resist jumping ahead to read Conan Doyle’s defense of spirit photography in the 1920s. So, fifty years later. It is a very strange book, and mostly inadmissible, dwelling as it does with obvious prejudice against slights to friends in the Crewe Circle whom he knew.

“Somehow, I circled back to spirit photography, seen now as a form of “photo brut,” and though reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s defense is impossible–it is all just highly particular rationalization protecting his friends in the Crewe Circle and the SSSP–his evidence shows that 3rd generation SP, we are now in the 20s, is very weird. As my graph, last image, shows, either the psychic oomph at work is in the photographer, in the magic camera, in the space between camera and sitter, in the sitter, or in some external spirit zone behind the sitter. My reading focuses on photographer or sitter then takes in a larger view of mind (derived preFreud from mesmerism, but which accords to 21st dream theory) that might then take in the rest. First two types, the “Look Ins,” heads floating over sitters, copies in photo space a familiar entoptic CEV*, which I have often, the Floating TV trope is a variant; but, then, others are the sprit photo equivalent to photo bombing and the weird thing is that in the 1870s the existence of a photo raised suspicion but now ACD uses a photo of deceased to prove the Lean In is real, psychically, because it looks just like the picture. When they lean in that is type 2 and they copy off another CEV but on the deeper lattice level, the They’re All Laughing At Me Circle trope, where you see all your enemies circling you in your head, so I find it bad-creepy that a device usually conveying fear and shame is construed as a good, kind thing (I like thinking of my long-deceased mother, but having her sitting over my left shoulder like a parrot? XXgvdg^#¥^€¥°✓^=={]™!!! No.(*closed eye visualizations/hallucinations if intense)”.

This copy, with a paste-on photo, even weirder

but, as noted, this is third generation spirit photos (gen 1, 1860-75; gen 2, 1900-1910; gen 3 1920-30s). The startling thing here is how much has been surrendered to reason, establishing the presence of spirit in a highly retrenched form. In all of these pictures from the Crewe Circle, in Crewe, UK–which is a small midlands town southeast of Liverpool, sort of triangulated against Manchester–it is almost as if the true attraction of the photo as photo is the depleted nature of the rendering of the person, and then the spirit appears as an exclamation point above, so, solidly in 4.

Again, my method is walking through. And this form, a small spot of spirit with a face in it, hovering over the head of the sitter, but weirdly disconnected from it, as if a voice from one of those spirits who have in Dicken’s Christmas Carol (1843) lost their power to influence human events, thus causing them to moan woefully, this is kind of spooky in the strange metaphysics of it. But, as a visual device, again to use my system, this IS a common entoptic dream form, which I experience often. It is a “punk”, which, in a CEV, inside the eye, I see float, and even, then, as it “boils,” that is, the liquid aquaeous of the eye sizzles on it, it seems to chat away to itself, only to then fade. This is also the Floating TV effect, which is a tropaic device in horror movies, nicely used by Peele in Get Out (2017) during Chris’s descent to the underthebottom. If punks are not common, nor CEVs, then it takes a certain labial quality to one’s entoptic field to envision. (this is, indeed, a skill I have had since childhood, “redreaming” movies after having seen them, and wanting them back. I would lay with my head in my pillow and redream the movie scene by scene, by visualizing it. What people visualize when they describe things, how the prose of a novel is “visualized”, this is of interest of late. *I favor, for example, and follow, artists who by a lift out of one’s own mind to visualize another’s mind do exactly this, Walter Price, Cedrick Ransom, Candice Lin, Richard Hawkins).

So, I recognize the face as a common form of entoptic phenomena. The question then is, how does it get to be externalized, if that is what is going on here? Well, that is what I think is going on here, but differently. These appearances of ghosts or spirits are so conventionally placed like an “idea lightbulb” above one’s head, but then the face itself is crowded by the iris as if peering through a black mist to the space of the sitter, this posits a belief in the presence all around of a beleaguered 5, that is, a spiritual realm on the other side of or in back of the sitter, which is as if a backstage crawlspace of this space we live in, the material world, and all about. Something like this

That is, the photographer takes the photo of the sitter, and captures a spirit behind or above him. But he does this because while they believe that the spirit is part of a whole other reality on the other side of the here and now, it is coterminous to the here and now, so more 5 than 6. Thus, the spirit is part of a reality given afterlife by it and license to move about, but somehow disconnected. Then, when summoned to visit the sitter through a photograph it can peer through the veil to make itself seen in the photo with the sitter. I think the belief in a holistic beyond, or other side, is likely anchored by the photographer being not an individual but part of the Crewe Circle, who by mutual influence of groupthink upon him, they all believe in that, has created such a unitary space in their little world. That is, he “represents” the group.

But, then too, Doyle supports a variation, where the figure comes in at an angle, shrouded,

These photos are made doubly strange by the fact that whereas in the 1870s the existence of a photograph which looked exactly like the appearance of the spirit in the spirit photograph compromised the integrity of the spirit, as it indicated then that the photography just double exposed the one over the other, here, fifty years later, Conan Doyle provides a picture of the deceased, to look as closely alike it as possible, and it is the side by side of the two that is enlisted as proof that the spirit in the photo really is the spirit! So, here is the woman in life

same woman. Then there is another one

and that ghost or spirit is shown to be real by comparison with a photo of her in life.

Then they get more involved, again.

And that creepy lower face is proven real by comparing it with a photograph of the man in life.

Why would the logic so turn that what two generations ago was proof of falsity in the present time, in the 1920s, is proof of authenticity? The conceptualization of the afterlife has changed. Again, if you as a group believe the afterlife is a world parallel to the material world superimposed as a network of crawlspaces about it, that is, a counterspace, then it follows that all that is happening in the photo is that the taking of the photo somehow opens or burns a hole in that membrane, which you can gaze through, momentarily. Then, somehow, the relative, by loving thought, is summonsed, and it is he who looks through the glory hole, to appear to you, so 5 from a darker 6. And then the personal identification proof is needed because the afterlife being a crowded place, and a crawlspace corridor as if in a haunted house in a 1930s movie is a continuous mirror space behind the walls. Well, if that is so, any old ghost can walk by and peer through the glory hole, so you need to personalize it with proof of ID. Very modern, a depleted notion of ghosts.

Thus, the forlornness of these photos, the sitter alone, with no sense of presence, and no belief in it, and then one gets a look in into the photo by a spirit, is striking. They attest to the power of the belief of the group cast through the camera as if psychically to draw the departed out, to make an appearance in a skeptical zone..

But then, too, in photos like this one, there is another new element.

and, then, in photos like this, that element takes on still another form.

The first photo, because there are two faces, confirms the belief in the group nature of life in a coterminous crawlspace conception of the afterlife. But that zone is pictured as if a cloud, or fog, and two people look out of it, one of them is the chosen relative. It is almost as if the two are fighting to be the one seen in the window, like kids trying to get on camera in a photo booth, or, today, a group selfie (and with the fad interest about a year ago in the 1.5 angle selfie). This reinforces the idea of a coherent afterlife, but more within the terms of the conceptualization of a near death experience. As the trope goes in horror movies, that experience creates a place where everyone you ever met in life, even if you have long forgotten them, are there, you to see all of them.

One model I have excavated from horror movies is the Palace of Death view of the afterlife. Verity Platt argues that the artistic rendering of crowded space and veils on Roman sarcophagi was a psychompompic idea which, based on the experience with gods in Greek temples, or in Greek incubation temples, brings you down in. Here, again, a pagan idea where the space behind the sitter manifests as funereal. Then, at some point, in deep REM, you pass into a new physical space, which I think the Romans conceptualized as seaborne, and after that swim you get to the palace of death, deep, deep in the mind, but in reality too.

In my system, I have three possibilities for how a dream can turn back into a physical reality. One, by means of ostension, or reverse reality, a theory of say a satanic cult mutilating cattle can entice some bystander to take on the disguise and become that and thus by reverse agency make the feared spirit a dread reality, new again in reality. Two, in the experience of the second nightmare in the eldritch formation, the syngogic, one does not know the difference between being awake and asleep; or then in the third nightmare, the epigogic, one literally has no idea which is which, which means nightmare can seem like reality. And, finally, three, my first formulation, after descending through hypnagogy into REM some cultures believe you can go further into what I call the thrum space, that even below hell on earth, and that becomes real and physical again too. This lies below 5, the world below not beyond.

The fact that in the above the spirit world is pictured as if a smoky foggy space, means to me that it is seen as a sort of benign version of hell on earth, a standard trope, fog, mist, etc, in horror movies. This is second level hell on earth, under the aegis of Chloros, demon god of fog and miasma.

This view of the world of spirit is a relic of old horror movies. I watched one recently, the Night of the Werewolf (1981), the hold out in the Paul Naschy series, which I do not think I had seen before. In it, the world of spirits is shown as a crawlspace within the crypts that exist in old time castles.

For example, formerly, in older movies, there was life, and then there was the afterlife. If one went down into the underworld, you entered into it. Now, the arrangement has shifted to a secondhand terrain, entering a tomb is like entering the underworld.

The world of the living equates with the palace that is connected to the tombs, and the palace itself does not quite know if it is a shrine to the dead, or an apotropaic assemblage, to keep them out, and dead (Naschy between Vlad Tepes and Eiizabeth Bathory).

The ruins of the castle become the world of the dead.

The local peasants have come to think of the castle as part of hell, an entrance to hell, which is the tombs. But, sure enough, a car full of sexy modern girls gets stopped by a deadfall of a branch in the road, then their car dies, so they venture in, almost as if into an Egyptian tomb (an idea that excited me in the 00s)

Then the art becomes the model of the form of the limits by which the dead may present themselves, they have become “sepulchertures”, you don’t know if it is a statue or a body ready to rise up

what this art-ifying of the afterlife means is that the dead and the living present themselves in a very limited way. By a protocol limited to how the dead are treated during burial and exumation, everyone becomes as if a statue

This means that lovemaking can consist solely of two statures rubbing up against each other

Then the dead or the spirit emerge by treatment of the art, the sepulcher, here a sepulcherture, treated “as if” the dead.

Then the energy of new life created also has to abide by a protocol, the lid lifts on its own into the air, without any physical stress.

Then the dead risen up, that is, the spirits, that is, equivalent of the spirits that appear in certain spirit photos, do and cannot appear as if living a life in death but simply as they might present themselves appearing and posing on the threshold, for them to wave at you, or make a grand entrance, all of it very stagy and unreal. I mean, in this rising up, Bathory is almost literally equivalent to a spirit in a spirit photograph, and she appears as if on the threshold, introduced, which consists of her as her corpse standing up.

And then these risen are always showing up like that, in smoky tableaux at doorways, threshold picturings of them only.

Then, to move in that world they require some objects to become magnetized to contribute to the idea that the materiality of this zone has been compromised and is periacqueductal, like this windblown curtain, a spirit photo if ever there was, as if the vellificatio, or ta-da, announcing an arrival.

They are as if literally nailed to their coffins, the framework of their term in death, they remain two dimensional figures of that posture.

and since appearing bedside is a traditional way for a spirit to approach one, though, that is, a dream, they can then seek out that space and manifest there too, in a limited protocol of territoriality.

And in the grand finale, Waldemar literally changes in the tomb, to then take on the limited manifestation of the spirit dead in and around her coffin only.

And when defeated she simply fades back into her previous state, when dead,

which means that her whole existence in the afterlife was as an animation of her corpse, through the agency of possible preservation provided her by the intervention of the sculpture on the lid. And by that passage she can then manifest in a spirit or spirited body form of the corpse, or, even more extreme, the dust that the corpse has returned to, to appear only as a telemon of that state, at the threshold of the living, in a formal setting. That two-d vision is the notion of the dead that frames the whole telling of the vampire and Bathory story.

All of this, then, indicates a possible construal of the afterlife, in the mindset of the Crewe Circle.

Then, the other dimension, somehow the veil enters in

This belongs to a study of a whole other class of spirit photos that Conan Doyle defends in this strange book

“­But, then, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Defense of Spirit photography, the by far weirdest photos, just as photos, are the ones that involve an ectoplasmic veil, arch, or, in picture 6, he calls it a bag! Very weird photo! This does not conform to ectoplasmic manifestations in 2nd gen spirit photos circa 1900, which saw ectoplasm as a physicalization of intense psychic energy that dribbles from nose, eyes, ears or mouth. Where to place it? That arch only appears in a spin in movies, derived from dreams, in the opisoentoptic i.e. behind the eye space, passing the seen into dream into deep brain, seeing (or imagining) this arch in the eye was a centerpiece of Blake’s visions, I’ve named it after his depiction of Antaeus*, how might the keeping of a face descend? time passing. As I learned, after time, the mind helps you get over grief by finding a comfortable place in the deeper brain to settle memory of the deceased, in the Inner Chamber (thalamus), or the Hippocampus Hall**, and so my thinking is these arches appeared over and out of the sitters having entered into that process. As for the “bag” that is the commencement of the process, they’re just starting. That last photo, no idea where that is. Can grief be photographed like this? Dreams and movies certainly think so. (*Roy Batty at the Tannhauser Gate is a variant, end of Blade Runner (1984))**by the time I had kids my mother had settled in and quite literally helped me raise them, in the form of memories, which I just copied, and it tingled more positive vibe when I didn’t even understand why)”.

In this group, he calls the veil form pictured an “ectoplasmic arch.”

Again, this might be read as a form that the photographer summonsed up, by his or her psychic ability. It might be an emanation in the contact space between two sitters in which by their shared grief they create this ectoplasmic manifestation of grief, in the folds of which the dead might appear to them. But because the veil or arch seems to have a fixed form transcendent of the relational space between sitters, sometimes coming forward in front of the sitters, and in the last two remarkable photos seemingly having a life of its own, being found out only forming, this leads me to again think we are in the same universe, the Crewe Circle as a group, by way of groupthink, created a solid surgent push of belief that opened up and in some ways created a belief in a crawlspace other side coterminous with the here and now, and the veiling is part of that reality. This is again a pagan space, as vellificatio on a Roman sarcophagus means that a god has just this minute arrived to grant you an audience.

end pf pt. 1

Nope (2022) and a brush with the god of carnage, pt. 4 of 4.

Rev., Oct 29, 30, Nov 1,2,3 2022.

The trap form incorporates elements from all the previous, so they bring in Holst from their humiliation at the soundstage. They bring in the horses from the first scare, as the instruments that will give them victory, also as bait. They bait the ground with elements from Jupe’s absurd set up, the sky dancers. They map it all out, overcovering the cenote, to make of their Hidden Valley the trap itself.

And, then, they INVITE attack, to undo it. A risky effort. This, however, is the formation I call the Daimonion. It plays out by making all the troubles they have had into magic, for them to magically work it out (this is the sort of magic, for example, that allowed Laurie Strode to take down Michael Myers with a wire hanger). The first magic aspect that OJ realizes is–reaching back to the first scene in the movie, at the sound stage–don’t look in its eyes. Thus, he understands that the UFO is sort of like a horse, it will get upset and come at you if you look it in the eyes. It cannot recognize you as prey without that look. This saves him at one point as he goes to rescue the first bait. Then, taken from Jupe, the Sky Dancers not only literally dangle in front of the UFO as bait, but inform them by their rise and fall, electrified by the presence of the UFO where it is, so they have some control over moving around in and about, maneuvering strategically.

Then, very much like the god of carnage it sweeps down, but as OJ does not look up, it apparently does not respond to or see his presence.

Then, after Holst sees it, but does not, apparently, “get the shot”, he goes after it personally, to be swept up into it. So his mania is resolved, and, somehow, his sacrifice to his vision, to see god in a UFO, causes the UFO to change form, to, that is, mature, in some way. This transformation I do not entirely understand. BUT, I did devise, in June, 2021, when I had a burst of surprising optimism, the covid nightmare apparently breaking, a construct I called Hell Frozen Over. HFO is a surprise in that it causes the nightmare epigogic seeing monster formation to back up and be by its recoil made over into positive forms. That is, when it rains it pours, when your life is reduced to the bottomless pit and life is nothing but a matryoshka formation of houses of cards getting put up and torn down over and over and over again…even then. there is hope.

In working this out, I first developed the idea of “epigogy”, the “seeing of monsters” in ambient space, after the third nightmare, in Amityville Horror 3 (1983), and that there had to be a positive aspect of overcoming too, a quote

“BUT….there must be a benign aspect of this too, no? so, let’s posit that in entering into this world, you come out of it, and this is due to being in ambient epigogy,

and IF you are able to overcome the demons, and the monsters, and not submit, then Tartarus freezes over, and becomes Frozen Hell, or as I call it Zudecca. We are now, I argue, due to the aftershocks of BLM demonstrations, the Biden Presidency, then the changes to the mediation and practice of industries due to covid lockdown and all the ultimate consequences no doubt to come, in a period of hell hath frozen over. And this is where the great positive demons are now, so seeing Blake’s Satan in ice, he is, in fact, in Tartarus

that ice then expands and the whole thing, as an effulgence of ice, LIKE IN AMITYVILLE HORROR 3D (1983), the whole of the epigogic POV of the ambient and sentient becomes Zudecca, hell frozen over, that is, a kind of heaven on earth.

and at the top of it, replacing Antaeus, who lifted you down in, you get, I think, Altmejd’s Splitting Smurf, who just might be the first time any artist has given sight of this particular daimon, or god of day, the god of today (yesterday, June 2),

so, that is where I am at, right now, coming out of covid lockdown, and in the nervous energy leading up to my possibly reentering the world (though now it has been postponed, and maybe the moment will pass), we are in Zudecca, where “religious”, agentic, hypnagogic, syn- and epagogic dream-based art is on the rise.

And another quote:

while Antaeus was up top lifting Dante down to the place of sacrifice, of the exhomophage figure, at the top of the cenote, Splitting Smurf sits below in Zudecca and his whole being, if not here a giant (perhaps some day), encompasses the entire ambient terrain, as graphed out in a scirpograph

He has four eyes because he has moved through the Tannhauser Gate to Heaven’s Gate, he sees truth and lies. He sees consciousness, and vigilogogy-hypnagogy, syngogy and epigogy. He sees the core of the mind, the adjunct spaces, the ambient and the sentient, he sees all. His pineal gland third eye is slowly splitting open, at present it looks vulvalike, he has no nose, his hands are raised in “hear no evil, speak no evil“,“ etc pose, to indicate a transmutation of sense to another level, to the seeing of the unseen, or the monstrous

He signifies, to me, crossing over into the deep spin, and into the cenote, a totally different state of imagination, way, way out and down, as has been indicated by my treatment of the ”hell on earth” trope in Mandy (2018), and other movies; and my treatment of the monsters and hallucinations in the Amityville movies, particularly 2 and 3. But the key development that came to me, in fact, right as I saw this, is that hell on earth is frozen by frozen hell, which may or may not be a good thing. The phrase, we won’t see that ;til hell freezes over means it will be a long time, but my hope is now is the time of hell freezes over, perhaps.

it follows, in my reading, that other quartzite works could be construed as figures carved out of the cenote, and, as such, effulgies, or effulgence sculptures, based on a freezing of the negative space of the cenote and all of its spins, I have mentioned the monsters coming up out of the cenote as pictured in that movie

and that and that this hellhole, the very picture of the vertiginous spin down the cenote, a peripteral phantom version of the central core of consciousness in hypnagogy

resulted in a splash of water, and then a freeze, freezing the negative space as an “effulgy“

then that blast up through the house

to freeze the radiators

cause freezing chandeliers to fall

and even send the sailfish flying

So Zudecca is in the same space as the epigogic, the place of sacrifice, the cenote, and the descent, come up from the bottom, the bottomless pit layer of hell on earth. BELOW THAT is Tartarus, and maybe more out into sentience, and it is HERE you are cast by a tyche, out of the figure eight, out of the Blue Streak, in a Mondo, down.

it is THIS that can reverse from in the bottomless pit, by way of Zudecca, to create hell frozen over.

then, when a tyche enters the picture, the figure eight is a wider loop, to sentience, and it drops down the Blue Streak, Moonfire, mondos, etc., and this in fact Tartarus, a tyche-thrown hell, created by outside forces, not constitutional, this is where Mike Kelley was. This is where the planet in Alien was, under Ash’s watch, this is the dark world of tyche.

This whole idea, however, I based on a previous conceptualization, my first on the presence of an evil overseer, what I now call a tyche figure, in Alien (1977). this takes us down to Tartarus. But, in a recent essay, working through the nature of hell in Dracula (1979) I went back to Alien for an analysis of the land of the Blue Sun. This brings to mind the half-life POV which I addressed in the Irish movie Spectre (1996) with Alexandra Paul and considered as well as Ash’s perch over the perilous outing in Alien (1977). According to this trope, a quote:

“they are overseen in their exploration of the ping by Ash in his bay window, the Blue Sun itself. The graphic space is, just like Jodorowsky’s long shot, a mis en abyme, careless of the gradations of ambient vigilogogic space. But then, the planet will have to be considered, relative to them, an ambient space, that when they land on it it drops into a spatial equivalent of hell on earth, in sentient outer space. And then when they land, they are overseen by Ash, who is suspect and later will be revealed to be death, so it IS a thanatopsis of sorts.

I suppose the only place, hypnagogically, that such a place in outer space could exist is below the bottomless pit of hell on earth, and so I have to term it Tartarus, which was a special hell below hell which was reserved solely for demiurges or gods hurled there from Olympus and imprisoned in perpetual darkness (the Greeks had to have created the idea to conform to some psychological pressure)

this is what the whole construct, everything vis a vis each other, looks like

then, so, then, we have the real bottomless pit, come to in the working of the brain, and there, there is a being, Zudecca, who can cast it back up and create of it a Hell Frozen Over state, this is, in fact, the bottomeless pit. But, then, we have the other one, the one in which you are cast down by a tyche figure, of which Ash is the emblematic form, and this casts you NOT into the bottomless pit, but into Tartarus, with “the bottomless pit” being just a part of it, and the angel of milk and honey, and this is all libation to your hope for recovered power, caught in a Tantalus situation, and so you suffer. So, there is, adjacent to each other, the real bottomless pit, with Antaeus and Zudecca presiding, and maybe overcoming, and then the Tartarus bottomless pit, where one is cast down by a tyche figure.

I touched upon the difference today in a post:

“I’ve been delving into where exactly the city at the bottom of the bottomless pit is in the mind, and having trouble coming up with names of various locales, maybe I will lift a few terms from Mike Kelley’s exploration of said zone, though it is also true, currently, I think the art of the bottomless pit looks more like Eugene von Breunchenheim’s Red City than Kelley’s Kandor, as Kelley has too much constitutional technical-societal support to drop too far in (which means that his visions are “mondos” cast into his mind by an evil tyche or fated actor, not constitutional, i.e. it needn’t have happened). If he is mapping dark LA, of course, I’m doubly interested. H&W is also sending Kelley’s Topo Gigio Topographical model to Hong Kong, where it might manifest as the angel of milk and honey supporting the city in eternal bottomlessness with its saving grace. Gigio’s creator, Maria Perego, died in 2019, obit relates that having no straight man in the act Sullivan stepped in, and, surprise, they really hit it off, it was a hit, Sullivan repeated the schtick 50plus times on his show, but, us kids? I think we thought Topo Gigio was really, really, really weird. H&W all winter, HK”.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/08/arts/television/maria-perego-dead.html

By this distinction, with some FB blurring, Bruenchenheim exists in the real bottomless pit, but, for that, has a chance to pull out, if he is guided by Antaeus and Zudecca. By contrast, Mike Kelley exists in a tyche-controlled space, with a lavish ommatidian of rhabdom zones of functionality that can be instrumentalized to address the issues of it, but this is Tartarus in the bottomless pit, not THE bottomless pit hell on earth. His imaginings of the city at the bottom of the bottomless pit is mediated by popular culture theory, by other concerns like nostalgia, by comic book commentary, he is also seeking redress, by Abgrunde. That is, it is a work of art art, while EVB is a work of outsider art. It is a matter of support, and relation with the world.

I concede here too, there is waffling. The model not yet entirely clear. In any case, OJ has his horse sense magic, don’t look at them.

So to pick up from yesterday, I see the action at the end of Nope as taking place under the aegis of Zudecca, in a natural epigogic state, seeing monsters, but able by some inner power or reserve of strength to reverse the charge and, as Zudecca, create of the Hidden Valley a saved hell frozen over.

So, the driver is more bait, bringing the UFO in

Then OJ takes it up

at this point Holst goes for it

to be swept up

It COULD be that they have been by this last drama, and the disbelief of it, been cast into the bottomless pit, and this all takes place in the bottomless pit that has temporarily been staged by them in their Hidden Valley, a benign cenote, but we’ll see, this would explain what’s to come the matryoshka effect of the final mouth, so, while the right hand side analysis is possible, so is the other, on the left, because this whole series of events would feel like being caught in a negative magic bad miracle chain reaction of one bad thing after another which takes place in the bottomless pit tearing you down for you only then be able by magic to repel it in form by some reverse power. Or something like that

it starts, all of a sudden, just there, Em running from it

but it remains. This agitation causes the UFO animal to bloom or blossom into a deep sea type creature in the sky. Again, I have a vague sense of having seen this before, but I cannot place it. In any case, in terms of preexisting forms in the psychomachia, thus far it would trace over the forms of the figure eight and the Blue Streak sky, overcovered with hell frozen over positive energy flowing back up through it.

And, then, the big surprise is that they do not actually win, on their turf. In fact, OJ does not kill the beast, it is Em that does that. She drives off, by again the odd surprise of the TMZ intruder giving her a means to get out, the motorcycle, and she takes it on a run back to Jupe’s Claim, and so we see it loom over that.

And then, out of nowhere, but cleverly, she understands that some things plastic, like flags, or sky dancers, mess it up, cause it indigestion. So she sends the Big Boy balloon aloft, cuts it loose, to float free, as a new devised, unplanned for, impromptu bait to counter it mano a mano in the sky, two balloon like entities at war, like in Hell’s Angels (1930).

And it is important that when she shows up “in Dodge”, and at High Noon on the main street of this Dodge

She is wearing the caution police scene tape that she has broken through to do something. She is transformed (this could be a tacit comment on police and what good they are to the Black imagination, at present, even though the idiocy of the Defund the Police rhetoric in the euphoria of the performative outpouring of fanfare in 2020 likely cost us this election), SHE becomes the hero, the gunslinger, and not only does she put the weapon up, and it work, but she also realizes that if Holst is gone she has one last chance to get the Oprah shot and that is with the direct technical descendent off of a clade line in the lineage of the Well Camera shot looking up from it. well, this has to be the Bottomless Pit shot, and SHE then is the angel of milk and honey who not only kills it but gets the shot.

And, perfectly, so that she can tell her grandchildren years from now, and this now reminds me of the devised device that Red Buttons made to catch a tree full of monkeys in Hatari! (1964), she not only gets the thing to eat Big Boy.

the representative of Jupe

and explode, but she gets that confrontation, mano a mano, balloon to balloon

ON CAMERA, the Oprah shot, to make her name for herself ever after.

success

It then makes the mistake, eating rubber, so it is defeated almost in the magic way the aliens way back at the beginning of UFO movies, in War of the Worlds (1953) were undone, them by the common cold, these aliens by something we take totally for granted.

exploding

Since this is a reverse effect pushed onto the monster by a hell frozen over device, as if pacifying it, it is also done from the bottom of the well, which represents the most literal modern-day descent technically of their prototype vision of the camera taking pictures of the Negro jockey, For that the well is of the bottomless pit, making, in fact, her, AND THE UFO, transformed into an angel, defanged, before killing, and killed by plastic, again, the easy magic defeat of the monster, as in a dream, the very manifestation of the angel of milk and honey, the saving grace, destroying it, victory.

And I say this too because it is in this phase, and see my essay on Men (2022), this past summer, that the matryoshka (Russian doll) formation forms, and the mouth of it, green, coming out, box after box, like a reverse and extension of Jupe’s spectacle box, his holding pen, that too is a form of bottomless pit consciousness, which perhaps is more typical of UFO as opposed to horror movies.

Though I at present work out the daimonion of the final sequence tentatively, if it is in fact a daimonion formation cast back by the angel of milk and honey into the hell frozen over form of epigogy above, to become, as it were, fourth level consciousness, cosmogogy, which turns the movie into a more optimistic essay, through the movie features exquisitely crafted shots and scenes, excellent use of tropes, with Peele as usual seeming to have an encyclopedic knowledge thereof, this is what I have come up with for now. And then there is a strong building action, if not explicitly an eldritch formation, peaking at one of the supremely scary scenes in recent American film, and then to top it all off there is a strong sense of the demonic and the psychodynamic. Peele is aware that a UFO movie results from the interference in the human mind by a tyche controller, a bad actor, especially in paranoid minds in a condition of grief or crisis. This spins out special horrors, and, overall, ends up with the movie being another document of the helter skelter psychogeography of the space of the movies in and around the dream of Hollywood seen as the sunset in the American west.