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The Emergence of Hyperstition
Chris Shambaugh (and Maudlin Cortex)1
According to the tenets of Hyperstition, there is no diference
in principle between a universe, a religion, and a hoax. All involve an engineering of manifestation, or practical iction,
that is ultimately unworthy of belief. […] Because the future
is a iction it has a more intense reality than either the present
or the past.
— Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
No one knows exactly when or how the Cybernetic Culture
Research Unit, or Ccru, came about. Even less is understood
of who (or what) speaks through it. Its existence has been denied more than once, and despite repeated attempts to excise
all record of its strange intellectual and aesthetic experiments
from institutional histories, it always seems to return, each
strain more virulent than the last.
— Prue Nort
1. Note from the editors: We asked Mr. Shambaugh if he could elaborate on the concept of hyperstition following his presentation in a similar vein at the Aesthetics After Finitude conference in February,
2015. After ignoring our emails for months, we inally received a single reply from him containing the
following line: ‘My original endeavour, inding the solution to the problem of “explaining” hyperstition
is being annexed, if not virulently rerouted, by anonymous forces.’ The email carried an attachment
containing an article titled ‘The Krakatoan Chimera’, which was supposedly written by one Chaim
Horowitz. We wrote to Mr. Shambaugh asking for clariication regarding the contents of the attachment but to no avail. After much deliberation, we have decided to publish the Horowitz document in this
volume, along with a transcription of the annotations that accompanied it, without alteration.—Eds.
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‘The Krakatoan Chimera’
Chaim Horowitz
THE LEMURIAN TURN
Echidna Stillwell spent much of her young life haunted by recurring nightmares
of gargantuan explosions, chthonic tsunamis, and atolls swallowed whole. By
the age of 18 she came to understand these nightly terrors as direct transmissions from the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa in the South Indies—an event she
would later describe as the biggest bang heard on this earth within living memory. At the time of this realization, in 1911, Stillwell was one year into a Bachelor’s
Degree at the Pembroke Women’s College in Providence, Rhode Island. Due in
part to annoyance with her peers, as well as her anomalous nightlife, Stillwell
became enraptured by the writings of Sigmund Freud.
While in Providence, she found herself compelled by the mechanics of
various Semitic languages, developing a suspicion that many ancient dialects
were not just elegantly stripped down communication devices:, but perhaps
simply more efective instruments for contact.(:) This idea led her to seek out
one George Gammel Angell—the Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages at Brown—with whom she spent long hours contemplating linguistic redundancies in the English language, intently considering topics such as the
anthropomorphic listlessness of vowels and primitive logograms. These exchanges with Professor Angell would turn out to be far more constitutive than
she could have known at the time. Meanwhile, the torments of Krakatoa returned more ferociously with every night, eventually resulting in a premonition that the surviving cultures of the Krakatoan explosion were somehow
ailiated with the long lost continent of Lemuria, an enduring topic of fascination with Stillwell.::
:
Not unlike those ‘deviation-amplifying’ runaway processes described by Magoroh Maruyama in
his 1963 paper The Second Cybernetics, hyperstition surfaces as all runaway systems do, efectuating both
qualitative and quantitative alterations in the perceptible. For this reason, formalizing hyperstition as
a concept is quite an ironic venture, as the temptation to systematize its ‘deviation-amplifying’ operations, will inevitably bring on ‘deviation-counteracting’ gestures. The bottom line is that no one wanted
to draw attention to autopoiesis in a time of war and uncertainty, preferring to see in Maruyama’s diagnosis a stabilizing potential. (I’m reminded of Ian Hacking’s ‘looping efects’, wherein expertly constituted descriptive or diagnostic categories regarding human behavior are assimilated, taken on by the
subjects under scrutiny, thereby hyperstitionally ratifying and inlating the original iction, resulting in
ratcheting pathologies and the “making up of people”. You get the picture. It’s an escalational self-fulilling paradigm.) Anyway, the heated up runaway is the kind of positive feedback Wiener was deathly
afraid of and what hyperstition requires.
(:)
‘There is a basic diference between communication and contact; communication is designed to
avoid contact, to establish a distance across which communication can take place. Contact involves
identiication with the creature you contact, and this can be very painful.’ - WSB
::
Bateson called it schismogenesis, either escalatory or de-escalatory, but most deinitely runaway. It
could be brought on via a cargo cult scenario, typiied by the sudden arrival of an alien artifact (or hyperstitional carrier) that contagiously revalences the ield of relations constituting the invaded culture, desperately seeking to stabilize (rationalize) the anomaly’s origin and function. Homeostasis, the perpetu-
It is worth remembering that the turn of the century generated much confusion surrounding the existence of Lemuria, although Stillwell had fortunately discovered the necessary reading materials. A most signiicant misapprehension arrived in the leap year of 1896, when the British photographer August le
Plongeon equated Mu with Atlantis—the treasured island of the West. By the
early 1920s Stillwell’s diary indicates that she was engaged in readings of the
Russian occultist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine—a highly inscrutable tome, but one which fully convinced Stillwell that Lemuria not only
preceded Atlantis, but that this Western island was likely to have been nothing
more than a peninsula of the far more substantial Lemurian megacontinent. It
was then through documentation of Captain Mission’s explorations in Madagascar that she discovered that the aboriginal word for ‘lemur’ translated directly to ‘ghost’. Despite more credible accounts of Lemuria coming from both
the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel and the English Zoologist Phillip Sclater,
it was not until 1931, with the publication of James Churchward’s The Lost Continent of Mu, that the forgotten landmass was solidiied as a Paciic continent far
older than Plato’s precious Atlantis.
By the late 1920s Stillwell was living amongst the tribes which survived the
Krakatoan calamity; having sailed through the Sunda Strait in 1925 in search
of an explanation, if not a cure, for her own incessant torment by the caldera.
Her early ieldwork there not only conirmed suspicions that the Land of Mu,
or Lemuria, had indeed existed, but more remarkably that the tribal communities there held signiicant residual strains of the ancient Muvian polyculture.
((:))
Over the next few years of concentrated island hopping, Stillwell came into
contact with a multilateral set of tribal peoples, all of which shared an orientaal regulation of a system through adaptation and incorporation of noise, was more convivial to Wiener,
who invented cybernetics (hijacking Ampère’s hijack of the Greek kubernesis) to prosecute it, smack dab
in the middle of WWII: communication and control between human and machine, very much prophetic of the inhuman modulatory capacities of digital technologies which capture and reigure in order to better predict and contain. Not to mention the cyborg feedback loops promoted by self-tracking
devices…
((:))
Templexing—time folding—is central to hyperstition, as it exposes the control structures dependent on linear accumulation (language being a particularly insidious perpetrator). Brion Gysin and
William S. Burroughs invented the cut-up in order to warp the binding lines of time, which constrain
thought by forcing it into language-encoded linearity (WSB later picked up on Alfred Korzybski’s general semantics, which included elucidations of mankind as a ‘time-binding’ class of life). Cut-ups are excellent germinal sources for potential hyperstitions, missives from the future—‘when you cut into the
present the future leaks out’—detonated preemptively. WSB also worked with tape recorders, playing
back edited concoctions in public situations to trigger concomitant efects—to induce a real event out
of a reproduction. Furthermore, he understood the following basic fact: If the arrow of chronological
time is deined as entropic and irreversible by the second law of thermodynamics, and all complex beings are self-organizing, then they embody temporal reversal. In observing the manifold tractability of
this temporal lip, coincidences detach from serendipity, and intensify.
The China Syndrome, a ilm released March 16 1979 documenting the partial meltdown of a ictional nuclear reactor hyperstitionally brought about the very real partial meltdown of a reactor on Three
Mile Island (near Harrisburg, PA) March 28 1979, some 12 days later. Details regarding both cases were
too proximate to be the product of coincidence, the most extraordinary being the malfunctioning of
coolant-level indicators which led to nearly fatal human overcompensation in ilmic space and in “reality” (understanding the luid nature of the latter term). Indeed, WSB had correctly identiied the volatile nature of speculative incursions into chronoportational modalities.
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tion towards number so confounding, she deemed it utterly indigestible for the
western mind.(:):
With her only reference being the weathered journals of an explorer by the
name of Cecil Curtis (who had himself died in the great Krakatoa eruption),
Stillwell was able to identify two of three tribes by utilizing and adopting Curtis’ overarching classiication of the ‘N’Ma’. While the actual etymology of this
truncated designation remains unclear, some academics have since come to believe that it refers to a ‘people of Nomo’.
The following description from The Vault of Murmurs, Stillwell’s retrospective
account of her experiences living amongst these proto-aboriginal peoples, ofers
an invaluable description of the state of the N’Ma at this moment:
By the time I arrived in Indonesia, the tripartite N’Ma system was in
shreds. In totally annihilating one tribe—Curtis’s Tak N’Ma—and all but
destroying another—the Dib N’Ma—the 1883 explosion of Krakatoa had
wrecked the complex web of social exchange on which the Mu had traditionally depended.
In Stillwell’s eyes, the Mu were the overarching cultural wellspring of the N’Ma
and furthermore, as noted in her diary, ‘that Transitional Paciic interculture
providing a mainline conduit for Lemurian inluences into human history.’
Captivated by what she described as ‘a ixation on the intrinsic materialism of
number’, Stillwell set out to study the atypical spatio-temporal practices(::) of the
Muvian people, with hopes of reconstructing their cultural sensibilities.
Complicating coincidences further, Stillwell noticed that Cecil Curtis’ journal entries had also identiied peculiar customs of dream sorcery amongst the
(:):
Apophenia—conventionally lagged as a pathological misrecognition of meaningful agglomerations of information within noise—may be positively valenced in terms of its capacity to ind new patterns and therefore invent the future. It’s a thin line between creativity and paranoia. (The obligatory
Lovecraftian premonition: ‘The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human
mind to correlate all its contents…some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up
such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from
the revelation or lee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.’) Didn’t the godfather of cybernetic anthropology Gregory Bateson state that ‘all that is not information, not redundancy, not form and not restraints is noise, the only possible source of new patterns’?
(::)
Where time folding is concerned, the numerous cases of plagiarism by anticipation unearthed by literary anachronism hunter, Pierre Bayard, loudly beckon. Due to normative habits in thinking the arrow of time in one direction only—forwards—Bayard contends that an entire realm of speculation has
been unnecessarily occluded, setting into motion a chronoportational framework in which the idea of
past authors literally plagiarizing from the as-yet-unborn becomes plausible. Read that pilfered passage in Maupassant that Bayard alleges was ripped of from (the chronologically subsequent) Proust,
an anamnetic sequence redolent of madeleine rememoration. Resonating weirdly within its context,
like a case of standard linear time plagiarism, it begs to be found out; the attempt to disguise the theft
by coating this most Proustian of precognitions with Maupassant’s usual dysphoric mien only further
compounds this intuition, which ends up over-ratifying a certain form of paranoid reading which escapes the boundaries of the speciic case to metastasize across all future literary engagement.
As oft underlined, future authors (pseudonymously) regularly chronoportate their work into the past
in order to induce qualitative bifurcations, either through the ampliication of existing weak signals or
the implantation of radically alien constructs which have no basis on which to be evaluated. Bayardian Operators would then be those particular carriers instituting avant-la-lettre insinuations whose particular stickiness helps them circulate and gain traction, priming for realities which thereby become
increasingly inevitable. The alien order of time is concealed within the folds of literature (WSB would
concur) and only discoverable through both exo- and eso-teric readings.
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Muvians. While her letters indicate that the nocturnal ruptures in her unconscious had dissipated dramatically since she had arrived there, Curtis’ observations on dream witchery triggered an awfully disturbing thought for her, which
she portrayed as ‘the vicious possibility, not that I had never been awake, but that
I have already died’. This rumination was purportedly short lived, however.:::
Carrying on as the excellent scholar she was, Stillwell began to perceive the
exactitude of Curtis’ relections. In a letter dating June 21, 1933, Stillwell proclaimed: ‘It is utterly evident that Mu culture is indeed based on a system of
dream magic, in which the Nago—or dream witch… holds a central, oracular
role.’(:)(:) Stillwell’s notes suggest that the vast majority of the Mu sought out the
dream witch’s wisdom by visiting her temple, and that on the night following the
ceremonial trial, would receive a ‘nagwi’, or dream visit.
It was around this time that Stillwell began to consider the intense possibility that one of these dream witches had interfered with her own destiny on
Earth. With serendipity out of the question, she asked the Mu elders for permission to approach the Nago’s temple (‘[t]hey greeted [her] entreaty with the same
sense of fated inevitability with which they seemed to accept all matters’). According to Stillwell, what transpired after her encounter with the Nago simply
could not be reconciled by any account of the unconscious ever encountered in
language.
THE NUMOGRAM
Although her retroactive descriptions of the Nagwi visit were fantastical to
say the least (even at times illegible, to be honest), what was unveiled to Stillwell
amongst the Mu N’ma was no neurochemical hiccup:
As I looked down at my hands, they became translucent, and I saw, inscribed into impossible geometries on the dream cave’s wall beyond, an
arrangement of ten circles, a number of smaller circles, and a series of interconnecting lines. This was my irst encounter with what came to be
called the Numogram.
Dr. Echidna Stillwell liked to remind me that even though she’d begun
sketching the twinning orbs and their circuitous lows before the phantasm faded, there was absolutely no need, as it had been branded in her mind. She began
describing the occurrence as a ‘a labyrinth in which my fate, that of the N’Ma,
Cecil Curtis, and more cosmic presences had always been tangled together’, insisting that the igure had not been constructed or preconceived by any mind
Power operates most efectively not by persuading the conscious mind, but by delimiting in advance what can be experienced. Recall the Escher-like staircase in Inception (a thoroughly instructive
ilm for the oneirically minded hyperstitionist) which harbors a gap inaccessible to the dreamer. As long
as the model is transparent—it remains unavailable for objective processing (as during waking consciousness)—it can simulate expansiveness while maintaining tightly scripted, policed boundaries.
(:)(:)
Hyperstitional entities are indiferent to explanation or signiication, only concerned with access, operating at the right nexus. (Schopenhauer got it too, in The Art of Being Right, a rhetorical arsenal keyed to winning an argument, not arguing for immutable truths.) Any reality frame is thereby provisionalized in the name of pragmatic engagement rather than epistemological hesitation. Friedrich
Hayek, inluential doyen of the Mont Pèlerin economic cabal, would agree that in a world indeterminably knowable analysis has its limits. You have to act; make a cut.
:::
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or body, but was rather a key embedded in the numeric undercurrents of matter itself. ((:)):
Stillwell’s faith in the unremitting diagrammatic exactness of the Numogram led her to think that it had the capacity to arise from any alphanumeric culture in history. She would excitedly tell me things like, ‘number is crucial
for discovering the real boundaries under which we operate’. Throughout the
1930s and 40s, she navigated the South-East Asian cultural matrix seeking to
unveil how the Numogram was invoked in Lemurian times—while also exploring how it might be of use to the present. Eventually she determined speciic passages through the Numogram’s contours, allowing her to begin a reconstruction
of the decimal-based language of the Mu-N’ma, which lead to her famous assertion, ‘N’ma culture cannot be decoded without the key provided by the Lemurian Time-Maze’. Frankly Stillwell’s ethnographic analysis of Muvian numeracy during this period was nothing short of path breaking.(((:)))
In an unpublished paper from the summer of 1935, she announced that
‘each numeral had a true name (although based on sounds intractable to modern human physiology)’, asserting that these ‘source words [were] derived from
[an] ‘Ur-Nma’ culture, [which] provided the names of the decimal numerals
and [their] basic morphological components [for] the entire Mu-Nma language
(Munumuese)’. After identifying forty-ive distinct pathways between the Numogram’s ten zones,(:):: she began unraveling the numeric phoneticism of each
((:)):
One always acts within an assemblage, a collective, in which machines, objects, and signs are at
the same time agents. The anonymous agent (for instance, in Valéry’s conception of a history without
authors) produces ruptures by diferentially suring combinatorial processes. This collective investment
can lead to the creation of an egregor (cf. Vodun ritual), an independent thought-form which may or
may not be intentionally actualized, and which communicates with its adherents, who in turn modulate it via feedback. The entity often outlives its initial collaborators (think of corporate concoctions, political parties, media celebrities, any long-term myth sustenance) and will continue thriving as long as
its components are periodically reenergized. The way in which the intensive gradient of a war belongs
to the latter rather than to any of the constitutive parties is a profoundly egregoric phenomenon. ‘John
Frum’ was an egregor hovering over Tanna (New Hebrides) that ended up becoming naturalized, institutionalized (reterritorialized!) in a political party in the 1950s. Dubbed an ‘urumun’ (spirit medium),
‘John Frum’ was/is a middleman, a servitor, a hermetic messenger travelling between the living and
the dead mirroring the escapades of the original Frum, a temporarily human vector connecting America and Tanna.
(((:)))
The number 9 holds absolutely no value in the digital reduction of the Assyro-Babylonian occult
practice of Gematria (meaning that 9 can be eliminated from any complex kabbalistic reduction). Due
to the fact that the division of zero by any number results in ininity, Zone-0 of the Numogram is necessarily paired with Zone-9—due to an elementary nine-sum coupling decimal procedure called zygonovism. This twinning process both divides and binds the ten decimal numerals (0-9) into ive syzygys, or numeric twins. Basically each number designates a zone, and each numeric zone is coupled with
its pair, and the smaller lines (considered channels), result from the simple addition of a numeral’s component naturals. By subtracting a smaller number from a bigger number within a syzygy, a current is
formed. Although Echidna was not always the most lucid with words, the neolemurian scholar Lendl
Barcelos remains especially clear: ‘The Numogram’s profundity arises from basic arithmetic, in that its
entire structure results from adding or subtracting the ten decimals running from 0 through 9. Imposing no rules that aren’t already in the numeric operations themselves, it also decouples the arbitrary attributions of numerology.’
(:)::
Designed to avoid capture by pre-established codes, hyperstition not only reveals the exceptional
arbitrariness of many belief systems in place, but the unavoidable departure from thought that occurs
when any belief is accepted or dismissed. Hyperstition as strange attractor of unbelief induces engagement with concepts that defer judgment. (“I don’t believe in it but it works.”) It is through the praxis of
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channel in the Lemurian decimal labyrinth, arriving at the conclusion that each
of the forty-ive corridors circulating the Numogram’s transits were actually
hosted by distinct (albeit dormant) demonic denizens.(:(:))
By drawing out the Numogram, and following its channels, Stillwell became convinced she could unlock its gates—summoning a legion of unimaginably ancient, time-travelling insurgents. Although I had come to trust her notion
that the central region of the Numogram was in fact a hydraulic arena of chronological time, and was even willing to conceive of the Numogram (as a whole)
as a map of time—I remained labbergasted by the notion that there were forty ive primeval demons occupying the transits (running from any one isolated
decimal zone to all other possible zones available to it).
So in January 1949, in the former Burmese capital of Yangon (a city bearing the curious translation ‘End of Strife’), I journeyed to test this most audacious hypothesis with one of my own. Across a table covered with spironomic
diagrams and rhizomatic manuscripts, I handed Echidna my irst rendition of
what I was calling the Old Book—an ancient Munumese text that I had recently lifted from the Mu Archive in Tibet (and then feverishly translated). I had
travelled there to entrust my irst version to Stillwell, because I was certain she
was the only person who could safely deliver the document to a new acquaintance of ours. This was the retired naval captain and occultist, Peter Vysparov.
Although Vysparov had been intently following Stillwell’s ethnographic work on
the N’Ma for decades, Stillwell had not heard of him, or his Lemurian proclivities, until this transaction. Directly following Vysparov’s reception of the package containing my B manuscript (now known as The Book of Paths), he initiated
a most fortuitous correspondence with Dr. Echidna Stillwell, which lasted from
mid March to late May 1949. After many years of searching, I inally acquired
this exchange, containing many of the missing pieces in what I would like to call
the Krakatoan Chimera.
PANDEMONIUM
In the irst letter, Peter began by conveying his exceptional interest in Stillwell’s research, before relaying a very recent and highly destabilizing encounter
of his own, which took place amongst the Dib-Nma of Eastern Sumatra. Apparently he had been deployed to the region to catalyze a local insurgency against
the Japanese occupation. Vysparov promptly admitted to having relied upon
Stillwell’s research there, with the goal of harnessing the sorcerous practices of
the local witchcraft in order to incapacitate the enemy garrison. What followed
was no routine insurrection, but rather a sorcerous war resulting in atrocious
unbelief that the hyperstitious are said to hold their premonitions at bay.
(:(:))
The ‘time-circuit’ is occupied by three of the Numogram’s ive primary, syzygetic demons—Katak (4::5), Oddub (7::2), and Murmur (1::8). Both the lower and higher realms exist outside of sequential
time, considered by the two respectively as ‘the Plex’ and ‘the Warp’ (these are the provinces of the other two principal Lemurian demons—occupied by Djinxx (3::6) and Uttunul (0::9)). She referred to the
demons (or eventually, lemurs) within the Time-Circuit as Chronodemons; those that only circulate in
the outer gulfs are Xenodemons, and inally those crossing all three expanses of the Numogram were
Amphidemons.
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mental breakdowns: ‘from leadership dysfunction… to berserk derangement(::):
and paranoid ravings, culminating in suicide’. The successful episode, however
horriic, left Vysparov irrevocably fascinated by the fact that the Dib-Nma sorcerers were ‘able to telepathically communicate extreme conditions of psychotic dissociation’. After imparting his sincere admiration for Stillwell, and also
thanking her for relaying my text, Vysparov closed the letter by describing the
dates surrounding the Sumatran ordeal as strikingly Lovecraftian.
While Stillwell had never met the reclusive H.P. Lovecraft during her time
in New England, she knew his writings through and through, and had in fact
even engaged in a leeting correspondence with the man. However, she had
sensed an excessive and irrational terror((:))(:) in Lovecraft’s tone (which she described to me as ‘unusually hygienic racial paranoia’) and thus cut of their
communications.
I remember how distressing Vysparov’s letter was for Stillwell, as it was clear
evidence that the Indonesian conlicts were further devastating the long alicted peoples of the N’Ma. Nevertheless, in her irst response, Stillwell agreed
that the dates in question possessed not only strong Lovecraftian resonances,
but overtly Lemurian ones as well. While mid to late March (the period of the
Spring Equinox) is of course explicitly emphasized in ‘The Call of Cthulhu’—it
was also what she called ‘the intense-zone of Nma time ritual’. Vysparov’s next
letter opened with some lingering thoughts on his encounter with Dibbomese
Sorcery. He wrote of an ‘occult ammunition manufacture’, ‘complete personality disintegration’, and then hurdled a much heavier thought: ‘Dibbomese sorcery does not seem to be at all interested in judgments as to truth or falsity, it
appears rather to estimate in each case the potential to make real.’:::: Although
Stillwell responded respectfully, her letter was undeniably critical.
In short, she was concerned Vysparov was potentially reducing Nma sor(::):
Think about the way in which (artiicially-generated) anticipation bleeds into, infects, shapes the
present while functioning as a probehead for potential future events. It’s the essence of hype. The amygdala, emotional nexus of the brain, is adjacent to the hippocampus, lodging both hard drive and information retrieval mechanisms. Anamnestic experiences fuse the two in mutual excitation. Add signiicant portions of the frontal lobe involved in planning and impulse control and you have a machine for
hyperstitional entrainment.
((:))(:)
The integrity of a hyperstitional carrier is never relevant, only its capacity to conjure the desired
efects, which assemble in the absence of discernable causes, much like within certain Vodun practices
(as documented by Walter Cannon) that induce fatal biological consequences. The route is through the
amygdala, the ‘audition-to-fear’ pathway, lubricated by cultural underpinnings. (The manner in which
deprogramming efectively retroproduces the ofending program is another classic efect-before-cause
scenario. Recall that regressive hypnotherapy historically preceded the appearance of false memory
syndrome!)
::::
Peirce’s idea of abduction—‘leading away’ (ab + ducere)—is at the core of his hyperstitional pragmatics. Thought becomes stiled when negative feedback reigns. Abductive reasoning does not need to
follow logically from self-evident observables or premises at hand (as with deduction), or from excluded
but necessarily implicated information (as with induction), being untethered to initial conditions, and
although not analogous to discovery or justiication, it is deeply intertwined with both. CSP sought to
jumpstart alien vectors of investigation by changing headings abductively, without the beneit of provable theorems to lead the way. The British cyberneticists (bless their idiosyncratic minds) rejected the
statistical, quantifying methods made possible by data correlation. Grey Walter (among them) knew the
complexities of the world could only be accosted through materially contingent, temporally pressured
interventions.
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cery, ‘to mere magic, or the imposition of change in accordance with the will’.
While this seems like an easy misinterpretation to arrive at, Stillwell considered it catastrophically Western, and moreover a crude divergence from her
life’s work. Nevertheless, the exchange continued, perhaps climaxing with Vysparov’s communiqué of May 7, 1949:
Here in Massachusetts we have been convening a small Lovecraft reading-group, dedicated to exploring the intersection between the Nma
cultural constellation, Cthulhoid contagion, and twisted time-systems.
We are interested in iction only insofar as it is simultaneously hyperstition—a term we have coined for semiotic productions that make themselves real—cryptic communications from the Old Ones, signaling return: shleth hud dopesh.((::))
Although Echidna Stillwell had always been wary of reading groups, Vysparov’s enterprise caught her attention. As someone who had committed her
life to the most urgent invariances, Dr. Echidna Stillwell was well aware that
superstition only ever scratched the surface of reality. This notion of hyperstition,
however, had strong Lemurian current, and got its grip on her.
While Stillwell had assumed Vysparov had read bits and pieces of her ethnographic work on Lemurian sorcery, she was startled that he had encountered
as much as he had.(:)(:): Although oddly lattered by Vysparov’s bold claim that
her ‘recovery of the Lemurodigital Pandemonium Matrix’, was none other than
the implicit wellspring for Abdul Alhazred’s fabled Kitab al-Azif (known as The
Necronomicon by most Western occult-dealers), she still found it, ‘absurd to imagine that Lemurian Pandemonium has One purpose or function’. While her inal response to Vysparov did not at all imply commitment to this newly inaugurated reading group, she nonetheless congratulated him for the daring venture.
Stillwell had always presumed Lovecraft’s writings were more factional
than ictional, not only because the narratives oscillate between real and imaginary events, but simply since she had met several of his ‘characters’ in person.
In fact, she once told me that the most excessively hyperbolized ictional quantities in Lovecraft’s writing were simply outcomes of missing information, if not
explorations cut short. Aware that much work had to be done in decoding Lovecraft’s mythos, not to mention the many zones and channels of the Numogram,
she thus closed her letter to Vysparov of May 28, 1949 conveying her profound
interest in how these events all converged around hyperstition. There she wrote,
(:)(:):
Reality potency is a function of consistency, but a lair for staging helps. One should strive towards the construction of a consistent world that performs the reterritorializing necessary for hyperstition to take efect, inevitably requiring the mimicry of epistemological and formalist hierarchies and
patterns by which something can be ratiied into conceptual solidity. Any kind of nonsense or synthetic
iction as long as it’s pressured through sense-making formalisms, protocols, narrative, institutional logics, parasites on them, can be successfully transitioned into efectiveness. You remember the “Welfare
Queen” hyperstition that Reagan amped (dredged) up in order to justify the decimation of a social program? Or cyberspace, ictionalized by Gibson in 1984, then conjured into being via extensive investment in the concept. Then there was that Bush administration oicial: ‘We’re an empire now, and when
we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act
again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re
history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’
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‘Hyperstition strikes me as a most intriguing coinage. We thought we were making it up, but all the time the Nma were telling us what to write—and through
them’. As with the Numogram, it would seem that hyperstition was not something that could be attributed to Vysparov, or anybody else for that matter. (:::)
Stillwell presumed the preix of this word was derived from ‘hypodermic’
(beneath the skin), but also approached this assumption cautiously— wondering whether this concept’s potency wasn’t also connected to hype (recent American slang for trick or swindle). Either way, she was amazed by the sheer grammatical rarity of a neologism that sought to outstrip its suixation without any
recourse to allusion or metaphor. Mindful that any entry into language entailed
overcoding, she felt hyperstition was a concept that required delicate usage,((:))::
and decided that if it were to be employed at all, it would require covert engagement, as well as diversions. Cognizant that the word fact evolved from the Latin for fabrication, and the word person from mask, she understood that hyperstition
could only be entrusted to the most depersonalized ‘individuals’.
THE RIFT
It has now been over forty years since this exchange took place. I am writing
this to tell the real Stillwell story. Having inally defeated the Vysparov estate
in court, we are now in the process of publishing their correspondence in full.
Roughly nine years ago, Stillwell vanished from the face of the earth.
What really happened between Stillwell and Vysparov? In the early 1970s—
largely due to Vysparov’s support—Echidna had been appointed Chair of the
Hydro-History department at MVU (MIT’s short-lived interdisciplinary appendage in Cambridge, Massachusetts). Vysparov’s enduring enthusiasm, however, had the gradual efect of discrediting Stillwell’s work via contamination
with his own questionable interests. As rumours began to spread that her data
had been falsiied she recorded the receipt of several ominous ‘cease and desist’
letters in her diary, mentioning—leetingly, as if paranoia had made her doubt
All epistemic activity composing a particular hyperstition needs cryptographic dispersement if
it is to prove its contaminatory mettle. Hyperstitional carriers simulate personalities in order to consolidate a node of anegoic cognitive consistency: to think what no natural ego can. (Caillois’ psychasthenic, de-pathologized: ‘I know where I am, but I do not feel as though I’m on the spot where I ind
myself.’) Carriers can be coincidence magnets, attractors, ferreting out previously veiled, subliminal
linkages. They can attach themselves to other entities, holding them together in a correlative bind, resulting in a permanent fusional parasitic-syzegetic contamination. (Remember the lead up to GWII
and the terms Atta, Prague, Saddam, 9/11 hanging out across vast swaths of media. It’s only a matter
time before you ascribe causal solidity to these relations, möbius-like, without anyone knowing the difference.) They can also be programmed to hijack existing (read: consistently deployed) symbols that already compress a preexisting set of relations and trajectories, normative temporalities and continuities,
keeping in mind the thresholds above and beneath which such symbols shed their identity. Carriers are
props articulating the ambiguous zones between the perceptual experience of actual reality and what
can be imagined.
((:))::
Hyperstition beneits as much from smoke and mirrors as it does from collective excitation. Hyperstitional transmissions are always autocatalytic. The hyperstitional investment of Jerusalem as Holy
City with a speciic historical destiny entails certain geopolitical consequences. Likewise in inance:
The Black-Scholes-Merton Model (in option pricing theory) becomes an engine (prescriptive) rather
than a camera (descriptive). Derivatives are themselves hyperstitional. They are ictional quantities—
no longer pegged to anything materially substantial like the gold standard (Nixon unmoored the US dollar in 1971)—transmuted into an efective world-historical force.
(:::)
Chaim Horowitz
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her own intuitions—the fact that each of the letters had been sealed with a
strange insignia ‘comprising ive spheres arranged in the form of a cross’. Tragically, the university began to distance itself from Stillwell’s career, and volumes
of unpublished writings on Muvian folklore never saw the light of day.
Just weeks before her disappearance, I received what is considered to be
her inal letter. Dr. Edward Blake—the author of a forthcoming Stillwell biography—is convinced that the letter is authentic and contains many of ‘Stillwell’s characteristic stylistic traits’, perhaps most notably her typically serpentine handwriting … but to this day I remain suspicious. The letter of March 6,
1980 reads:
Chaim,
Despite considerable eforts, Vysparov and his Atlantean brothers will not
rest without capitalizing on the Lemurian device. I had always thought
he seemed too academic, but somehow convinced myself that his didactic
compulsions were a militaristic tactic, if not just a remarkable sense of humor. Unfortunately, it is now dreadfully clear that he has had ulterior allegiances all along.
In order to protect hyperstition from encroaching tedium, we are in need
of a suicient detour, a sort of smokescreen. Do you recall the Phonocleric? “Liars retain respect for the truth”? Displace illation for the sake
of transmission. A rigorous unfolding of the labyrinth (in all its folds) remains key, but for the sake of the last Lemurians, all processes intrinsic to
hyperstitional praxis must forever be cloaked.
Parallels with particularly resonant dynamic systems could be drawn, but
if the occultural traditions are amended, style must be encoded accordingly. While a fragmented hyperstitional mythos might help corrode your
credibility, only with the most exacting conceit. I must go now.
- Echidna
PS—Hyperstition will ind a way around this mess … focus on buying the
carriers some time.(::)(:)
(::)(:)
Entrusting a concept to any real author always backires. Territorializing manoeuvres emphasizing the pathology of original genius inevitably short circuit the hyperstition’s potential virulence as it
takes a cascading network of carriers for a hyperstitional multiplicity to gather its distinctively self-regenerative traction. In order to smuggle concepts into culture, avatars are indispensible, decoys are useful, and depersonalization is mandatory. (On encountering anomalous obstacles, carriers would be well
advised to relay the hyperstitional eddy to a less encumbered vector.)
Designed to pursue a line of thought further than is prudent, decent, or reasonable, a carrier thinks
only for the sake of the thought itself, rather than for what its thinking will mean for its own interests (of
which it has none). It probes, or pings territories that no natural mind could navigate. Heraclitus advocated seeking out the invisible and inarticulate in the order of things, the invisible connection being the
stronger one, the inconspicuous correspondence the most important. Pinging is a way of smoking out
a distribution of the insensible—a motley array of weak signals, aberrant behaviors which rational models fail to apprehend—exposing the operative paradoxes and inconsistencies of a constellation which,
when surfaced, often spiral out of control. Hyperstitional probeheads favor misconstruals of a system,
foregrounding the latter’s workings as it surfs the impersonal diferentiating ilters of language, media
and communication.
Semiotic/material constitution is already thought as being implexed within an afective, semiotic,
The Emergence of Hyperstition
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interpretative network which assigns these particular concoctions a certain productive virtuality or potential (The Phonocleric). A parasite, the carrier plays the position instead of the contents. Playing and
preying on the relations and the points that constitute those relations as operators = a royal road to hyperstitional efectiveness.