Dialectical Metaphor [Ekistomancy]

There is a double-frustration in the practice of magic, a rock and a hard place.

The rock is this: there is a certain minimum level that a magical result needs to hit to really consider a spell or a ritual to be something that "worked." Below that level of result, you are down in the noise of everyday mystery- the random fluctuation of situations and events.

To charge a sigil, release it into the world, and feel, later, that it did it's job, one must expect results, and catalog those results. This, if for no other reason, is why many occultists insist that a strong magical practice includes the keeping of a magical journal in which to record praxis and payoff, a sort of objective catalog of which things worked and which things didn't.

But one must also not get bogged down in such details, and that is the hard place. To practice magic, fundamentally, is to open yourself up to the possibility of grand things. You dabble not with just a single fire, but with the entire elemental idea of fire. Cosmic winds sweep through your body, coalescing upon your magical instruments and shooting out into the world. You must act inside the realm of gods and spirits and the shooting, sparking planets that whirl endlessly across the sky.

One must be the tallest man (or woman), with the broadest shoulders, to bridge these two needs. To keep one's head in the sky and feet on the ground is to be a giant, a great huge curtain of  a creature, Mr. Fantastic and Atlas combined.

It is hard to hold two things in one's heart, but the magician must do it. She must think boldly, as if the marshaled forces of Eternity stand with her, and everything comes naturally and easily. But she must work as if all stand against her, as if magic didn't work and she was alone in the universe. She must be strong enough to work through the times that it seems as if she is alone, even if she is not, but bold enough to seize synchronicity when it flies past.

Baum-Centre Must Awaken! [Ekistomancy]

Baum-Centre is a not-quite-neighborhood, a sort of no-man's-land between North Oakland, Shadyside, Bloomfield, Friendship, and East Liberty, which seems not to fit well with any of them. Baum and Centre run parallel across it, and in those long, thin blocks between them are all manner of businesses, many of them closed, and the strangest of houses nestled between and amongst.

It is a commercial corridor, but seemingly by accident. UPMC Shadyside takes it over for a block or so. Car dealerships come and go. Huge warehouse buildings lie empty.

Baum-Centre is shadowed in a valley to it's south by Train tracks and the East Busway, making connectivity from the south intermittent.

On the north of the corridor, Garfield, Bloomfield, and Friendship hit Baum askew by nearly 45 degrees, deriving their vague grid from the diagonal Liberty Ave (not to be confused with East Liberty Ave a mile East), Friendship Ave, and Penn Ave, rather than the nearly-East-West Baum-Centre.

In any case, Corridoria, as I like to call it, it very much its own weird place- a long thin strip of not-other-neighborhoods right on the edge of half a dozen contenders. It is a place that I wish to see awaken, a place which I wish to see become its own place, different from its neighbors, and a place I wish to see respected as different.

To work, then!

These are a handful of the small rolled-up sigils I have been quietly dropping all along the Baum-Centre corridor. I tried to make the sigil itself reflect the linear nature of the place.

Here they are wrapped up, outlining the rough shape of the place they serve.

The work continues!

Construction on Panther Hollow Road Appears to be Over [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

Looks all new and patched and shiny, too!

The Game is Afoot [Ekistomancy]

As alluded to in previous short post, things are happening in that Big Webpage we call the Real World. They are still happening. The words written herein have inspired real action, real motion, not just scholarly debate.

Temple Area Zero has been given siblings: a group ritual ignited Temple Area Two, the square of streets formed by the non-intersection of 56th Street and 56th Street. Seperately, a carpet-bombing of sigils is causing that great creature called Baum-Centre to rise and awaken.

More on these developments as time allows- for indeed somewhere in the river of action, there will be eddies of reflection, and at those points, I will post

Fear not! [Ekistomancy]

More updates are on their way. Many Real-Life Ekistomantic things are occurring, and will be posted when they are completed.

Beautiful Ruin: Exfoliation of the Divine [Ekistomancy]

Something that Pittsburgh "does" exceedingly well as a city is to have truly beautiful decay.

Broken windows, re-natured properties, rusting train tracks, all these things are of course terrible signs of the passage of time, the entropy of things, and the slow death of neighborhoods and lives. To the people who watched such places inside a city die over time, who saw the glory days and now see the destruction, such things are terrible.

But to come upon such a place knowing it only as a ruin is something different. Ruin seen without direct historical context is something humans find beauty in- just think of the Parthenon or the Pyramids- whose rounded edges and crumbling columns display proud scars of weather and chaos, cracks and breaks that show the ancient hand of time, that impress us rather than make us turn away.

The specifics of ruin- the way that concrete cracks and breaks and crumbles, the size-stages of a soon-to-be-rocks sidewalk, the tones and hues of rust, wet or dry, the varieties and shapes of plants that begin to grow through rooftops, the strange stew of plastic, metal, and organic trash that gathers in the corners and eddies around old courtyards- all of these shapes and forms are pregnant with meaning.

They stand in for whole webs of causality- how did the seeds for this specific plant end up in this exact sidewalk crack? Who left this ancient beer can? What kind of machine was this odd metal rust-ball part of? And even larger questions- How did this neighborhood die? Who specifically last lived in this apartment? Did they leave because the stairs caved in?

These objects drift together in the kind of striking pairings that only intense and lengthy neglect, combined with the elements, can produce. These discarded and abandoned places and objects have been given over to the City and the Land- no human force pushes or pulls them. It helps that most humans hate going to ruined parts of their own culture- most abandoned places are devoid of, well, stewards. They are some of the few places where one can be alone in the city, alone with the city. And sometimes it feels like through these ruins, the City speaks to you.

These feelings can be especially sharp when drifting- it feels as if the city has pulled you and these things and this place together specifically for your edification, especially if you are the only person around. The lay of the detritus, the broken angle of the rotting roofline, they are all signs just for you.

But doesn't decay also signal disease? Ill Health? Don't we think of Detroit, a city mostly-abandoned, as a failed city, a dead place?

Yes, yes, and yes. Decay is close to death. It is achingly beautiful, yes, but it is also a sign of change.

Is it the kind of change you want? Is it the kind of change the city needs? Sometimes, yes. Sometimes suburbs are unsustainable, and the healthy long-term thing is for the city to contract in area and rise in density. Sometimes industries die, and new industries must be found.

Ruin is thus a call to action- find what the city needs to right this ruin, and do it. Maybe it should be cleaned up and re-natured. Maybe it should be rebuilt. Maybe something in between. The ruin, and the city, will speak to you.

Go to the ruined places you know- the empty lots, the shuttered streets, the decaying industrial parks. Bring a friend. Explore! Look for the cracks in the pavement that are also cracks in reality!

As the Situationists once scrawled on walls across Paris,

Sous les pavés, la plage!
Under the streets, the beach!

Panther Hollow Road is Under Construction! [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

In Schenley Park, the main drag, Panther Hollow Road, is being rebuilt.


I knew there was trouble when some time over the summer, jersey barriers appeared in the northern (westbound) emergency lane, routing pedestrian traffic around a bad section of sidewalk that used to have a metal guard rail, as the hill down into Panther Hollow is quite steep there. Before the Jersey Barriers were up, that sidewalk looked like this:

In mid-September, the Jersey Barriers expanded again, taking over the whole north (westbound) side of the road- both lanes- for a few hundred feet. More barriers were erected to squeeze the eastbound traffic down to one lane (the southmost of the four lanes) and squeeze the westbound traffic across the double-yellow-line over into the second-most-southern lane, which usually is the fast east-bound-lane.

As far as we can tell, the whole sidewalk and north-most lane collapsed and started sliding down the hillside, and the construction crews are there to repair and replace that part of the hill with stronger soil- probably gravel, so that Panther Hollow Road stops trying to sink into its namesake.

A few days ago we photographed the whole thing as we drove through it. Enjoy the Aphilotus-o-mation!

A Survey of the Web Resources of the Field To Date [Ekistomancy]

To contend with the printed word, I'd like to present a more ephemeral collection of references: a survey of the web resources related to Ekistomancy that I have found so far. For a more general magical link resource, Sk4p.net has an excellent one here.

(Note: Know, of course, that like any, pardon the pun, linked list, links may die and links may break. I intend on retroactively updating the list as time goes on, culling dead links to old branches of the web, and I shall mention when I most recently update down at the bottom of the post. In the future, then, there may therefore be some discrepancy between when this list was first posted and when I have most recently updated it. If this discrepancy irks me, I might even farm out the list to be its own page on the site, an event which shall also be retroactively noted in-post. I am, if anything, a thorough webcreature.)

One should note the paucity of direct Ekistomantic resources- this is not a long list, as it is a tiny, tiny field. I actually feel bad, as not a few of the links are to websites I myself have contributed to, lending a subtle air of self-congratulation to the list that evaporates only when one Googles the hell out of the iterations of city-magic keywords and comes up with little else. Such is the result, I guess, of original research and study, to be a self-reflective field.

Our first stops are two message board threads:

Barbelith Underground>>Temple>>Urban Occultism
Barbelith started soon after Grant Morrison began publishing The Invisibles, as a gathering-place for those interested in the comic and the issues/pursuits it discussed. It saved itself from the miseries of Eternal September (the massive increases in noise over signal during internet discussions that has happened since the web's inception) by requiring prospective posters to competently fill out a webform stating their interests and intents. Unfortunately, the day-to-day moderation of the place, including pawing through new apps and pushing fresh blood into the place, seems to have dried up in the last few years, and the board has had a number of outages and database explosions in 2009. The thread linked to above has not, for example, been updated since 2004. Most of the other threads one can find via google search haven't seen action since 2003.

Many of the more active posters on Barbelith's Temple section moved themselves over to Liminal Nation, where our second thread hails from:


Unreal Cities- Urbanomancy, urban shamanism, etc.
Liminal Nation, a forum specifically for offbeat magical practice, has been much more active than Barbelith as-of late, perhaps because it was set up by 'Lithers and specifically poached much of that board's magical conversation. This thread is more-than-representative of that activity. One might even be able to figure out who their beloved Ekistomancer posts as over there.

And some other things:

Megapolisomancy, Or Why All Cities Are Haunted
This post on the sci-fi blog io9 is a nice roundup of tangents to the field, if in the context of, well, being a blog about science fiction.

Unknown Armies net.magick Archive- Urbanomancy
Here is the earliest site I can find relating to the Urbanomancer character class presented in the quasi-magical RPG Unknown Armies. It is vaguely helpful to the practitioner, but is mostly game mechanics.


The Demon-Haunted World
The slides and notes to a great presentation on the interaction of cities, technology, and magic by Matt Jones, a designer at dopplr.

And tangentially related:

Urban Shamanism
The website of David Lang, advocate of modernized shamanistic practices, who lives in Oregon. Not strictly city magic, but certainly aware of the role Shamanism needs to play in modern life, and the need to reconnect many cities with their geography and environment. Ekistomancy is cousin to such practice, but not directly related.

Last updated October 19th, 2009

Temple Area Zero [Ekistomancy]

Over the weekend, I set out to give life and material presence to what I call Pittsburgh's Temple Area Zero, the sacred site I feel is the heart of the city.

My goal was to outline the space physically, to inform the city that I considered this already-holy site worth further study and investigation, and that I wanted to make it's already-sacred nature more materially present. In short, I wanted to take a sacred site and make it a Temple.

The Name

I named it Temple Area Zero for two reasons: as a former computer science nerd, I index from zero, and so the most important temple should therefore be the zeroith one. Second, and more subtly, Temple Area Zero acronymates to TAZ, a reference to Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone.

The idea came to me last year, in Long Beach, that the space I already hold sacred (and have for quite a number of years) should be instantiated even more as a Temple. The idea also came to me that such a temple would need a guardian, a physical creature with a larger etheric body attatched, to protect it and protect those in it.

All of the Temple Areas i instantiate will have such guardians- and a few are already built.

The Guardian

The Guardian is not the first of his kind. Years ago I built a City Totem, a wire construct of different detritus I had found in the city. Its head is a rail spike. Its body, a property line marker, its arms more rail spikes. Its tissues are steel wire.

The Guardian is a smaller cousin of this City Totem, built of a rail spike, a rusty, decorative hinge, and steel wire. Long yards of thinner wire attaches him to a strange volcanic stone I found in my youth.

The Ritual

The ritual, briefly, consisted of the following steps:

Building the Guardian and sanctifying him with the city (happened months ago)
Taking the Guardian to the Temple Area
Using my City Key to open a way into the Other City.
Once in that magical medium, calling four city spirits (in this case, historical figures) for each direction
Walking the West, North, East, and South outlines of the Temple Area, speaking to each spirit in turn, asking it to watch over the site and lend it strength.
Going to the center of the Area and beseaching the City to continue to strengthen the site magically, especially within the Temple Area previously proscribed.
Asking each of the spirits to imbue the Guardian with something kin to them: life, motion, will, and temperance.
Placing the Guardian.
Dismissing the Spirits in reverse order.
Speaking directly to the City.

We'll see how well this Temple Area works out, but building it felt excellent.

City Yogas [Ekistomancy]

No, not stretching in the middle of the street. Here I mean yoga in its most general sense: a discipline, regimen, or structured set of training goals. The well-honed City Mage must set goals in these areas, and take action to achieve those goals. As general areas, these things require not so much mastery as continual learning and growth. As with any spiritual practice, such training should engender a certain level of frustration and hard work, but just as much pleasure and joy.

The Knowledge

London taxicab drivers are known the world around as some of the most competent cabbies in existence, despite living in an old, confusingly laid out city whose streets are mostly one-way and non-rectangular. This is in no small part due to the elaborate, strict testing required to become licensed to drive a cab in London, called officially "The Knowledge of London" Examination System, or more informally, the Knowledge. The testing system was put into place in the 1860s, and has changed little since (save to update the road and route information).

Officially, the Knowledge of London is the memorization and internalization of 320 well-defined "Main Runs" or routes across London, the locations of all 25,000 streets in the Central London area, and the locations of and order of about 50,000 Points of Interest that appear along those routes and streets.

The study of the Knowledge culminates in passing an "Appearance", a sublimely simple test- one must, without looking at a map, identify the quickest route between any two points that the examiner names, and then describe in detail and in order all of the stops, turns, signals, and points of interest along that route. Most initiates Appear twelve times or more before passing, and the average time a beginner takes to master the Knowledge is around 34 months.

Recent studies have (of course) shown that pre-Knowledge and post-Knowledge brain scans differ quite a bit- when asked questions about maps and routes, post-Knowledge people access an entirely different brain area than pre-knowledge ones do.

But the Knowledge is not something that needs to be limited to London, or cab drivers.

Key understandings of a city's functioning can be garnered by extensively studying its street layout, and whether by car, bicycle, or boots, exploring the grid in person. Theoretical knowledge, for the most part, must bow before experiential study. Such study reveals information about geography, history, neighborhood relations, and the psychology of the city's inhabitants, as well as insight into the psychology and character of the city itself.

Not only does such Knowledge help in the day-to-day activities of errand-running and appointment-making, it elevates such activities into a form of prayer or practice- one is communing while one commutes. Stringing together those three shortcuts and in doing so routing around the normal world of traffic is a kind of magic itself, a playful interaction with the greater system of the city.

Exploration can also can lead to many magical experiences on its own, as there are any number of wonderful hidden gems scattered across a city- tiny public parks, beautiful houses, or enchanting stores or cafes, just to name a few examples.

If the city was a book, its pages and words would be its streets. If one wishes to know one's city, one must read it one avenue at a time, perhaps by...

Drifting

As much as one should be familiar with nearly every street in the city, to the point of never being lost, it is equally important to surrender that control and structure sometimes. Indeed, sometimes in order to really learn the streets of a city, one must get lost in them.

Any physical map of the city will be wholly inadequate to describe what really exists in that city. Lines on paper can never transmit the feeling, the taste and sight of a place. It must be explored in person, in the most irrational and emotional ways, following scents or ideas or invisible forces through back lots and across busy streets.

In the mid-50s and 60s in France a group of artists known as the Situationists rediscovered this idea, and labeled it the dérive, or drift. Guy Debord, the key theoretician of the group, explains the purpose of the drift thusly:

The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance that is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the terrain); the appealing or repelling character of certain places — these phenomena all seem to be neglected. In any case they are never envisaged as depending on causes that can be uncovered by careful analysis and turned to account.

In City Magic, Christopher Penczak calls the drift experience sidewalking and recommends it as a sort of ambulatory meditation, an effort to engage with the physical world in a very magical mindset, as if was an outside observer, seeing physical objects from a vantage point that also showed their magical sides. Though we arrived at the thought independently, he and I both recommend drifting as an excellent way to find and acquire magical tools and materials.

The most I have ever physically drifted was a full day- I wandered about Pittsburgh for long enough that I managed to cross two rivers and three freeways. I took two bus lines all the way to their termini, and visited countless neighborhoods and subneighborhoods. I started in the early morning and ended the next morning; I ended up hanging outside a downtown coffee shop at 5 AM waiting for it to open, and then took a bus home.

This occurred at the apex of a week of mental drifting, with various smaller physical drifts leading up to this one long day of magical wandering.

Another Situationist, Ivan Chtcheglov, points to the danger of very long drifts.

The dérive (with its flow of acts, its gestures, its strolls, its encounters) was to the totality exactly what psychoanalysis (in the best sense) is to language. Let yourself go with the flow of words, says the psychoanalyst. He listens, until the moment when he rejects or modifies (one could say detourns) a word, an expression or a definition. The dérive is certainly a technique, almost a therapeutic one. But just as analysis unaccompanied with anything else is almost always contraindicated, so continual dériving is dangerous to the extent that the individual, having gone too far (not without bases, but...) without defenses, is threatened with explosion, dissolution, dissociation, disintegration. And thence the relapse into what is termed ‘ordinary life,’ that is to say, in reality, into ‘petrified life.’ In this regard I now repudiate my Formulary’s propaganda [Debord's propaganda] for a continuous dérive. It could be continuous like the poker game in Las Vegas, but only for a certain period, limited to a weekend for some people, to a week as a good average; a month is really pushing it. In 1953-1954 we dérived for three or four months straight. That’s the extreme limit. It’s a miracle it didn’t kill us.

He is correct. Drifting does push one towards boundary dissolution. After ten hours of following one's nose, so to speak, one begins to wonder what one this nose might actually belong to- the urges to turn left, to walk up or down a hill, stop seeming to come from within, or if they do come from within, it is some hidden part well below consciousness or ego. By surrendering discretion-of-direction, one becomes much like the oft-remarked-upon plastic bag from American Beauty- at the mercy of fate, and maybe the weather, without volition, but still acting.

I don't think that long drifts are a strict necessity to the practice, and if they are, once or twice is enough. Many of the drifts I have taken are probably better called "evening strolls" or "long walks". Robert Frost summed up the kind of walk I speak of, and drifts generally, better than any other, in the following:

Acquainted with the Night

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

Though I don't advocate duration, I do advocate quantity- I probably have a few hundred hours of drifting under my ekistomantic belt. I'm betting Frost does as well.

Recognition

When exploring the city, either as a drifter or in more mundane mindsets, one may sometimes come across something which evokes a magical feeling- something strange or uncanny or beautiful or scary. It is important that the practitioner recognizes these feelings for what they are- reactions to real magical occurrences.

Maybe such feelings arise from something as mundane as the quality of light in the area, or from something as supernatural as a ghostly presence or a recent, strong magical working, but in either case fostering a sensitivity for and recognition of such feelings and the places that cause them is vital to the practice.

Whether the feeling ultimately stems from some internal issue or an external, occult source, the practitioner would be wise to note such subtitles, and explore them further. It is always necessary to trace strangeness back to its source.

Focus

This may stem from my Chaos Magic training, but focus, whether the penetrating stare that frightens the normals, or an hour of zen meditation, or the gnosis sought by Chaos Mages and Thelemites alike as the will-concentrating heart of their practice,  being able to focus the mind on a particular task, object, or thought is a core skill to Urbanomancy.

Detailed explanations and exercises can be found in all manner of books, from Peter Caroll's Liber Null to Crowley's Magic (Book 4) to almost any book on zen meditation. The idea, though, is to empty the mind of thoughts, or to unify the mind behind a single thought, through any number of methods, from maintaining a still and empty death posture, to intense repetition of a mantra, to riding the mind-wiping bliss at the moment of orgasm.

Further posts will detail these ideas of focus, concentration, and gnosis, but for now, being able to quickly move from a general awareness to an intense concentration is the skill in abstract.

The First Lesson [Ekistomancy]

... and maybe the last lesson.


So often is it cited as a core truth of almost any practice (law, medicine, sports, magic, or life) that I feel almost shameful mentioning it here: It is always the simplest pieces that take the longest to master.

They are always taught first, and always take the longest to teach. When I hear the word "fundamentals" I cannot help but hear it in the gravely, heavily accented voice of my high school water polo coach. He yelled that word at least once a practice for all four years of school, usually followed by "god damn it!" He was not wrong to make this a near-mantra.

In this respect, Ekistomancy is no different. The simplest action within the practice is the most vital.

Be present with the city.

That's it.

Be present with the city.

You live in it. So do thousands or maybe millions of others. It is the amalgamated physical result of billions of man-hours of thought and dream and action. The least you can do is acknowledge its being around you.

The city is an arcology of buildings: examine them from basement to roof-beam.

The city is a mass of people: chronicle them as if you were a writer hunting for characters.

The city is a wunderkammer of objects: take them home with you, recombine them, and push them back out into the world.

The city creates the air you breath and the (usually) concrete ground under your feet: feel them.

Look around you. Notice. Record. Wonder. Enjoy.

Possible Worldviews for the Practice [Ekistomancy]

One fact I take for granted across my whole practice: cities contain within them a fair bit of magic.

But where does this magic come from? From what place does it extend? Are there other paradigms for magic that fit living in cities?

Another thing I take for granted is the notion that magic uses some kind of energy system to work. That is to say, places that are "very magical" I understand to have large concentrations of some kind of etheric energy, while places that are "magically dead" seem to lack this energy (I use the word etheric not in an effort to create circular logic, but in an effort to avoid it. I use the term as shorthand for "unknown to science and also seemingly unmeasurable". Whether this is Reich's orgone or some other invisible energy is, to use a pun, immaterial). Now, it is entirely possible that this energy model is wrong, that magic is more like a field of forces, or maybe something entirely different, but having experienced things like clear magical flows, fountains, and sinks, I feel that an energy model is, if not correct, a half-decent approximation.

In any case, I would like to present a couple of different sources of the magical energy I find in cities, as well as some of the traditional methods for manipulation the energy that might flow from these sources. For any given ritual, I tend to find one or more of these possibilities applicable. Some of them are mutually exclusive, but I like to think that when held in the kind of dialectic framework post-modern magic is known for, even mutual exclusivity can be reconciled vis-a-vis appeals to shared base principles, etc.

Ley Lines

Out of all the possibilities presented, this is perhaps the most direct decedent of neo-pagan thought. Ley Lines, or Dragon Lines, or Lines of Power, are roughly, a system of energy lines embedded within the earth, across and around local geographic points. They are most well-recognized in England and Ireland, and in China under the geomantic rigors of Feng Shui, though practitioners contend that they exist across the whole earth, a kind of extended web of transmitted and received geological etheric energy.

Ley lines tend to be easily visible in rural land- animals follow them, so do brooks and rivers. Some contend that they are not magic at all, but a certain kind of mapping-thought-onto-land that seems to be universal among humans, less an actual property of land than a way of seeing it.

In a city like Pittsburgh, the Ley Line model makes perfect sense, as the city is old enough to have been laid out not on a strict and rigorous grid, but on the kinds of cow-paths and "flat but winding" road systems that tend to go along ley lines. When I try to seek out ley lines for use in my work, nine out of ten of them run right down the middle of arterial Pittsburgh streets. The other one-in-ten happens either in a city park that lacks streets, or at places where the street system seems to have interrupted itself due to considerations of grade, previous land ownership, etc.

On the other hand, when I lived in Los Angeles I found exactly two ley lines in the whole city- an intersection atop Signal Hill (in Long Beach), which also seemed to mark that spot as the heart or belly button of that city (more on that later). Everywhere else, the grid seemed to have overtaken and eliminated whatever ley lines may have naturally occurred there, driven it, to pardon yet another pun, underground.

Which leads us to our second model:

The Grid

So if the natural lay and curve of the land in a city doesn't seem to hold (magical) water, one might turn to the next clear system of movement- the street grid. This certainly has non-magical bearing on the character of a city. Manhattan wouldn't be Manhattan without its rigorous grid of Avenues and Streets, nor would Los Angeles be LA without its mile-by-mile parceling of land, and such rigor seems to foster some amount of magical energy.

I would contend, however, that strict geometric city grids do not so much foster an etheric energy that flows (like blood through a body, or rivers across land), but rather heightens magic's resting state, at least when it concerns very geometric functions. I tend to imagine a very computer-simulation-esque kind of grid, all glowing green line floating out and above a boring plain. Structured city grids, I think, tend to be a good base on which to build highly structured magical forms, but a terrible place to build magic that has any sense of motion or life beyond, say, the level of a computer or an equation.

Part of the nature of a grid is its very Cartesian normalness- it equalizes all places it touches, making them all, in some sense, the same. Where the power of this comes from is in the forcefulness of its imposition upon the ungrided land, the replacement of more "natural" structures with the severe logic of mathematics. The cities where the grid has displaced the lay of the land as the guiding structure for building are cities that in some sense have abstracted themselves away from notions of place or land. They are mighty institutions, sure, but their non-integration with local spirit and character deadens them somehow.

Again, I seem to have built a nice segue into the next topic:

Genius Loci: Organizing Spirits, Local Ghosts, and the Shadows of History

The word "genius" in Latin means, literally, spirit. Where our word for applicable intelligence comes from is the roman notion that artists were not themselves creative, but rather were channels for the creative power of these sort of muse-creatures that hung out near them. So to speak of someone's genius was to speak of the shadowy entity that was constantly throwing them ideas and visions. It was not to flatter them; in fact is almost belittled the artist's own creative thoughts, and rather praised his ability to translate forms from etheric to physical.

A Genius Loci, then, is a "local spirit", not in the sense of "ghosts tied to a certain place", but rather "the sense of place" itself- a sort of guard and edifier of a particular location, a preexisting force or creature that shapes a location into what we see of it physically.

Ley lines seem tied to characteristics of the land around them, but the causality of that association is unclear. So it is with Genius Loci.

Here are the thoughts of Alexander Pope,  English Poet, on the subject (in verse, of course):

Consult the genius of the place in all;
That tells the waters or to rise, or fall;
Or helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale,
Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;
Calls in the country, catches opening glades,
Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,
Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines;
Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.

What draws a genius to a certain place is unclear- they seem, when they are discovered, to have always been there. A neat trick.

An aside: in gardening and landscape design, the notion of the grid and the idea of a sense of place are the two guiding principles of the field, and the proper meshing of their interactions the mark of a true master.

I give, for you, the example of Mount Vernon's gardens. George Washington had two gardens built next to the house- the upper, or northern garden, and the lower, or southern garden.

The upper was a vegetable garden, meant to supply the house with food year round. As such, it was (and is) a testament to regime and order; it is rows and grids, a neat, nearly phylumological series of plant-types, careful gradients of soil-types and the botanical rigor of a textbook graph.

The lower garden, on the other hand, was meant to be a wilderness- to show plants not in neat rows but in natural clumpings, an artfully designed mini-paradise, bringing the wilderness right up to the foundation, but taming it as well, so that if one was to sit, one could look out and see the whole of the natural world unfolding and exposing itself like some delicate crystal.

The point, though, is that one garden was not whole without the other: Mount Vernon, and George Washington, needed both.

And so it is with urban spaces. As much as city magic is imposed by the grid of streets, the flows of people and traffic across the city-scape, it is also informed by the very specific, unique sense of place that different spots in the city engender.

Overlooks and vista points are wonderful places to work communication magic, as the very character of the place fosters the casting of a wide net, the spectacle and vision of looking out from the highest hill or the tallest tree.

Freeway underpasses, to take the opposite example, are a great gatherer of detritus and secrets, and an excellent place to work magic that requires things to be tossed aside, buried, and generally put underground. They are huge bridges, underwhich hide mighty trolls.

Some senses of place, though, come not from spirits far more ancient than man, but from the very human history of a place. Signal Hill, in Long Beach, CA, for example, might be such a magical spot because it is the highest (and really, only) hill for miles, but it was also the site of the first oil spout in town, the place where the city first had a reason-to-be.

These origin-places are sometimes called omphalae (singular omphalos), Greek for "navel", a literal center. Indeed, the usually-cited "omphalos" is the Greek one, just near Delphi, which is said to have been located by two eagles Zeus sent out to find it. Some legends say that they found not a navel, but the largest earth spirit ever seen, the Python for which the prophetic pythia, the Oracle at Delphi, is named. Apollo himself is said to have tamed it, and buried beneath a great rock, also called the omphalos.

In any case, more modern omphalae have much more human origins- they represent the seats of civilization in particular areas, the beginnings of settlement.

Other nexuses, not exactly omphalic but certainly central, might be formed through conflict or violence, or from the long shadows of historical action. It is these non-central locations whose sense-of-place might not draw from metaphysical spirits, but from real ones- ghosts and shadows of past human action. A site of great slaughter, an old market square, or the place where some great figure died, might all gather mystical forces about them pertinant to those past injuries or experiences.

Though some omphalos are simply central places, many of them really do seem to have a larger, central genius to them, one that perhaps is the emperor or organizer of its greater locality.

There is another school of thought derived from this hierarchical theory, the idea that perhaps whole cities are organized not by the mass collection of local spirits in the area, but by

The Living, Deified Heart of the City Itself

Or, as some might think of it, the metaphysical instantiation of the city as a centralized being, whose wants and wishes are reflected in the greater function and geography of the city.

Under this rubric, the city itself is a kind of localized god or deity. Different cities would be ruled by different gods, whether by the god gathering the city around it, or by a good adopting a settlement as a kind of patronage. The most direct and well known example of this later phenomenon is Athens, Greece, whose patron deity is, of course, Athena.

In my own case, I believe that Pittsburgh, the god, not the city, was formed much more recently, beginning during the first human habitation as a sort of organizing idea, and growing to incorporate in its own will and whim the desires and drives of the humans who settled (or conquered) the area, evolving its divinity organically with the population, but with a larger eye towards the future.

As such, these City-Gods are the rulers of their stated domains, and have a feudal or at least governmental relationship to the smaller spirits and forces under them. But that idea of hierarchy points to a further thought:

The All-City; The Ur-City

Perhaps there is not a separate god for Baltimore and one for Brooklyn. Perhaps, instead, there is just one god, the God of Cities generally. Perhaps the cities of the world are each facets of one archetypal city, the sort of city on a hill that near-mythical Golden Age Rome is supposed to have been.

Perhaps, though, there is a City Court, presided over by the most ancient of archetypes, with the cities of the world arranged in their respective standings, vying for a piece of the population pie. Maybe there is no central authority, just a loose brotherhood or pantheon of city gods.

Or maybe there are no gods per-say, just one great Platonic City, capital C, whose etheric shadow looms large over our physical dimension, instantiating itself repeatedly across our world, tying civilization to itself in one great Gordian knot of streets and cars and skyscrapers.

Conclusion

Or maybe all these things are true. Maybe the unseen realms from which magic emanates are just crammed to the brim with all sorts of idea-forms and godlings, smack full of ghosts and geniuses and gods, lousy with loci.

Maybe when tapping the street-power of some traffic artery to enforce some spell upon an area one is really calling the aid and attention of a genius loci, or maybe one is through supplication influencing the will of the unitary Great City, or maybe one is simply enforcing human will onto the local geomantic ley lines.

In the end, why ekistomancy works is less important than that it works at all.

In my own practice, I use whatever belief from the above set seems most appropriate and handy. They are all situationally valid, and in a way, they might all be the same thing- tools of thought.

Tools of the Trade [Ekistomancy]

So how does one go about this Urban Magic business, exactly? Like man modern practices, ekistomancy asks its practitioners to craft certain tools for ritual and magical use.

The living-in-your-parents-house response is usually "but what if I don't have access to these kinds of things? What if my parents find my stash of magical rail spikes? Why can't I use astral tools, so that no one has to know?"

Well, sure, you can use astral tools instead of physical ones. I've done magic with both, and let me tell you, actually holding something magical that you've found, fashioned, and/or built in your hand, feeling the weight and temperature of it, is orders of magnitude easier to use as a tool than building some kind of astral dagger or what-have-you. As much as the city one wishes to interact with may exist in other, stranger realms, it is in large part a physical place, and appreciates physical tools.

That said, in another sense, it is only in those further, stranger realms that this tool actually holds any kind of might or power, and so it is just as good to hold in your mind the thought that superimposed onto whatever physical tool you craft is an astral/etheric/urbanomantic double, the importance of which should not be done away with.

Development

When I first started practicing ekistomancy, it was while also attending the Golden Triangle Temple, run by my good friend S. Knight. Temple 31, as it is also called, descends from a long line of western mysticism that traces itself through the six-kinds-of-awesome occultist Tau Allen Greenfield, through the organization he schismed from, the Ordo Templi Orientis, back through the Order of the Golden Dawn and back to the early Christian Gnostics.

But since the closer end of this line of mystical succession is actually a series of heretics and demi-heretics who have acquired legitimacy from their once-sects, but moved on to start newer, more interesting ones, Temple 31 draws from more recent and strange circles (Chaos Magic, Pop Magic, Post-Modern Magic) as well as more Crowley-ish trappings.

As part of Temple 31's weekly Magic Roundtables, some of the more Chaos Magic inclined of Temple 31's members began down the path of magical tool creation and subsequent use laid out in the ill-named LIBER KAOS KERAUNOS KYBERNETOS, or Liber KKK (The author, Peter J. Carroll, is British, and as such has no associations with that particular three letter acronym).

The rather short book lays out the general framework for a long term magical practice, a framework that can really be applied to almost any system.

Imagine, if you will, a 5x5 grid.

The columns are the classical magical acts: Evocation, Divination, Enchantment, Invocation and Illumination.

The rows, from Top (hardest) to Bottom (easiest) are:

High Magic
Astral Magic
Ritual Magic
Shamanic Magic
Sorcery

What Carroll suggests is that the beginning magician work his way up from the bottom, perfecting all five acts for each level before moving on to the next one.

He goes on to specifically define the first fifteen operations (Sorcery 1-5, Shamanic Magic 6-10, Ritual Magic 11-15). Astral Magic is a revamping of the first three, but entirely within the mind, and as such is sketchily defined.

Carroll finishes by pointing out that by the time one reaches High Magic, "The magician must rely on the momentum of his work in sorcery, shamanism, ritual and astral magics to carry him into the domain of high magic where he evolves his own tricks and empty handed techniques for spontaneously liberating the chaotic creativity within."

For Temple 31, those of us participating endeavored to complete the first rung- Sorcery. Further rungs were planned, but interest moved around and along, and at least in that context we never got to them as a group, though we continue on our own paths.

In any case, from this Liber KKK workshop through Temple 31, I began crafting some of the tools I now consider essential and basic to any practicing Urban Mage. As tools they no longer quite match the exact specifics laid out in Carroll's work, but so it goes. The studious among my readers should feel free to analyze where my tools differ.

The Goods

This, my gentle readers, is the Key to Pittsburgh. It was constructed from, if I recall, a speaker knob, some kind of drawer handle, and, most importantly and awesomely, a beetle encased in a clear plastic marble. There are other Keys to Pittsburgh that other local occultists hold, but this one is mine. It is held in the hand, either knifelike or keylike, and used in those ways in ritual- cutting the air, opening hidden locks, turning spigots and spouts of magical energy across the city's ley lines. It is also kept in the pocket, a constant reminder of my intention and will as a magician.

In practice, the Key is used in almost every ritual I perform, as an opener-of-the-way, as a spiritual sword or instrument, as a way to turn energies on and off, or direct them in certain manners.

Before creating the Key during Temple 31, I tended to use rail spikes as my mode-of-cutting-and-opening-and-pinning. They are excellent for their weight and for their association both with movement (as part of rail systems) and their stillness (they are, after all, solid steel or iron). They are especially potent for use in Pittsburgh, as Steel and Iron were its founding industries, and rail one of its chief exports.

I still use rail spikes in my practice, channel and anchor ley lines, to construct guardians, to demark local sites of magical interest, etc. Anything that needs to be marked out or held down in a permanent (but reversible) way is treated to a healthy dose of spike.

This device-creature is a companion to the Key, a mostly passive drawer-down-of-information, a Library-Fetish, a little servant that aids me in finding and collating data on various subjects, that pulls secrets towards itself.

In practice, this Library-fetish is used quite passively. It sits on my desk and is willed at every once in a while to aid in a task. More than anything, it serves as a sort of research-time battery, lending back the help and strength I push onto it in less hectic times.

Mapping is a super-important piece of my practice, and as a 21st century mage, I tend to most of it on the computer. The image above is actually a cut from a PDF map put out by the Pennsylvania Mine Subsidence Insurance Board showing which parts of the city are at risk of, I am not kidding, abruptly being eaten by the earth.

I tend to use derives or drifts as my method of divination, rather than some specific tarot deck or rune set, relying on the whole city to show me the signs I need to see.

Some mundane materials play parts as well: a leather messenger bag, a notebook for recording signs/grafiti, a digital camera, and, sometimes, a stick of chalk, for putting up temporary sigils.

These tools are all part of a longer process, and in time I may move on to different ones. For now, though, these are what I use.

There are some more complicated magical constructions I have made, but I'll save those for another post.

A Survey of the Printed Fiction of the Field To Date [Ekistomancy]

Urban Magic as a field seems to be prefigured by quite a lot of printed fiction, specifically the horror genre and what is called the "New Weird".

Much of this fiction stems from the odd stories of turn-of-the-century American author H.P. Lovecraft. From his New England home, he drew strange inspiration from the new-but-ancient American landscape, and wrote many sordid tales of mankind's encounters with what became known as the Cthulhu Mythos- ancient alien beings of unimaginable power and imperceivable will, whose very forms could drive men mad. Many of his shorter works explored in some detail various disturbing elements of Greater Boston, especially the warrens and tunnels beneath Beacon Hill (Pickman's Model is the best example of this), though nearly all of his stories relied on the cities of the eastern seaboard as places under threat, or from whence threat might emerge.

Generally, Lovecraft moved the "horror" genre away from more rural tales, and towards the monstrous horrors of modern civilization and modern science. His "cyclopian, primordial cities" buried deep in the arctic or high in the Himalayas lend their vast strangeness to the steel canyons of New York, London, and Tokyo. His terror, as he once eloquently put it, was in the thought that one day "modern civilization" might finally link together enough strange facts that some greater, mind-destroying truth might be revealed. From the opening of his most famous story, The Call of Cthulhu,

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but 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 flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Many of the authors discussed below cite him as a direct or indirect inspiration for their work.

Post-Lovecraft

The most direct fictional use of urban magic, in the sense of magic or supernatural activities for and about cities, rather than in them, comes from Fritz Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness, published 1977.

Leiber, inspired by Lovecraft, started writing Science Fiction and Fantasy in the early 40s, and kept writing up until his death in the early 1990s. Our Lady of Darkness was written in the middle of his career, and breaks from his other work by being set in the present day. It tells the story of a (vaguely autobiographical) recovering, alcoholic writer, who from his San Francisco apartment discovers a strange and horrible magic about his city, with the aid of a strange volume of occult science called Megapolisomancy: A New Science of Cities.

In a very Lovecraftian turn, this volume is referred to as being a real, factual book, and its purported author, Thibaut de Castries, to be a real historical figure, and possibly  Like Lovecraft's Necronomicon, Megapolisomancy is meant to be real. The author encourages citing it in other works, and there are those who really do look for copies of it. Our Lady of Darkness also introduces de Castries' second work, also fictional, a companion volume called the Grand Cipher or Fifty-Book, wherein de Castries explains the mathematics behind how magical forces gather in and around cities, what he calls "Neo-Pythagorean metageometry", as well as 50 key astrological figures and their uses.

Megapolisomancy deals very specifically with spirits called paramentals, elemental spirits drawn to cities by their dense collection of Steel, Electricity, Paper, and other "city-stuff". By arranging the very street grid, and by constructing skyscrapers of sufficient height, material, and design, one can apparently alter the flow of these paramental forces, and in doing so change the future. Obtusely, paramental seems to be both an adjective describing certain magical forces, but also a noun, describing the golem-like creatures.

The main character of the book, though, is not a practicing megapolisomancer, but rather a sort of hapless victim of megapolisomantic machinations.


Further googling of the term "megapolisomancy" revealed a greek wordpress blog, which used to contain a few articles, but now seems to be empty/abandoned, save for an ominous picture of the sky over a city. Strangely, one of these deleted articles was translated version of David Langford's short story BLIT, in which the author (and also editor of Ansible) first posited the idea of a basilisk, a specific image that "crashes the human mind", as well as defenses against them.


Spiral Jacobs, New Crobizon and UnLondon

New Crobuzon is the city in which much of the fiction by China Meiville takes place. The city was first introduced in his novel Perdido Street Station, where it was the lively backdrop for a sort of extended science-noir romp. The second book, The Scar, is mostly set outside the city, but it returns as a setting in the third book, Iron Council.

New Crobuzon is a vast, London-like city, inhabited by literally hundreds of humanoid and nonhumanoid races- walking cactus-men, bulky warrior hedgehogs, women with the heads of beetles, and disgustingly decadent frog-people, just to describe a few, which during the books is just coming out of an industrialization period, where objects are just as likely to be powered by steam engines as by steam elementals, and many fields of magic are regarded as much closer to science, or art.

Where these books intersect City Magic is in the character of Spiral Jacobs, seem most prominently in the third book, Iron Council. He appears for most of the book to be a crazy homeless man, endlessly wandering the city, and scrawling on its walls intricate, elaborate spirals.

As it turns out, the spirals are actually a linked series of strange sigils, placed at seemingly random, but actually hyper-specific locations around the town, and when they are complete, are used to turn the city itself into a living, breathing weapon against its inhabitants, and Jacobs (perhaps named for the great urbanist Jane Jacobs) not a mad derelict, but one of the most powerful sorcerers in the world.

Meiville's other books are more directly tied to city magic, mostly because they are set in the present-day. They are not fantasy, rather "Magical Realism" or "Urban Fantasy".


King Rat explores, if not a sort of magical London, than certainly an underground one, mixing the mid-90s drum-and-bass scene of warehouse raves and underground clubs with the Pied Piper of Hamelin and the cryptozoological urban legend of Rat Kings- groups of rats whose tails have become intertwined, acting as horrifying collective-animal-groups. It is definitely a work of Urban Fantasy, though like Our Lady of Darkness, no characters perform actual city magic, rather they experience magic or supernatural pheonomenon in an urban context.

Un Lun Dun, Meiville's latest, is most applicable to the field. It is a young-adult book describing the adventures of two young girls as they make their way through London's strange, magical twin city, UnLondon, a city inhabited by the cast-offs and leavings of its "normal" twin, presided over by an evil cloud of living pollution called, appropriately, "the Smog". Various magicians from both cities aid the girls as they battle the evil pollution cloud.

Neil Gaiman
Many critics have noted the similarities between Un Lun Dun and another recent book, Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman. Neverwhere also tells of a normal person caught in a sort of sinister-twin-London, this one called London Below, this time a young businessman, rather than two young girls. After rescuing a young girl who turns out to be a sort of princess, but also a key-mage with the power to unlock any door, the businessman is drawn into the other-London, and must right certain wrongs before he can return to London Above. Some amount of city magic is performed, but like Un Lun Dun, the book mainly concerns a cast of strange creatures and characters inspired by and reflecting more concrete aspects of the city, such as The Angel Islington, an actual celestial creature, purportedly for whom both the neighborhood Islington and its Metro station, Angel Station, are named.

Other works by Gaiman have similar Urban Fantasy bents, especially American Gods, a novel which forwards the notion that the hundreds of years of immigration to America has brought to this country all of the old-world gods, or strange instantiations of them, as well as created new gods reflecting American wants and desires, such as Media, Celebrity, and Technology. Again, there is much magic in and around cities, but very little City Magic. Though at one point, the main characters do escape a city by traveling one of its strange, alternate alley-streets, which is very Paper-Street-esque (more on Paper Streets in a future post), and that probably counts.

At two other points does Gaiman play with cities. Both of these appear as mini-stories in the long comic Sandman.

The first, collected in Sandman Volume Three: Fables and Reflections, is called "Ramadan". The Caliph of Baghdad calls Morpheus, Lord of Dream, to ask a deal of him. The Caliph is troubled that Baghdad, in all of its glory, is impermanent, and wishes the Lord of Dream to preserve it. Morpheus preserves this Golden Age of Baghdad by sealing the magical, flying-carpet city inside a bottle, and recasting what are in fact real occurrences of magic as tales and legends, where they will live on forever. The Caliph awakens in a duller, sadder Baghdad, with no memory of its magical days save but in legend. This tale is told in a frame narrative to a young child in present day Baghdad, in whose thoughts the Golden City now lives on.

The second story is from the final volume of Sandman, a story called "A Tale of Two Cities", about a citydweller who awakens to find himself in a familiar-but-alien version of his own city, empty save for grey crowds of non-people. Slowly, he realizes that he is not in his own city, but in that city's dream of itself, the total unconscious-points of spectral geography that make up people's dreams about that city. Eventually, the man exits the Dream-City and wakes up, but wonders aloud what will happen when the City itself Awakens.

Gaiman later cited the Cthulhu Mythos as a direct influence over the second story: "You can tell it's Lovecraftian, because I use the word "cyclopean" in it."

This idea of a dream-city leads us to our next topic.

Invisible Cities, Unreal Cities

The lyrical, nearly poetic Italian author Italo Calvino wrote, late in his life, Invisible Cities, a book of prose poems, framed as a sort of scholarly debate about imagination and linguistics between Marco Polo and the aging Kublai Khan. As many merchants had done before him, Polo described to the emperor the various cities within his empire- brief, incredible descriptions of stories and experiences within those cities, half recollection, half dream.

In addition to capturing ideas about language, narrative, and imagination, Invisible Cities also captures the visionary potentialities that city structures present, their strange ability to foster all kinds of unreal structure.

TS Elliot's poem The Waste Land similarly ensnares and engenders this power of the cityscape to create, in the viewer, untapped mindscapes.

What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air 
Falling towers 
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria 
Vienna London
Unreal

 The Subterranean and the Invisible

Both Neverwhere and Un Lun Dun, above, posited a sort of underground inverse-city, and that theme of subterranean habitation is continued in two other books.

The first is, like many of the above, directly tied to the Cthulhu Mythos, mixing Lovecraft with the rapid prose style of the Beat Generation. It is called Move Under Ground, by Nick Mamatas. It is a sort of sequel to the various autobiographical Beat books (On the Road, The Yage Letters, etc)- Jack Kerouac witnesses the ancient, terrible island-city of R'lyeh rise off the California Coast, and teams up with William S. Burroughs to drive across America and save the day. The entire book is available, free, here, for your reading pleasure.

City of Saints and Madmen, on the other hand, is pure fantasy, a series of connected short stories set in a strange city whose human inhabitants long ago pushed its founders, a race of mushroom people, underground, but, sinisterly, the mushroom people still live, and cast a long shadow upon the surface dwellers. Shriek: An Afterword is also set in the city of Ambergris, which the reader might note is named for the most secret and valuable excretion of whales.

And now, to round out the list we come to Grant Morrison's long-running comic epic, The Invisibles. In some ways, the work can be framed as a drug-addled occult-induced romp through every weird conspiracy and activity anyone ever thought up, having nothing to do with cities and city magic. But one would be overlooking the many subtle references and practices of city magic the hyper-allusive comic contains.

There are certain passages early on in the series that are clearly an aging ekistomancer, Tom O'Bedlam, trying to pass on his knowledge of city magic to Jack Frost, the main character. He shows Jack how to see the strange underside of Cities, how to meld with pigeon-minds, how to hide in plain sight, how to interpret graffiti. He speaks of ancient, alien, mushroom-like entities, whole planets taken over by this extraterrestrial notion of city-building, where the towers rise like gravestones over a dead population, as the cities have finally won out. He points out William Blake's Urizen, chained to the bottom of the Thames, and to the black pyramid atop the Canary Wharf building. He shows Frost the city as it truly is- alive and magical and strange, and most of all, able to be manipulated.

This magic, combined with the kind of strange spontaneous mixing of pop culture and ancient ritual that happens through the rest of the comic, is City Magic done right.

One of the key icons in the series, a sort of magical orb-satelite, is first seen as a graffiti scrawl in the London Subway, BARBELITH, which is now also the name of a very active web forum devoted to the topics that The Invisibles collated, including city magic. But that is the start of a whole other survey, which I shall save for another day.

The Beginning: A Time for Definitions [Ekistomancy]

What is Ekistomancy?

Ekistomancy is the art and science of city magic.

Definitions breed further definitions. What do I mean by city magic?

City Magic is a narrow term that refers not to any magic done in cities by an random pagan, but specifically to that magic which is done with or about the city. Worshiping a particular street, leaving offerings for ancient denizens long passed, or drifting through downtown looking for signs (both prophetic and terrestrial), are all wonderful examples of ekistomantic practice.

Ekistomancy has been known by many names: the urban fantasy book Our Lady of Darkness calls it Megapolisomancy, literally the "Divination/Magic of Big Cities." This name was misinterpreted in a recent io9 article about city magic in film and print, calling it Megalopolisomancy. The roleplaying-game-cum-magical-handbook Unknown Armies calls it Urbanomancy, a sort of odd mix of Latin-based English and a Greek suffix. The book of the same name calls it City Magick. More properly (though not strictly proper) it should be Urbomancy, and some call it by that name.

Ekistomancy (my own neologism, which might also be spelled Ekistimancy) is derived from the Greek term Ekistics, a word coined in 1942 by Konstantinos Apostolos Doxiadis, a famous Greek architect and town planner, from an old, old greek word (oekistis) meaning, roughly, "shaper of settlements," referring ambiguously towards the people who build houses in a settlement, the houses themselves, and the person who directed those colonists in the first place. Ekistics itself has been accused of fostering car cities, and of not truly being a science, as it is claimed. Ekistomancy spurns and drops those criticisms- it borrows the base-word, but not the politics.

But why call it Ekistomancy? Why not one of those other terms mentioned above?

To make it stand out from the other terms, mostly. City Magic is not some fictional science writ by a half-mad Ex-European-noble-on-the-run, nor is it the basis for somebody's RPG character mechanics. It is a real, legitimate practice, and as such deserves a fancy greek-root name.

But what is this website, Ekistomancy?

A blog dedicated to the exploration of the field of Urban Magic- its core practices, its fringe edges, its history and its future.

For me, the author, Ekistomancy (the website) is a challenge and a promise. My goal: I will update at least weekly, and hopefully much more than that. A frequency-of-posting any lower than that is a disservice to the field and to my own practice, and to you, the reader.

A note on terms: Above, I have used perhaps seven terms for "city magic", with various capitalization, in an effort to introduce the idea in as many forms as possible. From here on out, I will try to stick to either "city magic", "urban magic", and "ekistomancy", with capitalization dependent on how corny it comes off as. One thing I often detest in occult books is the use of capitalization and misspelling to reinforce magical terminology, eg. "Green Magick", "High Holy Day", "Book of Shadows". If I capitalize "city magic", it is because I am referring not to any particular instance of city magic, but rather to the field or topic of City Magic as a whole.

A further note: I tend to use quotation marks (") the way that computer scientists do, as explicit references to other texts. As such, I flout MLA guidelines by leaving my quotes' internal punctuation intact, and by putting external punctuation strictly outside my quotations.

The Mysterious House of Lot 190, Lower Greenfield [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

Bing! came through, for once, and has an aerial photograph of the house.

Different Mixers Redux [Man and Bits of Paper]

Our new roomate Nicole lived just previous to living with us in a house called S----- (named for the street it was on), also called the Fraggle Yurt of Love. I met Nicole at a function run by a campus org we both belong to, KGB (which does not stand for Keeping Geeks Busy), which is its own crazy set of stories. KGB, generally, is an organization composed of the geekiest of geeky kids, on a geeky geeky campus. We follow Roberts Rules of Order (The same ones congress does), but all of our committees are jokes, like the Trebuchet Target Committee, or the Committee to Destroy Ohio (they collaborate sometimes), or the (Name of Still Living KGBer) Memorial Robot Committee.

N. is the most recent in a long line of KGBers (mostly officers of the org, actually) to live in S-----. In fact, I asked around, and the last time someone signed a new lease, as opposed to an addended lease or a sublet, in S----- is, and I am not exaggerating, EIGHT YEARS AGO. Put another way, there has never been a time that S----- was unoccupied, or where people had to, say, FULLY move out, in EIGHT YEARS.

About four years ago, there was a cadre of rather messy people living there, and since then all new roommates have been self-selecting- OK with living somewhere messy. That is to say, since that initial messy time, the house and it's occupants have just gotten messier (compared to the past).

Finally, just this summer, Nicole and the other most-recent-yurt-live-ers (mostly the others- Nicole is actually really clean, but susceptible to house-inertia, so I guess she's culpable as well) had the place so ill-kept that they simply could not find other humans willing to live there, and so, finally, after eight years, there were no new KGB tenants. The lease ran out, and the house had to be emptied.

Anyway, that's all lead-up to this story:

My friend Matt used to live in S-----, three or four years back, and not overlapping with Nicole's stay. When he moved in, he brought with him three boxes of Kitchen supplies (Plates, utensils, cookware, etc). His new roommates and him looked through his stuff and the stuff already in the kitchen, and sort of traded upwards- using his stuff to replace less good stuff, but not unboxing his stuff if there was already, say, a really good Soup Pot, much better than his newly-brought Soup Pot.

What went down into the basement was two of his three boxes, as well as three boxes of kitchen supplies that were rarely-used, or that his new additions had replaced, which belonged to maybe seven people (three current roommates and four previous ones who had left some of their stuff behind.

Matt moved out of S----- a year or two later. When he did, though, he packed his kitchen stuff pretty hurriedly. When he got to California and unpacked, he found that he had packed so hurriedly that he hadn't even packed HIS OWN kitchen supplies. Out of the seven pots/pans and seven matching lids he had, no lid actually correctly matched a pot, and there were TEN different manufacturers represented.

Then the really strange up memory hit. He remembered how this had happened- When he was in the basement packing up his supplies, he had looked through not two white boxes (IE, the two he had actually put down there), but through two blue ones. But the five boxes he and his roommates-from-a-year-ago had put down there were white or brown- the blue boxes must have already been down there. Thinking about it further, he realized that the table he had been using to hold these boxes up and sort through them was ACTUALLY NO TABLE AT ALL BUT SIX OR SEVEN OTHER DIFFERENT BOXES ALL LABELED "S----- KITCHEN" PUT DOWN THERE IN THE PAST NEAR-DECADE BY THE COUPLE DOZEN ROOMMATES BEFORE HIMSELF.

(the epilogue: the landlord ended up actually hiring someone to clean out the basement, as none of the current roommates actually could figure out what was down there or who owned it. That person worked for three days and took out four dozen trash bags and as many or more boxes.

One of the other most-recent-yurters put it this way in her LiveJournal the night that they finally all moved out:

that house had entirely too many hit points.

but it's over. we gutted s-----.

my key locked that door for the final time. i don't feel like i had much to do with the house's living history, but i sure as hell witnessed and played a part in the long, anguished demise.

Nicole moved in with Rigel and me, and is visibly relieved to be living in a clean house.)

Cleaning Other People's Houses [Man and Bits of Paper]

It's a good feeling to clean a friend's house. To see order emerge from seeming chaos. It's good for the friend for you to be there, both for moral support, and to shed some fresh perspective on the situation.

It's good to be able to look at a disaster area and say "Oh, we can fix this. Go get that empty bookshelf."

It's good to have the right tools from having cleaned your own house.

Me: "Why are all these shirts everywhere?"
Him: "I... I don't really have that many hangers."
Me: "Oh, well, I just cleaned out S------- (the name of another house). We now have a couple hundred plastic ones at my house. You can have, say, 50?"
Him: "Oh, I guess that would work."
Me: "Also, I'm bringing 409, Goo Gone, Windex, and Pledge. And my vacuum."
Him: "Ok.... *looks around* Oh my God, yes."

It's good to rediscover a floor.

Pittsburgh knows Kung Fu! Or so I though. [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

I thought Pittsburgh had a Black Belt, until I talked to our other contributor, Edward.

Let me explain.

Having just moved back to Pittsburgh from California exile, I am, well, excited. My fiancee and I are madly scrambling to furnish our new apartment, and so we have been driving all over the city, which has lead us down some interesting roads.

We did a lot of driving, and we passed a lot of Belt signs. The belt system is an innovation Pittsburgh made in the 1940s, developed by local traffic engineer Joseph White. They are collections of connected roads which, when followed in sequence, form long circular ring-roads, or belts, around Pittsburgh, in leiu of and then as alternatives to interstate highways.

The system looks something like this:


(image credit: http://www.routemarkers.com/usa/Pennsylvania/Belt_System/)

And the belt signs look something like this:
(image credit: http://www.routemarkers.com/usa/Pennsylvania/Belt_System/)

A few interesting points about the Belt system:
Roads that are belts retain their origional names. So, for example, there are signs on Shady Ave in Squirell Hill that it is Shady Ave, but also that part of it is the "Blue Belt"

The Highland Park Bridge is the only double-belted road, being for its span the carrier of both Blue and Green

The Green, Orange and Red belts are not complete circles- the Red Belt especially, as it is only that northern arc from Leetsdale to Tarentum. The Red and Orange belts cut off at the edges of the county (though Orange does continue unofficially, twelve miles of it being decomissioned in the 1970s, which gives me some exploratory notions), while the Green belt runs into a number of geographic issues (The western hills in Robinson township, for the most part), which make continuing its arcing curve prohibitive and/or trite.

The belts are arranged concentrically, and labeled after the colors of the light spectrum- Red at the edge, down through Orange, Yellow, Green, and Blue to Purple (Purple was of course added in 1995 to try to help lost tourists in our lovely double-gridded downtown).

Imagine my surprise, then, when on Penn Ave headed north through Wilkinsburgh, well inside the yellow belt's purview, I came upon these signs:
The first time I came upon them I did not really notice them, save for the abstract notions which wiggled into my brain that a) some tiny extra piece of the Red Belt ran through Wilkinsburgh, and had its own detour and b) the Black Belt existed, and also had a small detour on Penn.

This lead to some confusion, when I mentioned a week later to Edmund that I had traveled along the Black Belt while picking up furniture, to which he replied "What? There is no Black Belt. Though if there was, Paper Street would be part of it."

And so just this morning I googled "Pittsburgh black detour" and found that others had been confused as well.

According to this March 2008 article in the Trib, the detours are color-coded designatory overlays (just like the Belt System) designed to route traffic away and around really bad accidents on the various parkways (just like the Belt System), and that the detours are colored Red, Orange, Green, Blue, Black, and Brown (the first four of which are also colors represented in the Belt System).

More confusingly, according to the Emergency Detour Routes For Limited Access Freeways document revised and rereleased by Penn-Dot in 2008, there is not just one Black Detour, but thirty-eight, and not just one Red Detour, but twenty.

I am not sure if any same-color detours actually intersect each other, as the document is 210 pages long (it can be found as an 8 MB pdf here), but I am tempted to try to find out.

At the very least, I did find the two detours that the specific signs we found (On Penn near Ardmore) actually reference
RED DETOUR:
(image credit: Emergency Detour Routes For Limited Access Freeways page 116)
BLACK DETOUR:
(image credit: Emergency Detour Routes For Limited Access Freeways page 124)
They detours, then, split at Penn and Swissvale, Black heading further down Penn, and Red turning right on Swissvale.

Adding to the confusion, though (and perhaps explaining part of why two clearly different road systems managed to get mostly the same color scheme), is that in the above maps, pulled straight from the EDRFLAF document, RED is colored BLUE, and BLACK is colored RED.

Looks like Penn-Dot could use some better in-house graphic designers. They might want to take a cue from the brilliant Pittsburgh Wayfinder System, which... was also a Penn-Dot project, as far as I can tell.

Oh well.