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