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!