#megapolisomancy

[lizardsfromspace]

People who live in small towns are afraid of cities for the wrong reasons. They think you have to worry about crime, but crime has been declining for years, despite media hype. What you have to worry about is megapolisomancy: about the steel and stone and life of the city coming to life as a living thing, a thing of magic and occult forces, that can be steered into a urban augury by the modern seers and sages of the skyscraper. Also there's a lot more smog

[kennak]

▫️さんはTwitterを使っています: 「なんなんだよまじで https://t.co/dpA8gd74rS」 / Twitter

[0starkafterdark]

Top Tens - Mythology: Top 10 Mancy (Special Mention) (16) Megapolisomancy

  TOP TENS – MYTHOLOGY: TOP 10 MANCY (SPECIAL MENTION) (16) MEGAPOLISOMANCY Are you a lucky little lady in the city of light? I didn’t make this one up – fantasy and SF writer Fritz Leiber did, the plot concept behind his literal urban fantasy novel Our Lady of Darkness. Essentially it’s a type of divination or magic formed from large cities (Leiber’s city of residence San Francisco), that…

[stmol]

Οι πρώτοι χαρτογράφοι σχεδίαζαν την οικουμένη σαν έναν κύκλο με κέντρο την Ελλάδα και με «κέντρο του κέντρου» τους Δελφούς, τον «ομφαλό της Γης», μια ιερή πόλη. | Παντελής Γιαννουλάκης

Βρυξέλλες 2016 Αξιοσημείωτα από το βιβλίο “Megapolisomancy” του Παντελή Γιαννουλάκη – Ο εγκέφαλος μεταγράφει το χάος του Σύμπαντος, αυτο-κατασκευάζεται συνεχώς, μεταλλάσσεται και επεκτείνεται και χαρτογραφεί, κατοικείται και κατοικεί. Οι λαβύρινθοι της πόλης σχηματίζουν ένα αρχιτεκτονικό ιερογλυφικό, ένα αόρατο σύμβολο που χρησιμοποιείται ποικιλοτρόπως, ασυνείδητα από τους ενοίκους, συνειδητά από…

[ezrawells]

Megapolisomancy Workbook, Disc I from V. Room[s]

>> megapolisomancy //

[ ezra wells • 2023 • Thessaloniki ]

[neruomancer]

"Houses represent property and their relations to the political and economic classes that are able to own that property. Houses can represent violence in multiple ways, the land or people displaced in order to construct the property, the complexity of the structure in juxtaposition to poorer shelters of those without shelter, and most importantly how a house may disrupt natural lines or folds in the Earth's hypergeometric structure. The fact that haunted houses exist speaks to power that houses have the capacity to be violent to its inhabitants or builders. It is contested that maybe houses are not haunted but are simply malicious beings themselves that reject the original purpose they have been constructed. To pluck something from the void and then not only force sentience onto it but also to hold it in a static form only to rot and be abandoned. We are allowed to grow and ultimately change ourselves and even our bodies but the house cannot do this without assistance. The house cannot speak and even if it did, its owners would not listen. The house hates us because we exist and there is no other reason"

-House Hunters, modern architecture and its incursion in Megapolisomancy

[graywyvern]

( via / via )

Family.

"...perhaps de Castries['] Necropolitan age is the end point of Beuys’ 'concretization' of the urban environment, an endpoint he is endeavoring to avoid through artistic intervention?" --Jesper Aagaard Petersen, "Megapolisomancy: Metaphor and Magic in the Metropolis" in: Here to Go 2012

Not in Swedish but.

"Nothing So Far

Nothing so far but moonlight Where the mind is; Nothing in that place, this hold, To hold; Only their faceless shadows to announce Perhaps they come-- Nor even do they know Whereto they cast them.

Yet here, all that remains When each has been the universe: No universe, but each, or nothing. Here is the future swell curved round To all that was.

What were we, then, Before the being of ourselves began? Nothing so far but strangeness Where the moments of the mind return. Nearly, the place was lost In that we went to stranger places.

Nothing so far but nearly The long familiar pang Of never having gone; And words below a whisper which If tended as the graves of live men should be May bring their names and faces home.

It makes a loving promise to itself, Womanly, that there More presences are promised Than by the difficult light appear. Nothing appears but moonlight's morning-- By which to count were as to strew The look of day with last night's rid of moths."

--Laura (Riding) Jackson

AI Superb Owl.

[weirdletter]

Megapolisomancy: A New Science of Cities, by Thibaut de Castries, edited by Raymond Stantz, with an introduction by Egon Spengler, April Foolday Publishing, 2020. Cover design by Peter Venkman, info: academia.com.

“The ancient Egyptians only buried people in their pyramids. We are living in ours.”— So wrote the eccentric Thibaut de Castries in the first, and until now only edition of his controversial essay Megapolisomancy: A New Science of Cities, privately published in 1890. “At any particular time of history there have always been one or two cities of the monstrous sort—viz., Babel or Babylon, Ur-Lhassa, Nineveh, Syracuse, Rome, Samarkand, Tenochtitlan, Peking—but we live in the Megapolitan (or Necropolitan) Age, when such disastrous blights are manifold and threaten to conjoin and enshroud the world with funebral yet multipotent city-stuff. We need a Black Pythagoras to spy out the evil lay of our monstrous cities and their foul shrieking songs, even as the White Pythagoras spied out the lay of the heavenly spheres and their crystalline symphonies, two and a half millennia ago. [...] Since we modern city-men already dwell in tombs, inured after a fashion to mortality, the possibility arises of the indefinite prolongation of this life-in-death. Yet, although quite practicable, it would be a most morbid and dejected existence, without vitality or even thought, but only paramentation, our chief companions paramental entities of azoic origin more vicious than spiders or weasels. [...] The electro-mephitic city-stuff whereof I speak has potencies for achieving vast effects at distant times and localities, even in the far future and on other orbs, but of the manipulations required for the production and control of such I do not intend to discourse in these pages.” April Foolday Publishing brings back in print de Castries pioneering study on Neo-Pythagorean metageometry, in a brad new edition of Megapolisomancy: A New Science of Cities edited and annotated by Dr. Raymond Stantz, with an extensive introduction by Dr. Egon Spengler, in loving memory of the late Professor Fritz Leiber.

[camellia-fav]

via @Megapolisomancy

[darkbeacon]

Megapolisomancy Revealed

Megapolisomancy Revealed

In 1978 Fritz Leiber published “Our Lady of Darkness” which was received as a horror fantasy novel. The story unfolds around Leiber’s fictional hero, Franz Westen, who encounters the mysterious occult technology called Megapolisomancy – the ‘new science’, magic, and prophecy of super-cities created by Thibaut de Castries.   Westen has found an old journal of (the real author) Clark Ashton Smith attached to a ‘gracelessly printed’ tome entitled ‘Megapolisomancy’.   

The story oft references M. R. James’ ghost stories with quotes and symbolism, and Leiber himself noted that the story started out as a ‘short Jamesian horror story and just grew’.   As the story unfolds, HP Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, Dashiell Hammett, Jack London, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn – all real entities – are also invoked in the swirling tale about the strange occult science.

In Leiber’s story, the history of de Castries is revealed as such: de Castries arrived in San Francisco in 1900, when electricity, skyscrapers, radio, radioactivity, Egyptian discoveries, psychologies of Freud and Jung, and occult theosophies and Orders were being promulgated around the world.  De Castries gathered various acolytes to him and founded his own Hermetic Order of the Onyx Dusk, whose mission was violent revolution against super cities, and his perceived enemies.  

Our new super cities, de Castries felt, had grown out of control and caused paranormal and paramental entities to come into being – entities that inevitably drained and harmed us: their clueless creators.  Megapolisomantic operations were set to bring our large buildings down to rubble, to inflict paramentals on the enslaved humans to drive them further mad, and ultimately drive all human presence from such cities.  De Castries died in 1929, prior to the stock market crash which ‘would have been a comfort to him because it would have confirmed his theories that because of the self-abuse of megacities, the world was going to hell in a handbasket’.

In the time of de Castries, urbanization was just tipping over the 50% mark in the U.S, and megacities were just an idea but a fast looming threat on the horizon.   A century later, urbanization is the norm, at over 80% in the US, and the rise of the megacity has proven to be relentless, unstoppable.  For this reason, it’s worth a closer look at the city magic fantastically described by Leiber.  

Let us first contrast our world versus de Castries’ world of new urbanization.  The reams of paper, coal, electrical wiring & smog, once feared by de Castries, has been mitigated demonstrably as our communication networks have become wireless and environmental actions put in place.  Yet the steel and concrete behemoths remain and have multiplied, and the electric, gas, and oil lines that fuel our cities have been knit under the earth, out of sight.  We are still fighting to realize and solve of the deathly impact we are having on our earth’s ability to sustain human life, resistant as we seem to be to that fact.   

We have discovered new mathematics and physics to explain our universe, build and code the machines that serve us, even begin our first steps toward creating artificial intelligence.  We even seek immortality through merging ourselves with machines or possibly moving off the earth to survive in space, if our cities become too congested or our earth too diseased by our cities.   Everything we take in – from our food to the very ideas that populate our thoughts based on our media – has been edited for our pleasure – food is manufactured to be bigger and tastier than natural, media reports deliver messages that have built-in conclusions to ease us from the pain of thinking.   At the same time, we have begun to more widely acknowledge consciousness in other beings – a benefit of our networking: comparing notes and making better observations of the world around us.  But if we think critically, we can see the limitations of fast food, fast media, and fast connections and perhaps alter our interaction with them to utilize their benefits without being overcome.

The magician can focus on maneuvering more adeptly within their environment safely and productively, or exert their will on the multitude of issues that inhibit their Life and Initiation.  One’s Work might fall in to creating a safer more sustainable environment for Life to thrive; or for education and critical thinking to cut through to allow the Black Flame to spark potential others.

Back to the story.  Once de Castries decided cities could not be destroyed, he sought to utilize Megapolisomancy to control and protect from the paramentals and paranatural entities birthed by our cities.  They are the byproducts of the raw materials and the sludged, drained thoughts and neuroses of the madness that descended upon the inhabitants of such mega cities.   Today’s cities paranatural entities might be described as memetic forces, the drain of health from physically unhealthy surroundings, the unhealthy foods and habitual activities.  The paramentals might be the impulses to retract from the world completely and stay in our silos, the doubt and fear causing constant adverts, the crushing ‘everyone else’ mentality that is our struggle to shrug off.

We have observed a ‘command to look’ in nature, stemming from our evolutionary wisdom built into our reptilian brains, but we need to utilize a learned ‘unnatural command to look’ to stoke the Black Flame of consciousness and evolution of self.    By doing so we can promote critical thinking in ourselves and others, and make our surroundings and our network useful forces rather than debilitating ones.  Control your environment and input, lest it control you.

For these reasons, study of Megapolisomancy is in order – to be met not with trepidation and terror over ‘paranaturals’ and ‘paramentals’ but to establish a useful understanding to learn about them, use them for us and against our own stasis and the unrelenting World of Horrors that consumes and grows without thinking.   These ‘para-things’ and ‘citystuff’ exist because of the global ‘us’, and we can regain control of them to further our personal and societal evolution rather than let them bleed us dry.

Leiber alluded to Megapolisomancy in snippets and suggestion, but I have drawn the following operations/methods from the novel.  Excerpts from the novel are below for finer review.

1)      Usage of ‘weighted’ structures  - weighted in scale and importance

2)      Identifying and marking sites of future interest (for potential structures, activities)

3)      Protections against the paranatural/paramental entities: the Star (pentagram), abstract designs, and silver.

4)      Vector geometry in targeting a person/area

5)      Usage of elements (earth, fluid, gas, and fire)

6)      Usage of Balance to achieve the execution of an operation; or banishment of the paranatural/paramental entities (The latter comes from a blend of the mathematical and musical/artistic.

7)      Usage of one physical and mental Focal point in an operation

Other Links on Our Lady of Darkness & Megapolisomancy

Talking about Ritual Magic: Our Lady of Darkness & Megapolisomancy

Our Lady of Darkness: A Jamesian Classic

by Dark Beacon

[saraschriefer]

Edda Publishing presents HERE TO GO 2012

Here To Go 2012 is an anthology published together with the Here To Go: Art, Counter Culture and the Esoteric symposium in Trondheim, Norway. It contains texts and essays by all the speakers of the symposium: Carl Abrahamsson, Karen Nikgol, Kendell Geers, Gary Lachman, Andrew M McKenzie and Jesper Aagaard Petersen. In the book is also an additional text by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. The themes are varied: Crowley on film, occulture, the cut ups, megapolisomancy, the magic of fact vs fiction, the scenography of no-mind, and many other things. A refined and appetizing smörgåsbord of contemporary esoteric philosophy.

Here to Go 2012 is published in 500 hand-numbered copies: 400 softbound, 77 hardbound in cloth and a private edition of 23 copies hardbound in leather. 80 pages, size A5. Available through our fine resellers (please see www.edda.se). American customers buy directly from www.jdholmes.com

[0mulanrouge0]

https://twitter.com/Megapolisomancy/status/1585890547331661824

[marginalgloss]

the noseless one

As far as I can tell from his bibliography, Our Lady of Darkness was Fritz Leiber’s last complete novel. It was published in 1977, a relatively late work for an enormously prolific author who had been putting out novellas and short stories since the early 1940s. The back cover of my paperback edition (dated 1978) describes it as ‘Leiber’s first new SF novel in years’, which might have been true as a promotional blurb, but it’s a fairly generous interpretation of that genre. Anyone picking this up expecting conventional science fiction would be fairly disappointed. 

The story follows Franz Westen, a writer living in San Francisco who earns a living writing cheap novelisations for a supernatural TV series. He is coming out of a period of depression and alcoholism following the death of his wife. He lives alone in his apartment block, though he has a handful of friends for company. And he has his books: instead of a partner, he shares one side of his bed with a heap of volumes that has, over time, come to vaguely resemble the figure of a woman. And then one day, looking out from his window over Corona Heights, he sees something strange in the distant parkland that catches his eye.

This novel is a paperchase of sorts. It is teeming with fictional references; it is perhaps one of the earliest books I’ve read which ties together a broad range of influences from horror and science fiction under a single theme, what is now sometimes called ‘weird fiction’. H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith are here, but there’s also cameo appearances from Jack London and Dashell Hammett. The title is taken from Thomas De Quincy; he’s in there too. Even M. R. James and Arthur Machen warrant mentions, the latter with reference to his membership of the notorious Order of the Golden Dawn. 

Mysticism is woven throughout the story, often in a way which leaves threads hanging. The literary aspects interconnect with the strange book Westen has found in a charity shop — a text on something called ‘Megapolisomancy’ which purports to be a guide to the strange geometries and secret meanings buried in the layouts of great cities — and, accompanying it, a handwritten diary by someone who may or may not have been the author of the same thing. All of this is taken extremely seriously; there are passages here which seem to splice Frankfurt School theory with the esotericism of Edwardian modernism. 

It should be noted that similarities between Franz Westen and Fritz Leiber are almost certainly intentional. Leiber’s own wife died, and he too suffered from a drinking problem — and in fact, readers have since shown that he lived in an apartment which is almost certainly identical to the one occupied by Westen. The most memorable feeling this book engenders is of wandering around San Francisco in a sort of haunted daze. The city is beautifully recalled in an amount of detail which often serves little inherent purpose relative to the plot. It’s like certain moments in Vertigo, or in Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Inherent Vice, where the camera seems to drift along according to a dreamy life of its own.  

When it comes, the apparition of the creature itself — the ‘paramental’ — is not entirely convincing, nor is it especially threatening. In part this is because we’re not given any real reason to feel it is dangerous. It never takes away from anything Franz holds dear. (Perhaps I had it also spoiled to some extent with the grotesque illustration on the front of my edition.) The writing is good in parts, but not great: it has a hurried, slapdash quality, one scene sometimes moving to the next a little too quickly. The ending is also a little ridiculous, with the author attempting to codify the logic of what happened in a smattering of brief disclaimers. The book is at its best when it allows itself to digress eccentrically over the odds and ends of Westen’s far-ranging literary knowledge.

I should mention that the most haunting thing in the whole novel is in Leiber’s evocation of his own apartment building. There are certain repeated images which seem to have a resonance, even though they bear no direct relation to the story. There is an insistent concern with something creeping in over the transom above his front door. He is preoccupied with windows which have been painted black, by the complex workings of the elevator, by the abandoned broom closets left over from when the place used to be a hotel. And in particular the little ports in the skirting boards for a centralised vacuum system somewhere in the basement. There’s something there which is reminiscent of the secret postal service in The Crying of Lot 49, or of the electric sockets in the third season of Twin Peaks: a hidden network, almost forgotten, but not entirely abandoned. 

[prispru]

Собянин назвал Москву

Собянин назвал Москву самым зеленым мегаполисом планеты http://vybor-naroda.org/lentanovostey/196083-sobjanin-nazval-moskvu-samym-zelenym-megapolisom-planety.html

[parmapress-blog]

Москва оказалась третьим в мире мегаполисом по дешевизне такси

- По данным международного рейтинга Taxi Price Index 2017, Москва заняла третье место в списке мегаполисов мира с наиболее низкой стоимостью поездки на такси внутри города, отмечается в сообщении столичного департамента транспорта. Средний чек за один километр поездки на такси в Москве составил 15... - - http://www.parmapress.ru/the-city-and-county/moskva-okazalas-tretim-v-mire-megapolisom-po-deshevizne-taksi/

[ueomlct23-blog]

VALDAS vlds sigil