Demogorgon and the Metaphysics of Information

I have been thinking about the Demogorgon’s birth in a scribal error alongside the Kabbalistic concern that the misuse of the alphabet can be snatched up by Satan to generate false worlds. There is that simple slip of the pen from which centuries of myth and demonolatry spring. Can we think about that slip as the action of a willful spirit eager to find a voice or a sign of the power of the letter itself, taking root in its accidental inclusion?

I don’t have an answer to that, but it set me thinking about the structure of time again and the relationship between spirit and information. Over on the Nightshirt, you’ll find discussions hypothesizing that some Fortean effects are the result of time preventing certain forms of information from being transmitted backward, but we might be able to think that a little differently. We could expand the model to include more than paradox, to consider resistance in terms of the structures available to receive that information.

We can consider that some of this feedback may not always be bound with information from the future or the past. Information can come from other planes or dimensions, information that is attempting to ground itself in the line of time. These forms of information require special structures to be built capable of sustaining it, structures that disperse its informational charge across several registers, a bit like a circuit. The best such circuits would themselves be informational, e.g., be highly structured, like myths and rituals.

Some Fortean effects may then be the same thing as what would be experienced as a religious or spiritual encounter in another situation, except that the knowledge which would make possible a clear manifestation is unavailable and so expresses itself in more diffuse and obscure ways, as everything from uncommunicative and mysterious visitors to mysterious physical phenomena. The charge of information runs a little wild, animating the world around it in a disorderly fashion. Obscurity and strangeness may here be a property of the receiving situation rather than reflect the property o the signal.

Divination serves a useful purpose in this context as the system of divination becomes part of the receiving context that makes spiritual communication flow smoothly. The images, signs, and meanings bundled up in a divination system become the landing system for these messages, some of which are running along the line of time, some of which come from outside of time. Or, at least outside of time as we generally experience it. We can talk about the way in which this or that divination system is entangled with its diviners over time and with its extratemporal sources in ‘eternity’ (the 5th dimension?) as a way to differentiate some forms of divination from others. Maybe.

Divination helps build out context and context supports the transmission of spiritual ‘energy,’ what sometimes manifests as information in the mundane sense, but sometimes as information in a more esoteric sense. Divination starts to become a much more involved process, a matter of helping the querent find the context required to make the transmission clear, to realize it in the line of time. Which is, of course, what a lot of deeply rooted divination practices seem built to do.

2 thoughts on “Demogorgon and the Metaphysics of Information

  1. Or as a friend of mine worked out, rather obviously, during our Tower work, that in order for us to use ”the timephone”. to rescue Edward Kelley. the person on the other hand had to have had one too. ENTER The Maharal

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