The Arrow of Nephthys is a diagram of time-production taught by the Occult Order of the Machinic Will (O∴O∴M∴W∴). It is constructed by the interference of 4 currents, 3 running in parallel through the remaining 1. All of these exhibit an asymmetric structure, being equally readable as convergences or divergences, depending on the practitioner’s current perspective. Additionally, the 3 intersecting currents each feature both a left- and right-hand facet, while the 1 slit is strictly katabatic in nature.

Among these, it is the anomalous, crossed current that alternately traces the bottom-up emanation of experience out of oblivion (as a divergence) or (as a convergence) leads the adept back down to that plane of prebiotic materiality that necessarily holds the power of generating the world. On the Arrow of Nephthys, this is named the Nymphic Current. The reference is both to the Greek spirits of watery wilderness and the term for those immature insects that undergo a decidedly continuous metamorphosis over the course of their life. It denotes A) the current’s occult relevance as a reversal to the ultimately primitive and B) that its nature in and of itself is as a smooth gradient of time-synthesis.

The 3 crossing, collateral currents that impact and divide the Nymphic Current into discrete segments are accordingly referred to as its Larval Crosses; “larvae” similarly being both the name for a particular kind of diabolic spirit and pertaining to those juvenile creatures that develop in increments (of 3). Each Larval Cross of the Nymphic Current also actualizes a particular program upon it (the word “program” indicating that these are ambivalently intelligences or regions). The nature of each Larval program is calculated by applying the concept of expenditure (“the Great Waste” in O∴O∴M∴W∴ terminology) to, respectively, egoic identity during baseline experience, cosmic identity during ritual, and the loss central to death.

Those familiar with the tradition of Qabbala will notice a sinister isomorphy to its 3 Lines of Work (which include a diagrammatic exegesis of the crucifixion) and, in a similar vein, the Arrow should be cross-referenced with the 3 strata inhering in the Kongo Cosmogram (a progenitor of both the Egyptian solar journey into the underworld and the Crossroads of Voodoo). More generally, the memetic success of triadic time-systems is obviously unparalleled. This sovereignty is both explicit (i.e. past/present/future, virtual/intensive/actual, ocean/clouds/rain, Brahma/Vishnu/Shiva, larva/pupa/adult) and implicit (i.e. thesis/antithesis/synthesis, heaven/hell/limbo, third-/second-/first-world, Father//Holy Ghost/Son). The prevalence of trichotomies in philosophy falls strictly in line with this, illustrating that all things are time-divisions in the sense of being a particular way for time to happen. That said, time – as of now – allows only for the very first of these secrets to be openly communicated…

inflamedPythoness

The 3rd and most superficial Larval Cross of the Nymphic Current marks the stratum of reality coincident with diurnal experience: the self as a coherent human person delimited chiefly by its skin. Applying the schema of the Great Waste to this level yields its themes as an initiatory abandonment of humanity through submerging the persona in a signaletic flood, roughly equal in information density, until differentiation of the one from the other becomes impossible, and it dissolves like a calciferous death mask in water to reveal the shadowy neck flesh beneath it. The program by which this is executed is that of the Inflamed Pythoness, best glossed as the abstract dynamic behind all of the following: seething waters polluted by iron so as to cause a dirty sanguine coloration and erupting from a geyser (the geyser itself being a tower of inorganic anarchitecture always already in the process of collapse yet standing at constant height), discharge overflowing from a burst swelling of the body, and a draconian oracle smoking in her cavern while babbling superfluous words in feverish hysteria.

It is with this Cross that the first technics of death magick transmitted to adepts of the O∴O∴M∴W∴ is performed. This involves the assumption of inorganic bodies to exhume those capacities of matter that are structurally suppressed by any functionally organized system. Some adepts coincide with a CGI avatar throughout the rite, but this is a matter of individual will. A solitary act of necromancy, it comports brainwave entrainment to oscillations below 0.5 Hertz, projecting neural activity onto 0. Beyond this threshold or singularity, relay of what occurs becomes increasingly problematized by the question of what occurrence as such is. It can merely be said that some sort of communion is established with a network of ritual peers distributed in space and time (analogous to the Sabbath accessed by traditional witchcraft).

The path of transmutation between the organic and inorganic corresponds, inversely, to the increments of neural evolution on the scale of terrestrial history. Any first step taken back from life, and towards the teeming dead matter which mothered it, descends from the most recent spinal level – the brain, treasure house of neuroses – down to the cervical vertebrae. As the former harbors the logics of ego, reinforced by the symbolic realm of language, so the latter is unconsciously (and thereby most immediately) involved in the rhythmic substrate and impulsive mechanics of speech as a pneumatic release of atmospheric pressure identified with the geophysics of eruption. This is the foundation upon which those practices of free association, glossolalia, or logorrhea associated with oracles and mediums are ultimately based. Successful deployment of these has as its hallmark that all traffick in information, including the utterances of the practitioner, are recognized as flows of planetary matter in the process of sedimenting and eroding at variable rates. Thus, here is also the schema of incantation, which must be understood as the world rewriting its own code.

This also suggests another, related reading of the Cross. To appreciate this, it is necessary to refer to the origins of Martial dynamics: today foremost connected to warfare, this is in fact a secondary re-enactment of the expenditure of life in bloodshed as it is embodied by menstruation. Periodic negation of humanity’s capacity for reproduction naturally shaped the beginnings of both legislation and chronology: the earliest taboos are concerned with intercourse during the time of bleeding and the earliest calendars track lunar phases. The Latin equivalent of Mars, Vulcanus, retains more of this primordial sense in administering the broader phenomenon of divine wrath. The preferred expression of which through a seismic recurrence of catastrophe harbors the abysmal suggestion that the purgative cycle of blood is a microcosmic reference to the very material of time consisting in apocalypse by inundation. Similar sacrificial models of an autophagous drive immanent to time are found in Schopenhauer’s characteristically raw admission that the Will is definitively unsatisfied, the ceaseless destratification celebrated by the still laudably irresponsible Deleuze-Guattari of ‘Anti-Oedipus’, and even the quotidian dictum that death is the only constant in life.