The Space Between
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By 3gr3gor
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The Cosmic Liminality is a surrealist project aimed at capturing the strange occurrences happening in the world as we move through the liminal phase of global (cosmic) initiation that I believe we’re currently living in.
Background: In the anthropological study of initiation there are three phases found in instances all over the world throughout human history. First is Death – the old self dies or is killed in order to usher in the new state of being. But before the Rebirth can occur, the initiate must pass through the liminal. Often likened to the spirit world or underworld, the initiate in the Liminality is considered “betwixt and between,” neither that old thing or this new one. It is in this state of *thinness* that the real magic occurs – the sacred lesson learned, the guardian beast slain, the prize achieved that it can be brought back into society with the initiate a adult/hero/shaman reborn to a larger world.
Modernity has stripped us of these key rituals. Most of us experience the death of innocence but lack the guidance and tools for navigating the liminality. And even those who can deal well with the uncertainty of the liminal have nowhere to come out on the other side, since the rites designed to acknowledge the passage have been systematically erased and forgotten.
As a result we live in a world populated by fully grown children trying to do the work of adults.
Change is inevitable. It’s the only certainty of the liminality. For these reasons and more, our entire global civilization has entered an involuntary initiation cycle. The short-sighted wring their hands fretting that the world they knew is dying. The prescient among us recognize it’s already dead.
Our Cosmos (civilization) is now wandering the liminality, directionless and populated only by ghostly souls wailing for rebirth.
Surely you’ve all felt this uncomfortable thinness in the world. It’s a scary and dangerous state to be in. But it’s also where the magic is, the tools and lessons we need to emerge into the next existence.
We can either actively search for those tools and lessons, or wander aimlessly till time winks us out.
The Cosmic Liminality, then, is my feeble attempt to harness some of the magic of a world teetering on a precipice between wonders untold and ultimate destruction, and hopefully help usher in the former.
For more liminal magic, check out The Cosmic Liminality on YouTube
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If you’d like to participate, join us on Discord at the Dataplex Ouroboros
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A Lovecraftian Dimension
Did anyone notice how quickly the internet turned into a Lovecraftian horror scenario?
Like we’ve got this dimension right next to ours, that extends across the entire planet, and it is just brimming with nightmares. We have spambots, viruses, ransomware, this endless legion of malevolent entities that are blindly probing us for weaknesses, seeking only to corrupt, to thieve, to destroy.
Add onto that the corrupted ones themselves, humans who’ve abandoned morality and given up faces to hunt other people, jeering them, lashing out, seeing how easy it is to kill something you can’t touch or see or smell. They’ll corrupt anything they think could be a vessel for their message and they’ll jabber madly at any who question them. Their chittering haunts every corner of the internet. They are not unlike the spambots in some ways.
Add on top of that the arcane magisters, who are forever working at the cracks between our world and the world we made. Some of them do it for fun, some of them do it for wealth, others do it for the power of nations unwise enough to trust them. There are mages who work to defend against this particular evil, but they are mad prophets, and their advice is almost never heeded, even by those who keep them as protection.”
All people know several spells to use the internet. Facebook asks you for the magic words to log in, so does your email, so does your twitter and on and on. The spells are words or a gesture with the hand, some use the colour of your eyes, or the shape of your finger. Our chief of security joked about requiring users to give a drop of blood before they could log in. Many do not understand the humour of mages.
The cracks between the two are breaking. IP cameras filled our world with eyes and the magisters learned how to open almost all of them. We all carry magic slabs of glass that if you hold it up to your ear can sing to you with a loved one’s voice, but if you look at it with your eyes, can show you a corrupted human with bleeding orange skin scream the profane with a thousand voices. The other day I saw someone hack a moving vehicle. At one point they made it stop. At another they made it so it couldn’t stop. Some of our best and brightest are going to create an army of four winged bats hovering throughout every city and we are going to connect them directly to the dimension where the nightmares live.
I’m not saying it’s all bad, but I am saying Cthulhu lies deathless dreaming in this web we built him and he is waking up.
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Liminality Network:
A Call To Weirdness – Operation D.I.S.T.A.N.C.E.
3gr3gor – Dystopian Morphogenic Hyper-Collage in the liminality of Yog-Sothoth
Will To Weird – Trials, Alterations, Creations
Wyrmhole – Imagination Insemination
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Amour Fou 