Holding hands with the vernacular spirit

The ‘Zeitgeist’ is not a spirit in the sense of a 妖怪 (yōkai), he instead bears more resemblance to the Christian Holy Spirit. He’s not an entity, but rather a force. And like the Holy Spirit: “anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come” (Matthew 12:31). I wonder what other ‘Geists’ are out there, so that we may also bow down before them. Let’s perform a séance to find out. 

A guitar is a ouija board, Covered in letters spelling out ‘Fender, Gibson, Ibanez, Gretch, Martin, Taylor, serial numbers, countries of origin, the names of makers, etc.’ and the pick is the planchette. Musicians can be possessed while playing, something taking over and guiding your body and mind. “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them” (Acts 2:4). But who are they possessed by? I hope to discover what that something is. Who knows, maybe the spirit is a daemon. Maybe the spirit is technology. Maybe he is the Omnissiah “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own” (1 Corinthians 6:19). Hermeticists do not rest content with the idea of an unknowable God. Instead, they seek to penetrate the divine mystery.

How do you talk to the Machine Spirit? Electronic Divination? Electromancy? Is the Machine Spirit who we even want to talk to? Does electricity contain 神 (kami)? I want to talk to the geist of the amateur. The daemon driving the will to create for creations sake. I suggest a new form of divination: Transistomancy, Where the act of creating the machine is the dowsing. What better way to talk to the spirit of amateur creation than through the act itself. To speak to God we must first construct God's Temple. No, speaking is construction. It is in this process that lead turns to gold. Alchemy is about the process. The artisan is a magi.

The garage rock band, consisting of fathers who have found free time, perhaps they are the true mediums. Who haunts them? Can transistomancy help us find it?

Every transistor is subtly different, generating noise at a different frequency spectrum, at a different volume, have different timings, have different things to say. For the traditional synthmaker, matching transistors is an essential and arduous task. For me, their chaos is their voice. Analog sample and hold is not random, sample and hold allows inter-species-communication, human to lead. Molybdomancy. A schematic symbol is glyph of chaos magick. An IC datasheet a grimoire.

Hermeticism, like Hegel, replaces the love of wisdom with the lust for power. Our world requires more and more power, in the form of electricity. What if the alchemists were just early. Gold is a powerful conductor, but maybe conductors were the wrong thing to look for. After all, the primordial energy source, the Sun is also a god. Maybe alchemists just needed to look upwards.

I am not satisfied with not knowing God. With 結び (musubi) being intangible. I wish to hold hands with God, the spirit that drives us to create. Commission fees drive me to create, is money God? Hopefully not. Through transistomancy, through the act of making as a method of prayer, maybe he can become tangible. My desk is my shrine. Bach composed fugues to honor God. Can I write songs to honor this spirit?

Next time I will try to further clarify transistomancy, mainly for my own sake.