Some Musings on Psychogeography

Re-cultivating a Fractured Land

Jun 14, 2024

I’m finally getting round to digitising some notes & old pieces of work I originally wrote a few years ago but never really did anything with. I’m sure it comes as no surprise that I’m not exactly the biggest fan of the Chaos Magic movements. Or perhaps it’s better to say, I’m not a fan of modern Chaos Magic. The founding philosophy that one should abandon aspects of tradition if they are not utilitarian & that every esoteric system is at best some kind of arbitrary hermeneutical schema signals to me an instability in one’s world view arising from what I can only assume is an attempt to reconcile Atheistic Materialism or Psychological approaches to magic with actual experience.

The original idea among groups like the Illuminates of Thanateros & Caroll’s practitioners was that a focus on pure technique would enhance our understanding of older traditions rather than leaving them behind as some kind of relic that was incomprehensible to moderns. The hope was that with new insights into the subconscious -still a shaky concept even today, a continued streamlining of techniques, continually providing insight into the workable mechanics of ancient systems would take occultism forward and allow us to adapt older systems and make them more efficient.

We see this in Caroll especially, who -while advocating for the ability of a practitioner to adopt different worldviews and paradigms depending on utility, still advocated for completely immersing oneself in the techniques and causal reasonings of whatever tradition they were working with. Only once you had mastered the paradigm on its own terms could you then start streamlining and searching for utilities.

This is essentially the complete opposite of how I see modern Chaos Magicians approach things; looking at ancient systems and arbitrarily deciding which areas they think are important based on their own pre-understanding. There’s a tendency to dismiss older methods that are inherently more elaborate not because they don’t have utility but because people just don’t understand the rationale and unconsciously assume we have made “progress” since then and so they can simply discard it.

Psychogeography

One of the areas that I have taken quite a shine too in recent years however is that of Psychogeography (PG). Now I will say, this isn’t inherently a Chaos Magic practice, but I have seen it absorbed into the practice of some of the bigger names in that current. PG has its origins in -predominantly French, radicalism and artistic movements of the 1950s & 1960s who were heavily influenced by Marxist and Anarchist Theory, namely the Letterist and Situationist International movements.

PG is essentially a kind of landscape experience about the interconnectedness of nature. There is therefore a distinction between Urban PG and Wilderness PG, which grant entirely different spheres of insight. It is a process of exploration and situating oneself in your local landscape and interacting with it, or perhaps more poetically, it is a process of placing oneself into the land, not just on it. Guy Debord, the French Marxist theorist defined it as1:

The study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.

In other words, Psychogeography is a practice of observation & mental de-centralisation in which you observe how you feel when you move through certain places; your sensations, emotions or reactions to your environment.

It is the relationship between Mind, or better, Soul, and space. The Greek ψυχε, psyche, is often translated as Mind in modern discourse, but originally denoted the idea of a soul. As Richard Seaford has pointed out2, what modern Neuroscientists tend to identify as mental activity would have come under the banner of the soul for Plato. To keep matters simple, I am essentially referring to the bounded inner “self” in which your perception takes place here.

Psyche denotes our internal reactions, responses and insights to things, our feelings and emotions. Psychogeography is therefore an exercise in somatic contemplation on how a relationship forms with the spaces in which we find ourselves, and our internal reactions to those spaces (i.e the impressions and images formed in our soul).

It doesn’t feel right to describe it as a topic or field. PG is a territory with a bunch of confluences and deviations to it. It is a Landscape of its own. As a practice and theory, it has influenced a huge amount of cultural actors and revolutionaries, including artists, activists and academics.

The first published discussion of Psychogeography was in the Lettrist journal Potlatch in 1954, which included a 'Psychogeographical Game of the Week':

Depending on what you are after, choose an area, a more or less populous city, a more or less lively street. Build a house. Furnish it. Make the most of its decoration and surroundings. Choose the season and the time. Gather together the right people, the best records and drinks. Lighting and conversation must, of course, be appropriate, along with the weather and your memories. If your calculations are correct, you should find the outcome satisfying. (Please inform the editors of the results).3

The subtle air of sarcasm never disappoints me in these French radicals, the humour even feels slightly French.

One of the great utilities I have found in PG is that it illuminates the trackways and subconscious assumptions that you have about the land you’re in. While we seldom think about it as a species, many of the trackways experienced by humans are utilitarian in nature. The majority of our interactions with the Land are rooted in pathways designed to engage work, food or survival.

In instances where religious or symbolic aspects of the Land are acknowledged, it’s common for people to invest them with an animistic sense of being, attaching deities, spirits or forces to prominent features and giving such forces locations. Temples, churches and prominent features of the landscapes such as mountains, rivers and hills are some of the most common investitures.

I remember talking to Dr Lyne Kelly about this process in the context of Aboriginal Australians4. She explained to me how, while not living in the biological sense that we understand it, landscape features can be alive with memory & cultural influence, in the sense that they can retain information almost like biological codices. When an Aboriginal Native is engaging a landscape walk across a region of the Outback, they are not simply walking on the ground and gazing at the nature around them.

Every step they take, every fissure they cross or tree they see holds a story that is alive with cultural memory, information and insight. They can even use this to radically improve memory function and remember details such as trackways and routes for thousands of miles. I remember Dr Kelly showing me a small wooden box that had been given to her with a variety of beads and shells drilled into it.

She explained that, while it looked like a simple decorative ornament on the outside, this small wooden box was in fact a codex that contained the names, colours, notated cries and nesting locations for birds within a few miles radius of her house, all encoded in tactile form that she could receive by running her fingers across the beads in various ways.

I bring this up because Pychogeography is making use of a similar part of the brain. A lot of the time, it is the journey itself that matters and provides us with revelation and insight into our own condition. It is the path we take through the space that moves us. In the hero’s journey, the hero only becomes the hero because they go through the stages of their journey, end up in the underworld and then return to the status quo. The MEANING they gain is not from the destinations they go to (although they play a part), it lies in the experience of journeying itself.

In occult contexts, PG invites us to consider the spaces we inhabit, both physically and mentally.

Dérive

One of the core practices to engage this mode of experience outlined by the Situationists was known as Dérive. Meaning “to drift” in French, dérive is a practice of quite literally drifting through a given space to explore how a landscape, usually a city, is constructed, as well as how it makes you feel internally. Debord defined it as "a mode of experimental behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances”5

He actually gave an expanded definition in his Theory of Derive6, published a couple of years before this, explaining that:

“In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there… But the dérive includes both this letting go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities”

As a practice, it is mostly about walking, as this is our primary mode of movement through a landscape. To engage the practice, we must change the orientation of the places we move to, or rather, our orientation to them. It is a way of encountering the mysterious, unexpected and spiritual dimensions of the world by taking note of your surroundings. Psychogeographical experience can happen in any location, even urban ones like supermarkets and towns, it is simply a matter of re-orientating our awareness of them.

Exercises & Insights

So with that. Here are some suggestions from my own explorations of PG for you to experiment with.

As a simple start, go for a walk in nature or a city and take time to explore the landscape with the intention to see it in a new way. Some of this is about finding ways of tricking and shocking your mind to deliberately induce a state of aporia. One of the early collaborations between Debord and Asger Jorn had them create The Naked City: A Psychogeographic Map of Paris in 1958, for which they cut apart a typical map of Paris and repositioned the pieces before following it (think along the lines of Spare’s cut up sigil method, but for a map of a city that you then follow).

The resulting map corresponded with parts of Paris that they -in theory, subconsciously considered ‘stimulating’ and “worthy of study and preservation.”

As an adjustment to that practice, I also heard that they ended up walking around Paris with a map of Berlin, following and looking for road names in a deliberate attempt to unlock esoteric meaning in the Parisian street layout.

Another modern technique I’ve often had fun with is taking a coin or dice with you when venturing into a city and using that random probability to decide where you will walk next, never letting yourself know your next step. This idea of walking through a landscape without any particular purpose or sense of time is very useful and I’ve found it enables entry into a liminal state of state of mind in which insights about your local area come more readily.

In the spirit of disrupting those utilitarian pathways I mentioned earlier, try going into a place when there is no utilitarian reason to go there. The point is to transition from Mundane Geography to Psycho, by which you get lost in this new complexity and richness of the landscape brought about by your own dissociation. While on this walk, you want to disrupt your bounded inner self by using different methods like random maps, changing your destination mid stride, and bringing your attention to the walk in different ways.

Some things to look out for while slipping into the Psychogeographic Land are things like Simulacra -things that look like other things, faces, patterns or abstract principles and the like. Make an effort to dwell on those things that we noticed as kids but ignore as adults. We want to create those novel connections and in doing so, trigger a sense of astonishment and wonder at the beauty of the world. Truly get lost in and give yourself to the Land.

If you’re walking through glassy urban areas with many windows (or even puddles and water sources!) notice the reflections -how do things reflect? How do such reflections distort the landscape and the image within them? What would it be like to step into that puddle and traverse the shimmering, ghostly image?

Notice the cracks and breaks, whether they be concrete cracks, edges, broken branches or scruffy patches of dirt; the details of the space that you disregard and the way they interpenetrate. One other adjustment to this that i’ve found interesting is to alter my movement pattern in line with cracks or fissures in the landscape. Spend some time avoiding stepping on cracks, follow the perpendicular lines you notice in the floors and buildings or zig zag through the landscape.

Notice the shadows and the way the light envelopes things…bends round corners & illuminates your environment. Understand the weather & what it does -to the land, the trees and the buildings. Observe how the Land is weathered.

As you walk, pay attention to changes in height -both your own and in the landscape. Feel the slopes of hills and dips, the gradients on pavements and the force of gravity as you step off curbs. Take time to alter you walking pattern. Deliberately step off with the other foot to confuse your subconscious programming. Walk on the balls of your feet and walk slowly -especially in a city, slowing down your speed, and you’ll find there’s a bunch of people who walk slower too and you’ll notice them more.

Engage Somatic Stimulation as you navigate the landscape like a hunter. Keep humming, singing or whistling -all of which relaxes the vagus nerve and triggers the rest and relaxation response. It’s no secret that our cognition is calmed by such sounds as vowel utterance. mantras, songs or chants.

Every once in a while, stop and look around and look back -periodically stop, take a breath, breathe out and look around ALL of your horizon line before continuing on. One of things that I persistently notice more as I do this is colours -particular single ones or groups. I often find myself looking across my horizon line and seeing the stone pavement, but take time to look at the different shades, perhaps influenced by interplay of the light and shadow.

Another fun one that I ended up talking to Julian Vayne about is the act “as if” method. This is where you walk around the landscape as if you’re doing something else. Go into an open space, close your eyes and centre yourself and visualise the British Museum (or any museum you’ve been to) and walk around it as if you were inside it. Now of course, you’re not materiality inside it, but as far as Pyschogeography is concerned, a part of you is. Walk through visualised landscapes overlayed onto physical ones, and use that imaginative faculty to gain insights into your physical space.

Taken to another level, try inhabiting a space as if you were lots of different things. Inhabit a space as if it were your last day on earth, as an alien etc. Notice how your psychic state influences your connection and perception of the land your physically in.

Sight & sound are our active senses, but touch and smell is equally important -PG is an opportunity to come into a deeper relationship with your space. So equally, make attempts to view the space through your other senses. Touch the space, engage your environment through all your senses and acknowledge it. Move your body as if you are like the object you’re sensing.

You can engage things like hand positions/mudras/touchstones for this-the Default Mode Network will often get back in the way at some point, so its important to have some kind of gesture or action that returns you to the subjective state. This can be a mudra or hand position.

One of the weirder ones i’ve found is the act of making shrines or in some other way integrating with the landscape. This can be a powerful way of integrating your connection with the land and can also include things like photography or artistry.

There’s an old Greek concept known as Omphalos. This was originally a religious stone artefact that designated the “centre” of a space of worship. According to myth, Zeus originally placed the Divine Omphalos at Delphi, considered by Greeks to be the centre of the world. In more personal contexts, the Omphalos as a centre of space also applies to the human body.

For the body, the Omphalos it is the belly button (the navel), or main Dantein in Taoist Medicine. It’s our physical centre as well as our energetic one. With this in mind, I’ve found it to be an interesting practice to identify the Omphalos of a place and mark or interact with it in some way.

In any given space or land, what -to you, speaks out as the living hearth or world axis around which everything is centred? What does that thing tell you about the place? How do you relate to it?

Once you have the Omphalos of a space, try making a Psychogeographic map of it. Maps stylise and simplify things. As an exercise, create a magical map of where you live. Think about the important places to you and what their symbolic meaning is and design a blueprint for you to follow your own Hero’s Journey. The core idea is to make your own landscape magical.

Thank you for reading Mystai -Voices in Fire. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Final Thoughts

I often find myself thinking about communication as a concept and how it factors into things like this. This whole practice is essentially an act of communicating with yourself (or perhaps different aspects of your Self) in new ways, which many times begin as confusing and disorienting.

Take a moment and look around you, or think back to a time or place where you feel intimately connected. Where in this landscape/space for you embodies the abstraction of communication? Often, when in a city or urban area, it is communication masts/towers -i.e where all the data is being transferred and migrated or moved through.

So if you were to create a Psychogeographic ritual, it may be to take a pilgrimage/walk to such a place with the goal of eventually arriving at the closest Communications Tower and then reading a piece of poetry or doing something as an offering while in that environment to enhance or gain insight into your own communication.

In another vein, perhaps one could connect to the archetype of a healer. For me growing up in England, when I think of healing spiritually, I default to the Springs of Sulis at Bath. But in more modern day scenarios, we automatically assume things like hospital or doctors offices. As well as finding these qualities within ourselves, I encourage you to explore how you can journey to them in the landscape.

Mystai