One of the most enjoyable parts of writing these stories is delving into historical documents. I’ve used diaries, biographies, personal correspondence, and declassified documents. The CIA has recently declassified a whole host of documents on the para-psychology operations of others states. One of these reports that I’ve been digging through has a fascinating illustration. It is fascinating in its own right, but also is an example of something I have seen over and over both in fiction and in the occult psuydo-sciences. Specifically, the occult is often merged with geometry to provide some form of logical grounding.
The Czech occultist Josef Wolf offers a perfect example of this dynamic. Wolf presents a simple graphic consisting of two circles and a triangle. The outer circle represents the “Psychotronic” which I’m going to casually call the spirit realm. The Triangle is the “somatic,” which again I’m going to bastardize and call simply “the body.” And the second circle, which is inscribed within the triangle is the Psychic.
So presumably when these are all neatly circumscribed or inscribed (depending on your perspective) the individual (as depicted in figure 1) is able to use psychic powers or some such. Maybe. I don’t know. The CIA didn’t really get into it.
Figures 2 and 3 offer examples of how two people can be connected. I’m kind of at a loss for what this looks like. It looks like there is only one inner circle, so the two triangles are sharing a common soul or are otherwise soul aligned…maybe? In the first one they also seem to be body aligned as the triangles are stacked on top of each other but in the second example they are flipped forming a Star of David. Wolf describes this as a purely mental connection and “platonicly” aligned. So that is cool, I guess, but I can’t really think of an example of this sort of thing. But that isn’t really the point.
Now things start to get wild in Wolf’s typology because in figure 4 he has added another circle! This circle represents some sort of psychic connection between distinct individuals (i.e. those of us who are not sharing a single soul with one or more other people.) According to Wolf both figures 4 and 5 are examples of “telepathic connections” with “minimal coupling.” This is confusing to me. I get how this works in figure 4. The tips of the triangles are touching (holding hands?) and there is a connecting circle. But what is going on in figure 5. I am left to conclude that when people press their bases together, there is a direct psychic connection that doesn’t need to be depicted by an extra circle. Maybe it has to do with the circle-souls touching. That would make sense…except I have no idea what that means in practice.
So when I first started trying to figure out these diagrams I was really stumped how 6, 7, and 8 were in any way different from diagram 4. After all, you have a spirit realm with some inscribed, touching triangles. The triangles all have inscribed circles. And then there is another larger “connecting” circle that loops through all the inscribed circles. Figures 4, 6, 7, and 8 all have this. But, Au Contraire, they are not, the same. These three diagrams illustrate “psychosomatic.”
Of course this is very confusing for anyone with a passing familiarity with the DSM-5. Does this mean that all these triangles are fostering a sense of physical connection by way of a mental process? If that is what you were thinking, you would be wrong! Wrong! Wolf tells us that the mind/body intertwining observed in psychosomatic connections relates to people who are relatives! Maybe they are even twins!
And finally we arrive at the last two diagrams, which represent “higher psychotronic coupling involving groups.” So this is confusing to me as there are way more triangles (bodies) in figure 8 than in either figure 9 or 10. After puzzling over it, I came to understand that it is not the number of bodies involved but the way they are aligned. In figures 9 and 10 the triangles are connected in a way that forms a new geometric shape (triangle or square). Thus, it is totally different. If you are wondering where this kind of euclidean shape formation occurs (and you should be wondering this), the answer is church! Religious ceremonies or occult rituals are powerful precisely because they arrange people in such a way that new shapes are formed within the spirit realm! I bet you never thought about religious rituals that way before!
Wolf’s typology is really cool in that he uses two basic shapes and works out lots of different combinations of inscribed and superscribed circles and variations of arranged triangles. What I see happen time and again in occult writings is someone ascribes meaning to shapes or symbols, draws something cool with those shapes, and then asserts that the newly created diagram holds some power or is a representation of a real phenomena.
I’ll provide additional examples of this kind of occult geometry as additional stories get drafted. For those who are interested, Wolf’s typology is mentioned briefly in the short story “The Soviet Files” (forthcoming).