#there's no math without mind being able to percieve. and there's no seeing reality without perceiving maths

[ramenwithbroccoli]

not to be controversial on main, but i really do feel like way more people would enjoy maths if someone properly explained it to them & they didn't have a hanging threat of failing an exam above their heads

[fipindustries]

The ludomancer

So you heard of parahumans fans using their own lives to come up with triggers and create their own fan capes? well, that is more than well trodden ground so i figured lets take it an extra notch and figure out my own fan practitioner, my own fanctitioner! (disclaimer: many of of the personal details here were either exagerated or fabricated for dramatic effect)

backstory

i had open heart surgery when i was 6 months old, and if niccolette belanger is anything to go by, having big openings in your flesh at a very young age is free real state for persky spirits. Just imagine this giant entrance direct to my chest, leaving my heart ridden with holes and openly exposed.

Now this was in a very modern hospital in and incredibly sterile enviroment so is not like there were a lot of grisly phantasmagoric spirits crawling all over the place, you i was covered head to toe in technology, multiple wires and tubes and god knows what else all poking out of my chest, back in those days i was more machine than human. So with that in mind i like the idea that perhaps some fairly young spirits of electricity, technology, science and artificousness got inside me.

nothing too wild and powerful considering these things were all relatively recent by the standards of the practisce, but enough to have an influence. The general result is that i would be naturally inclined towards STEM fields, mad scientists, math and engeneering as a kid. I would constantly find myself getting involved into these enviroments (even when i didnt want to) such as going to a course in robotics, going to a high school soecialized in mechanics, studing computer science in college, etc.

my life would go on more or less like normal, the spirits slowly growing inside of me but always kept in check by my own essense and sense of self. Until...

Awareness

i changed careers and went to live at a college dorm in the middle of nowhere, five kilometers away from the nearest city, a small oasis of technology in the desert and the central hub for the Wi Fi of my state. As the years went by i became more and more isolated, my Conections grew weaker, my own sense of self got thinner and thinner (exacerbated by me finally questioning my gender identity). my prescence on the world was almost non existant, spending most of my time in my dorm in my computer not interacting with anyone, browsing ever incresingly more niche or obscure websites.

in this oasis of technology in the middle of nowhere, with my personal conections and sense of identity growing weaker, the spirits within me started to grow stronger and stronger, starting to screw with my very perception of reality, pushing things so that i would start to go down weird rabbit holes online, reading strange texts in impossibly formatted websites that would introduce strange ideas about the nature of reality, some times even downright attempting to posses me (i would try to rationalize these episodes where i would experience derealization as just panic attacts).

The spirits of technology would introduce me to forbidden ideas online, dangerous memetic cognitohazards, basiliks that would force me to perform obscure rituals to summon  demonic entities from lost planes of reality, not aligned with human values. They would try and convince me that reality was a simulation and coax me to pierce the veil and see the true subyacent reality, that subatomic particles were capable of experiencing suffering, that i could be tortured for eternity if enough people were kept from getting dust specks in their eyes. If things had gone like that for much longer i would have probably ended up summoning or becoming an Ex Machina and probably an entire wing of the college campus would have been condemned.

Luckly in my college there just hapened to be a young dabbler who got wind of my situation. They took notice of me and were kind enough to put me in touch with an online community of witch hunters who specialized in cases like mine (the dabbler didnt take care of it themselves because they didnt want to accidentally reveal to me more than strictly necessary about the magic world, the group of witch hunters had a lot more experience solving this problems without the karmic burden of awakening someone)

The witch hunters were a fairly niche group within the larger community of witch hunters. They specialized in bayesian techniques. Using the tools of rationality to dispell illutions, glamours, mind tricks and half truths. They established firm rules for thinking and percieving the world so that Others wouldnt be able to decieve or manipulate them. Calling bullshit on the impossible. Their organization, the Magical Interference Restriction Institute, coordinated the efforts to develop safe protocols for the practisce in the digital age.

They exorcised most of it, gave me a few basic mental tools and rituals to keep the spirits in check and recommended me to try and forget about the whole affair. But fat chance about that, by this point my eyes had been opened.

The awakening

When i finished college and moved to a different city i did everything in my power to enter in contact with the practitioner world again. Walking around the city, reading craiglist adds, looking into different organizations. Of course i wasnt acting blindly, i was guided by some of the things that i had picked up during my posessions, the things the spirits had revealed to me, the forbidden texts that i had read and some of the advice the witch hunters gave me.

Eventually i managed to follow conections and came across a small cabal of practitioners who put the front of a board game club to recruit people and have a place to reunite while looking legitimate and not arising suspicion from the mundanes. The way the club would work was that on the front it was a normal place to play things like Catan, Carcassone, king of tokyo, etc. But on the back room they would “play test” new “games” between the senior members of the club. when in reality they would workshop new rituals to perform.

They would focus on a fairly recent branch of magic caled Ludomancy. Focused on the idea that any boardgame is in the end a ritual. it would be this communal activity with rules and mechanics, supported by the illution and the beliefs of the players who would manipulate symbols and idols across intricate diagrams. 

they saw my experience with rules, logic and technology applied to magic and saw enough potential in me that they allowed me to join. Their awakening ritual is a bit different than most since they customized it based on their findings and experiences with rituals. Instead os sitting in a circle the circle is inscribed in a board. The piece that you use to move through the board has to be carved by you and has to be composed of elements that represent you and that are meaningful to you and it has to hold within a couple of drops of your blood.

You throw the dice and move across the board and depending on what places you fall in on of the cards will be drawn from the multiple decks. These cards will either give you challenges to overcome to prove yourself, make declarations and impositions on the kind of practitioner you will be once you awaken or just be criptic messages and riddles that wont be relevant or mean anything to you until many years down the line. You have to overcome the challenges, answer the questions posed by the cards and most of all, play the rules cleverly so that you can make your piece reach the center of the board and scream jumanji to complete the ritual. Now the rules of every awakening playthrough change and they can be incredibly intricate and complex, it can take a lot of cleverness of a lot of luck to finish this ritual but once you do you find yourself in a much firmer and powerful grounding than most begginers do.

the practice

i would probably focus on shamanism, collecting spirits here and there, slow and steady accumulation of a power base. i would like to get into constructs, acumulating spirits, helping them grow, give them a bit of my own power to help the process along, like sacrificing one drop of blood every week, or establishing small rituals of worship, and then mix and mashing them together to build more complex spirits, also i would probably offer small favors to the local practitioners in exchange of tibdits, trinkets and sources of power, always keeping it low profile and not too ambitious, something like helping with a ritual here and there, being a pair of extra hands, mostly giving help establishing magic circles and drawing diagrams, running small errands, sending messages. it would help let other people know that im not too much of a concern and hopefully they would let me be

if you need help or want to make an exchange with me you could come to my house and i would offer to play a game (usually one i made up) and in the process of playing the game i would perform the magic that you need or arrange the cosmological and quintessential pieces inside and outside of you according to your request.

My implement would be a set of D&D dices that i can use to make a bit of augury, affect probabilities, dictate outcomes and, in times of need, cheat at my games a bit. the rest of my equipment would be booklets and notebooks filled with my own designs, rulesets and texbooks, lots and of graph paper and one actual RPG supplement that i would use to bluff some of the more out of date Others by claiming that i have tomes filled with arcane spells and a full compendium of magicl creatures.

eventually i would try to diversify, focusing more on crafting and building, going more for the angle of the toy maker rather than game designer. I would build complex structures in papercraft, small mechanisms with cardboard, intricate contraptions with some clockwork and some springs.

i probably wouldnt get a familiar, i just dont see my self commiting to a life long companion. i would desperatly try to establish a demesne but that would also be rather complicated since i dont see my self owning property any time soon either.

[spinallyspiraling]

"Gnosticism meaning one who knows, was able to be expressed and discovered because a few individuals who expanded the know from Euclidean Mathematics. Gnosticism in it's true form still upholds the geometrical truths of nature and secretly still exalts numbers and math. Gnosticism when not diluted with ignorance teaches that geometric patterns and shapes are the initiators of man. The gnostics, although not as openly understood or spoken of, knew that metaphysical forces and properties were crafted by these shapes within and without, from the golden spiral of Fibonacci, the platonic solids of platonism, and the five elements of Euclid. The Gnostics taught that creating these shapes geometrically within and without was the causation of consciousness and thus by understanding the geometrical shapes and solids, one can craft himself the shape or solid to command his consciousness to evolve or to become devoid of higher capabilities and capacities. Alchemy in a sense is the same practice or study, only alchemy has 7 widely accepted steps or initiators, whereas Gnosticism has its 5 elements, 5 platonic solids, and sacred geometry as it's initiators."

~ SpinallySpiraling

The fifth element, i.e., the quintessence, according to Plato was identified with the dodecahedron. He says simply "God used this solid for the whole universe, embroidering figures on it". So, I suppose it's a good thing that the right triangles comprising this quintessence are incommensurate with those of the other four elements, since we certainly wouldn't want the quintessence of the universe to start transmuting into the baser substances contained within itself!

Timaeus contains a very detailed discussion of virtually all aspects of physical existence, including biology, cosmology, geography, chemistry, physics, psychological perceptions, etc., all expressed in terms of these four basic elements and their transmutations from one into another by means of the constituent triangles being broken apart and re-assembled into other forms. Overall it's a very interesting and impressive theory, and strikingly similar in its combinatorial (and numerological) aspects to some modern speculative "theories of everything", as well as expressing ideas that have obvious counterparts in the modern theory of chemistry and the period table of elements, and so on.

"And so now we may say that our account of the universe has reached its conclusion. This world of ours has received and teems with living things, mortal and immortal. A visible living thing containing visible things, and a perceptible God, the image of the intelligible Living Thing. Its grandness, goodness, beauty and perfection are unexcelled. Our one universe, indeed, the only one of its kind, has come to be."

~ Timaeus

The word “Geo-metry” comes from the Greek words Geos meaning “Earth” and Metron meaning “To measure”, which together literally translate as the “Measuring of the earth” or “Earthly measurements”, an art which was traditionally restricted to the priesthood.

The general belief behind sacred geometry is that geometry and mathematical ratios, harmonics and proportions are also found in music, light, and cosmology. It is considered foundational to building sacred structures such as temples, mosques, megaliths, monuments and churches; sacred spaces such as altars and tabernacles; meeting places such as sacred groves, village greens and holy wells and the creation of religious art, iconography and using "divine" geometry may be understood as a worldview of pattern recognition, a complex system of religious symbols and structures involving space, time and form. By studying the nature of these patterns, forms and relationships and their connections, insight may be gained into the mysteries - the laws and lore of the Universe.

The vision of God as a Great Architect has found expression through numerous sources throughout the ages. The great Christian theologian St. Augustine, who held both Pythagoras and Plato in high regard, grasped the significance of geometric form, pattern and proportion, and their representation through numerical symbolism.

"Numbers are the thoughts of God.”

~ St. Augustine

“The construction of the physical and moral world alike is based on eternal numbers.”

~ St. Augustine

"Mathematics is the alphabet with which God has written the universe.”

~ Galileo

“Geometry existed before the creation. It is co-eternal with the mind of God…Geometry provided God with a model for the Creation…”

~ Johannes Kepler

In a pre-literate world the oldest evidence of the Great Knowledge or Inner Teachings is expressed by means of geometry that has always been regarded as Sacred Geometry as it represented the Divine Law of physical manifestation. People with access to the higher dimensions see these geometric shapes where they emanate specific energies to sustain and support the physical dimension. The oldest evidence of the use of Sacred Geometry is 70,000 B.C. and originates from South Africa. By using Sacred Geometry our ancestors depicted the creation or make-up of our universe by the Divine Yin and Yang and the task of the human being therein in ever widening spirals of increasing density in the lower dimensions and thus estrangement of the Divine.

"Consciousness is obtainable and manipulatable with poetry, math, music, dance, and other higher pursuits such as astrology or astronomy, philosophy and other scholarly avenues of higher education because these higher pursuits are still mathematical and are basically mathematical equations. The higher pursuits and education was once only available to the aristocrats, oligarchs, monarchs, and artisans; give or take the far and few initiates of the ancient mystery schools due to the overreach of corruption, orthodoxy and religion in the affairs of man hindering the age of reasoning. All higher education leads to consciousness because all of the higher pursuits involve mathematics, numerical sequences, and pattern; with the iambic pentameter of poetry, the rendition or rhythm used in one's prose being a prime example of a mathematical scale creating inherant pattern. Music and dance are essentially a mathematical equation or scale, and also are outliers of pattern because math measures the notes as well as the distance between them, as does math also dictate dance due to the pattern or rhythm created by our movements in accordance or in mathematical synchronization with the scales and patterns imputed on the overall equation by the music underneath it. Mathematical correctness and symmetry is the definition of a talented musician, poet, dancer, etc; whereas mathematical inconsistencies a lack of symmetry or a misunderstanding of scales in music and math creates the foundation for a bad musician whom makes terrible music. Philosophy, a higher pursuit, because it requires empathy, wisdom, and an intelligence that can discern reality from appearence. Philosophy requires an application of our critical and reflective intelligence to understand human nature and altruism enough to seek how it is that the best in man can be unleashed. Every higher pursuit takes intellect to grasp and each transcends the mundane as these pursuits require a communion with our highest aspect of oneself, the soul, whether it be knowingly or unknowingly.

When one looks into all spiritual or metaphysical phenomena, one will discover a mathematical foundation underneath the visible or apparent reality we percieve, down to the kundalini being coiled 3 and 1/2 inches at the coccyx, the death of the same force at the base of the skull at the highest vertebra, to the rebirth that follows after in the core of man, the dot in which the radius himself will be calculated, the heart. Kundalini is mathematical, the Golden spiral being straightened into a line by it's upwards climb, the potential energy of our own matter becoming spiritualized and actuated, and this line in result turns into a weapon against the magnetism within that caused dissymetry and seperation from our highest self and consciousness. This gives life to the 5th element and the state of superfluidity; the spiritualized matter appearing as an observable weight, due to the energy of the Golden spiral - which was turned into line, threaded through the vesica pisces - the spinal medula, and faster than light, seemingly as lightning, was released; and the kinetic energy from the line created a zap of electrostatic discharge birthing the fires of shin and the zero point necessary for an introduction of aether to the biological being. This aether creates an outwards or expansive force a cool current or effect, similar to a dark energy or anti matter, this is the water of mem. As this line slowly loses energy it plummets downwards where it started, turns back into golden spiral; the sword that was stuck in the stone, and we bridge the gap between ourselves, consciousness and eternal return. Each climb gives life to a descent and every descent sets us up for another climb upwards. As above so below, the crown is in the kingdom and the kingdom is in the crown, keter overlaps malkuth and malkuth overlaps keter. Ascending, man must sow himself with friction and heat. Descending, man must take the thread connecting both poles and with the electrostatic discharge and kinetic energy, use this to free himself from the energy blockages that matter has trapped him in. In doing so man totally is transformed. The woman rediscovers her true form by reconciling the lost masculine within herself and man rediscovers his true form by reconciling with the lost feminine. This is the magnum opus, the secret of secrets, the holy of holies, the transcendence of both polarities the becoming of the Rebis, the androgynous, the God Self overlapping the physical. Greek mythology told the adepts of the mystery schools of antiquity that humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves. The keys to completion were once scattered, but Gnosticism had safely and secretly disquised these truths throughout the ages, through this spiral being raised up and converted into a line we metaphorically take the keys to the mysteries and pry open the treasure chests of the rib cage - sternum, the hips - pelvis, the crystal palace - pineal gland. This underlies the secrets of every system of belief, just as Hiram Abiff was using mathematics to design external houses of God, so we must also be like Hiram Abiff and construct the temple of God within self and become the Rebis once more. As it is with the rebis the great work is complete."

~ SpinallySpiraling