Sigil Séance Against Space Billionaires

Lucile Olympe Haute & Institute of Diagram Studies (David Benqué)

MFRU31 ESOTERIC ECOTECHNICS
Irrational Computation and Conspirational Networking
4 Oct. 2025 - Maribor (Sl)

The passengers of Blue Origin NS-16, the first passenger flight of Jeff Bezos’ New Shepard Rocket. (Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk, Oliver Daemen)* - photo: BlueOrigins / Twitter, as found in Marx (2021)

Our project started in 2021 with the first passenger flight of Jeff Bezos’ space-tourism rocket New Shepard. This moment acted like a science-fictional vignette, highlighting the figure of the space-billionaire as the arch-villain of our era, a cartoonish character hoarding wealth on an incomprehensible scale, lifting fascistic ideology from sci-fi novels, and leaving a trail of death and destruction behind them.

“Leave the billionaires in space” read the headline of an article by Parix Marx (2021) after the New Shepard launch, a sentiment we shared. This paper is about our response to this destructive billionaire figure and the future it promotes. We present Sigil Séance, a teleperformance based on chaos magick and sigils, that aims to create a space for thinking critically about the billionaire space race, and to manifest alternatives. As creative practictioners we seek to establish a form of praxis, both reflective and actively engaged in the current manifold crises that are unfolding.

New Space; the billionaire colonialist/ecocidal industrial complex

SpaceTech Market Map - Valery Komissarov 2016

Le futur New Space

	Ecocidal	Colonial
Earth	Fossil fuels Ressource extraction	Starlink Satelites Land grabs
Outer-Space	Starman roadster Space junk Inter-planetary contamination	Asteroid mining Moon colonisation Mars colonisation

“engineering territory,” or the leveraging of new technology to construct virgin territory in ostensibly empty spaces that can then be claimed as territorial property

Utrata, A. (2023) ‘Engineering Territory: Space and Colonies in Silicon Valley’, American Political Science Review, pp. 1–13. Available at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/engineering-territory-space-and-colonies-in-silicon-valley/5D6EA4D306E8F3E0465F4A05C89454D6.

Musk, E. (2017) ‘Making Humans a Multi-Planetary Species’, New Space. Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers, 5(2), pp. 46–61. Available at: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/space.2017.29009.emu.

Amazon patent US10419106B1

Au, Y. (2023) ‘The sprint to plug in the moon’, in Cath, C. (ed.) Eaten by the Internet. Manchester, UK: Meatspace Press.

Starlink Map - https://www.starlinkmap.org/

Musk, E. (2017) ‘Making Humans a Multi-Planetary Species’, New Space. Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers, 5(2), pp. 46–61. Available at: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/space.2017.29009.emu.

In summary the space-billionaire future is a radical ideology of acceleration in the time where all attention should be on planetary limits. At its worse, space-faring is a dark exit stategy, a deep betrayal of life on earth, as it effectively gives up on it and seeks the next planet to pillage.

Not only is this promise flawed but entrepreneurs also continually fail to deliver it, as illustrated by the 2017 timeline that shows flights for Mars flights taking place by 2023 (Musk, 2017), the frontier is always 5 years away for Elon Musk.

Rubenstein (2022) demonstrates how the ideological foundations of space colonialism are entangled with religion. As we feel the urgency to protect ourselves and the planet from this deadly future, pushing back on a spiritual level seems like a relevant terrain.

A Sigil Séance

Variations on a meme comparing videoconferencing to a séance.

About technologies and surnatural : worldbrain.d-w.fr | mediamediums.net

Esoteric Algorithms and Re-Enchanted Technologies | Casting A Spell | MFRU31 Esoteric Ecotechnics | SMB13 Séance: Technology of the Spirit | “Algorithms and the Occult” ASAP Journal special issue

S.L. MacGregor Mathers & Aleister Crowley, The Book Of The Goetia Of Solomon The Kinh, 1904.

Osman Spare, A. (1913) The Book of Pleasure: The Psychology of Ecstasy. Available at: http://archive.org/details/isbn_9781984994844.

Sigils gathered by Jackson (2013), redrawn with additions from the authors

Jackson, M. B. (2013) Sigils, ciphers and scripts: History and graphic function of magick symbols. Somerset, England: Green Magic.

Bind Billionaires who fly to the upper sky from coming back to Earth

Sigil Generator v1 - source code: https://codeberg.org/IDS/Sigil_Generator

Sigil Séance

With the Sigil Séance we are adding a collaborative element to this sigil making, allowing for a group of people to gather on a web page to generate and launch sigils together. The application is built with Yjs, a library normally used for collaborative text editing (Nicolaescu et al. 2016, Jahns 2014).

As they connect, each participant is given a user-name and an emoji avatar that appear in the presence list on the page and on the cipher grid. Anyone can edit or replace the phrase in the main text box and click a button to draw the sigil and sync it to all other participants.

Ritual paticipants are all connected through an audio call.

One participant types a phrase to launch and invites edits or additions from the others. The software converts each phrase to a sigil by 1) condensing all letters and removing duplicates such that each letter cannot appear again after its first position, and 2) tracing the resulting sequence of letters on the cypher grid (Jackson, 2013).

All participants must express consent before proceeding to the sigil launch. Consent is reset each time the sigil is changed to ensure that the collective energy cannot be subverted at the last minute.

Participants send and receive letters according to their position on the grid. This process repeats until the whole letter sequence is completed, at which point the sigil is considered launched and one participant clears the grid by sending an empty update.

This launch procedure is repeated a number of times during the séance ritual which we designed as a teleperformance

Ritual script for a teleperformance (~1 hour)

1) Hosts and participants introduce each other
2) Participants are invited to add entities to the formation
   (e.g. Karl Marx, Laika, Vladimir Komarov). 
   Each entity is summoned by launching their name
3) Hosts declare the formation copmlete
4) Payload: participants are invited to share 
   anti-space-billionaire phrases for 
   collective launching
5) Summoned entities are released by launching their reversed name
6) Hosts declare the formation open
7) Discussion and de-briefing

Magick & teleperformance as counter-attack formations

Jusatsu Kito Sodan (photo: Mitsutoshi Hanaga Estate)

Hopfner, J. (2020) ‘Power of the Powerless; On ritual, protest and the art of self-defence’, Dark Mountain. Available at: https://dark-mountain.net/power-of-the-powerless/.

W.I.T.C.H. Portland Instagram

Witches against Trump: #bindtrump & #magicalresistance

Simultaneously, on Instagram and Twitter a cyber-magic resistance is being organized. At each full moon, a ritual rendezvous is performed individually and remotely become collective through the hashtags #BindTrump and #magicresistance. The revival of WITCH in the social network era has mobilized supporters of both sides. In response, Pro-Trump evangelical nationalists gathered through the hashtag #PrayerResistance

#BindTrump (+1000 tags Nov. 2016 - Oct. 2018)
#magicresistance (660 tags Feb. 2017 - Oct. 2018)
#MagicalResistance (150 tags Feb. 2017 - Oct. 2018)

At each full moon, a ritual gathering is held individually and becomes collectively remote thanks to the hashtags #BindTrump and #magicresistance. The rebirth of WITCH in the age of social media has mobilized supporters on both sides. In response, pro-Trump evangelical nationalists have rallied around the hashtag #PrayerResistance.

The Hologram by Cassie Thornton

Thornton, C. (2020) The Hologram; Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future. Pluto Press (Vagabonds).

Taking dark magic seriously

Leaving aside the human toll, by wiping out a fathomless number of no less important organisms, those responsible for industrial pollution threatened the entire cosmic order. A curse was therefore the only proportionate response

Hopfner, J. (2020) ‘Power of the Powerless; On ritual, protest and the art of self-defence’, Dark Mountain. Available at: https://dark-mountain.net/power-of-the-powerless/.

The Jusatsu Kito Sodan monks mentioned earlier deployed abhicara, or black magic, which would be frowned upon by many buddhist who adhere to strict non-violence. According to the group however the amount of deadly damage unleashed by industrial polution were of such a magnitude that a kill curse was warranted.

In our case we also consider that ‘the entire cosmic order’ is threatened enough to warrant serious curses.

This is a point we discussed at length among ourselves and with members of the Laboratoire Sauvage Dessorceler la Finance (Brussels): how should we position ourselves in the spectrum of magical actions, which ranges from protection spells to “preventive retaliation” through spellcasting?

We are also aware that our software aims to encourage others to reflect on their own level of proportionate response. How can we respect their free will at each stage of the ritual?

We designed the consent mechanism explained above to provide a fail-safe in the design. We also added a disclaimer to our invitation text and website to make this aspect clear to participants

Conclusion & Future Work

Technological sovereignty

autonomy
choice of culturally and socially appropriate tools
priority given to local solutions
respect for the environment

Claire Richard, Petit ouvrage d’autonomie technologique, 2018

Future goal: peer-to-peer séance infrastructure using WebRTC

…if we want to get right with space, we’re going to have to get right with religion.To expose the values of contemporary techno-science as the product of bad mythologies and seek out better ones.

Rubenstein, M.-J. (2022) Astrotopia: The dangerous religion of the corporate space race. Chicago, IL, USA: The University of Chicago Press.

sigil-seance.diagram.institute

sigil-seance@diagram.institute

Lucile Olympe Haute & David Benqué