Goêtic Affordances
I am sharing this brief excerpt from a manuscript I have been developing over the past several months. Given the increasingly lengthy publication cycles for high-quality books — a reality we must accept as a testament to their value — I felt it timely to offer this glimpse. Over the last three years, James J. Gibson’s anthropological concept of Affordances has significantly influenced my understanding of spirit contact. The following section marks a deliberate integration of this essential framework into the realm of ritual magic, or goêteia, as I practice it.
I hope this work will encourage others to delve more deeply into the fields of modern anthropology and psychology of percetion — not by imposing external frameworks, but through a personal exploration of how their perspectives on Otherness can enhance our understanding and contextualization of our own experiences with non-human beings. Pragmatically speaking, Gibson’s concept of affordances will be central to my next book, Collectanea Goêtica (Scarlet Imprint, 2025), thus this short text will be a helpful foundation.
Please note that this brief text serves as an introductory overview only. I apologize for any contextual references that may seem out of place without the full manuscript.
LVX,
Frater Acher
You must do what others don’t to achieve what others won’t. — Henry Rollins
Excursus:
Goêtic Affordances
[…] Kurt Koffka in 1939 described the primordial way of perceiving the world as an immediate sensing of the qualities, the values or virtues of any particular object:
Each thing says what it is […] a fruit says ‘Eat me’; water says ‘Drink me’; thunder says ‘Fear me’; and woman says ‘Love me’.[1]
As Koffka explains, such primordial way of perceiving “is limited, but, up to a point, manageable, [as its] knowledge is direct and quite unscientific, in many cases perfectly true, but in many others hopelessly wrong.” Thus, humans over the course of millennia replaced this original “language of birds and stones” with abstract categories of thinking and knowing. Finally they arrived in a world of words that spoke in universal truths, but no longer gave “any guidance to conduct”.[2]
James J. Gibson in 1979 returned to Koffka’s notion of a primordial language of inherent virtues and, based upon it, developed his concept of affordances. We are using it here in line with Gibsons’ original definition; only instead of environment and animal, we use the goêtic terms of non-human and human being interchangeably. This results in the following definition: The affordances of the human are what he or she offers the non-human and vice versa. I.e. what they each provide or furnish to each other, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. Gibson has made it up. He meant by it something that refers to the value or modality of a being in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of all beings involved in any given environment.[3]
As an example Gibson offers the following:
If a terrestrial surface is nearly horizontal (instead of slanted), nearly flat (instead of convex or concave), and sufficiently extended (relative to the size of the animal) and if its substance is rigid (relative to the weight of the animal), then the surface affords support. It is a surface of support, and we call it a substratum, ground, or floor. It is stand-on-able, permitting an upright posture for quadrupeds and bipeds. It is therefore walk-on-able and run-over-able. It is not sink-into-able like a surface of water or a swamp, that is, not for heavy terrestrial animals. Support for water bugs is different.[4]
In the ritual laid out in the prior chapter we make our personal affordance explicit to Magna Mater. That is, we express what we as an individual human being intend to be “-able for” to her. In this rite, therefore, we take a moment to pause and define our foundational virtue and qualities, as well as their boundaries and limits, in relation to Mater. This is especially prudent in light of the human condition as we highlighted it above: In our nature as bridges from anywhere to anywhere we might want to take a moment – especially in relations with spirits that we expect to become longstanding partners – to define how we would like to be activated and integrated. In other words: to define what we are willing to afford them.[5]
When I did this rite, my affordance to Mater was unconditional and I offered her both of my testicles in service. Well, that is a longer story, but in principle, I don’t recommend to repeat this. However, I want to mention it here to both illustrate the extremes some of us might choose to go to, as well as the consequences of the decisions we take in such rites.
If we now reverse the topic of affordances from the human towards the spirit’s side, we arrive in the classical domain of ritual magic. Endless are the description of performative actions associated with particular spirits as well as the matching coercions to ensure full execution of ‘the job’.[6] Yet, from a goêtic perspective we aim to perceive spirits with the same genuine interest that we’d like to be perceived with. Thus, in our case understanding the affordances of Mater means knowing what she “is, invites, threatens and does”.[7]
However, since Mater is not a physical force that always works under sufficiently known circumstances for us to be able to predict its effect, this is precisely what each practitioner must explore for themselves. Mater’s willingness to offer her affordance is shaped not only by what we present to her but also by the broader context of our spiritual and personal landscape. This includes the environment we choose to work in, the legacy of our ancestors, the imprints of our previous incarnations, and the connections we have already forged with other spirits. In essence, her response depends upon the intricate network of bridges we have built throughout our journey of being us.
The crossroad, that is the point where our and Mater’s affordances meet each other we can call with Gibson a niche. “In architecture a niche is a place that is suitable for a piece of statuary, a place into which the object fits. In ecology a niche is a setting of environmental features that are suitable for an animal, into which it fits metaphorically.”[8] In goêtia, we understand a niche as an alignment of mutually beneficial affordances — a dynamic exchange where I recognize value in what you offer, and you perceive the same in what I provide. Drawing further from the language of biology, we might describe such a niche as a symbiosis: a sanctuary of collaborative interaction that sustains and benefits all parties involved. Much like in nature, these niches may be temporary, lasting only until one or more participants alter their affordances and shift the balance of the relationship.
Elsewhere I defined goêtia as “the creation of interspecies culture”.[9] From a more practical vantage point, we could equally sum up the main intent of our craft in niche-finding with non-human beings. The niches that Mater affords us are vast and countless. What are you willing to bring to the table?
[…] an affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property; or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us to under stand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer.[10]
This excursus into Gibson’s concept of affordances allows us to clearly identify two essential ways in which goêteia differs radically from medieval grimoire magic, almost inverting it.
In extreme one-dimensionality, grimoire magic is preoccupied with the question of the affordances of spirits to humans. It uses means such as spirit hierarchies, ritual paraphernalia and liturgies based on the Christian church to secure the sovereign position of humans vis-à-vis the spirits with a radical claim to absoluteness. Humans were to maintain complete independence from the spirits while still benefiting from their vast and far-reaching influence. Goêteia, on the other hand, begins with the search for reciprocity, for the point at which all actors experience affordances that are of mutual interest and benefit. Goêteia is inherently not about performance, but about relationality — a quality that cannot be achieved without first cultivating understanding.
Secondly, the main concern of the goês is not to describe, categorize and transmit non-human beings according to human categories. Rather, the goês recognizes the Radical Otherness of the non-human lifeworlds as such, and their own as neither superior nor inferior, but interwoven with these. The tools of the goês are therefore not based on orthodoxy, conventions and traditional keys. Instead, the goês faces the living contact with non-human beings in the radius of the genuine Here and Now, and renegotiates personal affordances individually and situationally.
You do not have to classify and label things in order to perceive what they afford.[11]
Niche-finding with non-human beings, i.e. goêteia is therefore essentially founded upon our ability to sense and understand the affordances of the non-human people in whose proximity we live, sleep, walk, drink, perform and renew. The place that coercion holds in grimoire magic is held by perception in goêteia. Mastering the art of careful and precise perception becomes a lifelong journey for the practitioner. The human craving for clarity and certainty, our species’ adversity to opaqueness and ambiguity is the actual evil inclincation the goês must wrestle with everyday. The temptation to fill the cracks and gaps in perception with borrowed narratives, ready-made solutions, or others’ explanations is persistent and insidious. Yet it is precisely this tension that defines the narrow path of the practice: a wholehearted commitment to a personal, phenomenological exploration of Radical Otherness.
If the affordances of a thing are perceived correctly, we say that it looks like what it is. But we must, of course, learn to see what things really are — for example, that the innocent-looking leaf is really a nettle or that the helpful-sounding politician is really a demagogue. And this can be very difficult.[12]
Footnotes
[1] Kurt Koffka, Principles Of Gestalt Psychology, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935, p. 7
[2] Koffka, 1935, p. 7-8
[3] adopted from James J. Gibson, Chapter 8: The Theory of Affordances, in: The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, New York: Psychology Press, 2015 [1979], p.119. The original reads: “The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.”
[4] Gibson, 2015, p. 119
[5] Gibson highlights the essential point that affordances that involve living species cannot be measured in absolute terms as we do in physics. Rather they need to be measured “relative to the animal”. (Gibson, 2015, p. 120) With this rite, then, we enable Mater to measure the human affordance relative to us as a unique specimen.
[6] The difference may seem subtle, but it is extremely important: in classical ritual magic, we start from an anthropocentric-technological worldview. Spirits here appear as valuable resources that are difficult to obtain, but once in the possession of man, they expand his scope of action in the world. Accordingly, working with spirits is work on expanding one's personal scope of action and thus a process of purposeful acquisition of power. From a goêtic perspective, such an approach resembles human imperialism, which regards the realm of the spirit as a colonial territory to be conquered. Not only is this factually impossible, since every ritual magician must pay for any increase in personal power, but it is also destructive in the short term for the spirits involved, and in the long term to a much greater extent for the people themselves. To sense one’s way carefully into the spirit realm, to seek understanding even over power, and to always be mindful of the experiences, cultures and needs of all partners involved, is not an expression of timidity or lack of courage. Rather, it is the only way to truly penetrate deep and wide into the spirit realm without ending up as collateral damage to forces far greater than the human.
[7] Gibson, 2015, p. 120
[8] Gibson, 2015, p. 121
[9] See my chapter on Goêtic Grammarye, in: Frater Acher, Collectanea Goêtica, London: Scarlet Imprint, 2025
[10] Gibson, 2015, p. 121
[11] Gibson, 2015, p. 126
[12] Gibson, 2015, p. 134
