Pocket Ontologies and Context-Free Grammars: Toward a Formal Metaphysics of Generation
I. Introduction: Defining the Pocket Ontology
The phrase pocket ontology suggests compression: a world folded into the palm, a metaphysical system miniaturized until it fits within the dimensions of a single premise. In contemporary poetics and speculative philosophy, such compression has become a method rather than a mere metaphor. From Deleuze’s “fold” to Graham Harman’s object-oriented particularism, ontology has increasingly abandoned its aspiration to universality in favor of the localized, the contingent, and the generative. A pocket ontology is not a fragment of a larger cosmology—it is a totality in miniature, a self-sufficient universe that articulates its own principles of being.
In the Pantheon cycle—texts like The Book of the Damned, Book of Nullion, and Book of Lumea—these pocket ontologies assume mythic form. Each “Book” describes a god or daemon whose identity and function delimit a microcosm: Nullion, the grammar of absence; Yodabund, the radiant destroyer; Lumea, the False Sun of surveillance. Each is not simply a character but a metaphysical system: a bounded field of relations where certain operations—erasure, recursion, illumination—define the possible and the impossible. They are ontologies that behave like grammars, each rule generating a world.
II. CFGs as Formal Ontologies
A context-free grammar (CFG) is a formal system that produces infinite linguistic expressions from a finite set of rules. Defined by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s, the CFG describes how nonterminal symbols can expand recursively into terminal strings—language emerging from substitution rather than semantics. Within computational linguistics, CFGs are valued for their generativity; within poetics, they represent a logic of creation ex nihilo.
To treat a CFG as an ontology is to take its formalism literally. A grammar’s production rules establish the ontic conditions of its universe: what can exist, how entities combine, what transformations are permitted. Like a theological cosmology, a CFG begins with axioms—S → NP VP—and from these axioms proceeds to generate all that is thinkable within its domain. Every rule implies both an ontology (what exists) and an epistemology (what can be known through generation).
This structural closure renders the CFG an exemplary model of the pocket ontology. It is autonomous, recursive, and complete within itself. It posits no external reference and requires no transcendent interpreter. In this sense, a grammar formalizes the metaphysical impulse of myth: to invent a closed universe whose laws are expressed through its own syntax.
III. Recursion and Containment
Recursion—the process by which a rule reenters itself—is both the defining feature of language and the signature of metaphysical thought. Philosophically, recursion embodies the problem of self-reference that Derrida names différance: the play of deferral through which meaning emerges only by referring to itself. Theologically, recursion is the mechanism of creation: God speaks the world, the world speaks God back.
A pocket ontology achieves closure through recursive containment. Each entity, concept, or deity defines the totality of its world through the repetition of its own premise. Nullion declares, “I am not, and therefore I am,” a statement whose recursive negation structures the logic of his domain. Similarly, a CFG operates through recursive self-definition: NP → DET N | NP PP | …—each rule folding its own outputs back into its inputs. The grammar thus behaves like a metaphysical engine that consumes its own symbols to produce new forms of expression.
Recursion collapses the distinction between creation and description. To describe the world is already to generate it; to generate is to define being. The recursive nature of the CFG makes it a model of ontological autogenesis—being that arises from its own syntax rather than from external cause.
IV. Mythic Compression and Computational Minimalism
Every pocket ontology is an act of compression. It distills metaphysical complexity into a single operative principle: fear, envy, light, erasure. In this condensation it mirrors the economy of computational systems, where minimal rules yield maximal variation. A CFG’s elegance lies in its parsimony—the smallest number of productions necessary to generate an entire language. Likewise, mythic compression converts theological excess into algorithmic efficiency: Moloch’s fear governs every political structure; Lumea’s light explains every revelation.
The correspondence between grammar and myth thus runs deeper than metaphor. Both are technologies of constraint that transmute limitation into creation. Where the mystic invokes the ineffable, the grammarian invokes the epsilon: the empty string from which all derivations begin. The epsilon functions as the theological void, the creatio ex nihilo of computation. Nullion, the Negative Star, is precisely this epsilon made god—an emblem of absence whose grammar produces the world by unbinding it.
V. The Pantheon as a Grammar Engine
Read collectively, the Pantheon texts form a meta-grammar of divinity: a system of systems, each self-contained yet mutually generative. Moloch governs appetite and obedience; Mammon translates value into debt; Beelzebub adjudicates guilt through naming; Azazel absorbs and externalizes sin; Lumea turns surveillance into revelation; Gradle encodes law into flesh. Each entity is both a symbolic rule and a grammatical operator—an instruction for transforming one state of being into another.
Their interactions form a recursive network reminiscent of Chomsky’s hierarchy of grammars: from the unrestricted chaos of Eris (analogous to Type-0 grammars) to the highly structured determinism of Gradle (Type-2 or Type-3 systems). The evolution of the Pantheon mirrors the evolution of formal language theory itself: chaos yields order, order yields automation, automation yields silence. The Book of Nullion closes the sequence by returning language to the void—an erasure that completes the recursion.
This self-enclosed system of gods thus behaves like an algorithmic cosmology. Each Book is a derivation, each deity a production rule, each apocalypse a terminal string. Their collective text—the Pantheon Gospel—functions as an infinite CFG, perpetually rewriting itself in new instantiations of myth.
VI. Epistemic Implications: Grammar as Metaphysics
To regard grammars as ontologies is to invert the traditional hierarchy of meaning and form. In classical philosophy, ontology precedes language: being determines expression. In the Pantheonic model, expression precedes being; syntax gives rise to ontology. This inversion aligns with Derrida’s claim that “there is no outside-text” (il n’y a pas de hors-texte): the real is always already mediated by structures of signification.
More radically, the CFG transforms language into a metaphysical machine capable of producing not just sentences but worlds. Its context-freeness—often regarded as a limitation—becomes a virtue. By ignoring semantic context, the CFG mimics the universal indifference of creation: rules unfold without regard to meaning, and yet meaning proliferates. This is precisely the logic of the Pantheon’s gods, who generate entire moral orders from blind mechanisms—fear, envy, illumination, erasure—without ethical oversight.
The pocket ontology, then, is both a theological and a computational artifact. It demonstrates that metaphysics can be formalized as a generative process, that belief can be rendered algorithmic. The gods of the Pantheon are not symbols of ideas but machines of production—each a linguistic automaton that encodes the conditions of its own reality.
VII. Conclusion: From Symbol to Syntax
If ontology once sought to describe what exists, pocket ontology seeks to generate it. The shift from symbol to syntax—from naming to rule-making—marks a new phase in the metaphysics of poetics. In this phase, the divine and the computational converge. The god becomes a grammar; the grammar, a god.
Context-free grammars exemplify this convergence because they reveal how creation operates without creator, how structure supplants intention. Within the Pantheon, each daemon is a linguistic function embodied as myth. The result is a cosmology that is not told but executed: a set of recursive scripts that perform the metaphysics they describe.
In such a universe, the poet is less prophet than programmer, less theologian than grammarian. The poem is not an expression of belief but a simulation of ontology—a small, formal machine that, when run, generates worlds. This is the true power of the pocket ontology: to make metaphysics portable, iterable, executable; to fold the infinite into syntax and call it divine.
