Photo by Mads Schmidt Rasmussen on Unsplash

The Kalmism Manifesto

Kalmism and Extended Nature: A Manifesto from the Margins

We live in a society suffering from chronic daytime consciousness. Modern life leans on performance, compulsive optimism, and a sterile illusion of happiness. In this consensus reality, death has been swept aside — isolated in clinical institutions and silenced as a mere pathological anomaly.

We do not uphold this lie. For us, death is not merely an endpoint reached only in life’s final stretch. Emil Cioran teaches, in his philosophy of decomposition, that life is nothing but a slow and inexorable slide toward disintegration. We die every moment, with every breath we draw, from the cellular level upward.

When this truth is integrated into daily life, something radical happens: the pressures fed to us by society, the artificial hierarchies and demands of performance, give way before meaning. This does not lead to apathy or passivity. On the contrary — it is the most extreme form of existential freedom. When nothing is permanent, every moment appears absolute and bare.

We may be suspected of nihilism or gothic gloom-mongering. But where gothic aesthetics use death merely as a beautiful backdrop or nostalgic entertainment, Tuonen Portti’s kalmism is gnosis — inward, experiential knowledge and esoteric philosophy. We do not observe death from a distance; we live it as true, as part of an extended nature.

Nor is the death drive, Thanatos, a blind desire for destruction, but rather a binding of energy. As the philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe stated, we are tragic animals who developed a consciousness too great in relation to the cosmic void. This freely surging existential anxiety demands a channel.

While science searches for cold mathematical formulas, we, as artists and seers, operate on the hazy border of everyday reality. We create symbols, rituals, and forms, and bind this raw, surging existential energy. We transform the inevitable tragedy of existence into a creative, magnetic force.

There are not two separate worlds, this one and the one beyond. We represent a radical monism: there is only one material reality, and everything belongs to nature.

What is called the supernatural represents only the marginal anomalies of nature. When an ordinary person sees mushrooms in the forest, they notice only the caps and stems and consider picking them. The kalmist, by contrast, looks deeper than the surface — into the cycle of life and death among fungi. What fascinates them is its philosophical core: a concrete, underground network that recycles death back into matter.

If someone seeks comfort and hope from Tuonen Portti, we do not offer it. For the kalmist, hope is slave morality — a coward’s way of turning their gaze from the truth and keeping themselves shackled in anxiety.

Western society tries to hide its cosmic panic by building illusions. But we, as artists, live on this edge, and it is precisely there that ultimate peace lies.

Birth was the catastrophe that cast us out of the peace of timelessness and into the prison of linear time and a flood of stimuli. Death is the corrective movement — a return to the original state of nonbeing.

When a person stripped of hope stops fighting the inevitable, life’s unbound anxiety settles.

For Cioran, the contemplation of suicide functioned more as a means of survival than as a concrete act. According to him, knowing that life can be ended at any time grants a person absolute freedom and a sense of control. When you know you can leave at any moment, you might as well stay a little longer. Life, in the end, is interesting enough that it’s worth seeing through to the end.

For Tuonen Portti, kalmism and the supernatural are not merely external artistic themes, but consciously chosen modes of being and perceiving. Kalmists define their relationship to the invisible world, to death, and to the beyond autonomously. This esoteric and visionary path makes the people of the Portti cognitive outlaws and ontological strangers: they break the boundaries of rational contemporary society and create their own reality by listening to what falls outside ordinary perception. Kalmism, then, is not a passive resignation to outsider status or a romanticizing of death, but active and profound spiritual work — a gate into the self and into the hidden levels of existence.