Back to Eden

Page of Swords

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Name: Page, Princess, Valet
Number: 4
Astrology: Earth of Air
Qabalah: He of Vau

Chris Gabriel December 21, 2024

The lowest face card in the suit of Swords has a different title in each deck, though their symbolism and meaning are united. They are smoke and fog, the thick and heavy air personified. Each are weighed upon by the material reality of their ideas. 

In Rider, we are shown the Page, a young man with long blond hair blowing in the wind. He holds his sword close to his chest and leans against the wind. One foot is firmly planted on the ground, the other only brings its toes to the ground. Behind him is a great deal of pillowing grey clouds. His face is stern.

In Thoth, it is the Princess; entirely green, we only see her from behind as she swings her sword. She is a young, lithe woman with geometric pixie wings and a diaphanous dress. Her crown is topped by the head of Medusa. She is amidst a great deal of dark smoke. She is a Valkyrie, a brave woman of war. She is the only one who is actively swinging her sword. 

In Marseille, the card shows the Valet. He is a young man with long blonde hair and a large hat. Well dressed, both his feet are planted on the lower border of the card, but go in different directions. He is considering sheathing his sword. 

Both the Page and Valet are confused, uncertain of whether to fight or not. The Princess, however, is right in the thick of it, swinging her sword. As the Earth of Air, this card is the materialization of thought. It is the solid air and the blinding smoke and fog.

Each of these figures are in the fog of war and have no clear path ahead. This can be anxiety and impotence, or terrible blind violence; the unwillingness to fight, or the fury to kill. 

Infact, the phrase “Fog of War” quite cleanly sums up the dignified character of the card. 

War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. A sensitive and discriminating judgment is called for; a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth. — Carl von Clausewitz

At its best, this card is the sensitive and skilled intelligence, not the uncertain fog. The Princess is the clearest image of this: with her gorgon crest she is Artemis, the lunar huntress. As such, she can see in the dark and cut through the fog. Crowley describes her as the embodied wrath of God. She is also a Fury who, regardless of the complex morality at play in a situation, will blindly punish whoever they determine is wrong.

When we pull this card, we can expect to be met with a call to action. Whether we meet it with ready intelligence or vacillate in uncertainty is up to us. This can also represent a person directly, someone defined by thought. 

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Film

Rebel Physics and the Chaos Magic Equation

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Molly Hankins December 19, 2024

The lines between magic, science and spirituality have become increasingly blurred, with chaos magic taking the form of what author and chaos magician Peter J. Carroll calls “rebel physics.” A trip to Carroll’s Specularium website reveals in-depth discussions of a particle spin theory related to spacetime and a paradigm he calls ‘hypersphere cosmology’ that challenges the Big Bang theory. While it may feel  impossible for a layman to make sense of, for the past year he’s been in published conversations with Institute of Noetic Sciences’ Chief Scientist Dr. Dean Radin about his theories. These conversations succeed in both vetting Carroll’s work from a scientific perspective and breaking them down for the average person.

Radin, who studies psychic or “psi” phenomena including telepathy, remote viewing, precognition and extra-sensory perception, contends that both magicians and scientists engaged in psi research are studying the same underlying phenomena. He weighed in on the variables of Carroll’s quintessential chaos magic equation, shown here for posterity and interest, but fear not if it is rather hard to follow. The equation is as follows with P equaling probability of natural occurrence, Pm  being probability influenced by magic, and M referring to the amount of magic applied, as defined by G (gnosis), L (a magical link), S (subconscious resistance) and B (consciously aware belief).

Pm = P + (1-P) x M1/p 

M = GLSB

“My interest in conducting a test involving magic is because the experimental design I’m using addresses a long-standing problem in mainstream physics, the quantum observer effect,” Radin explained. “And if it turns out that magical practices can enhance the results of such an effect, then that would be an interesting advancement for both magical practitioners and for physics.” The factors Carroll has identified that make up M, or the variable of magic in any spell, also determine the qualities of observation from Radin’s quantum physics viewpoint. Observing or measuring a quantum particle such as a photon  has the effect of changing its behavior, and this is the focus of his latest research at Institute of Noetics Sciences is focused on.

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“Laughter is the only tenable attitude in a universe which is a joke played on itself.” 

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When applied to predicting the efficacy of any magical act, each factor carries equal weight so let’s unpack them one at a time, beginning with G, gnosis. A Greek word meaning knowledge or awareness, Carroll defines the state of gnosis as “no mind” and the power source for any act of magic. The mind is emptied via an excitatory or inhibitory state and once achieved, pure energy, unimpeded by other thoughts, can be directed at “charging” our magical will. In his book Liber Null & Psychonaut, he lists sexual excitation, sensory overload, and overwhelming mental states such as anger, fear and horror as viable means of achieving excitatory gnosis. On the inhibitory side, he cites sensory deprivation, gazing into a mirror to achieve a magical trance and by means of physical exhaustion.

L, the magical link, is a deliberate psychic connection established between the magician and an object, person or symbol such as a sigil, which Radin describes as creating a symbol for an intention or goal. According to another of Carroll’s books, Liber Kaos, prior personal contact with the “target” of magical practice is ideal, but an extensive mental image even in the form of visualization can suffice. An internet search for Peter J. Carroll will soon reveal that there’s not a single photograph of him online, and any which claim to be are fakes, for the very reason of protecting himself from anyone being able to readily establish a magical link with him. 

1909 Photograph of William James’ seance.

The last two factors S and B (subconscious resistance and consciously aware belief) refer to mental states that can reduce the efficacy of a magical act.The goal is to reduce these because they typically can’t be eliminated entirely. Subconscious resistance is self-explanatory and can be mitigated by appealing to its highly suggestible nature. Meditation, mindfulness of our reactions, strategic affirmations, and the use of symbols such as the Tarot keys are all means of influence. 

In the reissue of Liber Kaos, Carroll updated his B for belief to an A meaning conscious awareness, but both are relevant to understanding this paradoxical variable. He writes, “In chaos magic we treat belief as a tool rather than an end in itself.” And while tailoring conscious belief to be conducive to successful acts of magic is critical, so is the banishment of conscious awareness once a spell has been cast or a sigil charged. 

This act of forgetting, challenging as it may seem when we’re “lusting for result” as he puts it, ensures the mind doesn’t become anxious of failure which would cause our will to become a mass of conflicting ideas that block manifestation. Non-attachment, however it’s achieved, is essential. Carroll recommends inducing laughter immediately upon banishment. “Laughter,” he says, “Is the only tenable attitude in a universe which is a joke played on itself.” 

And remember, as discussed in another Carroll-inspired essay on the pentagram, the so-called “information load” of the magical act will determine how much GSLB is needed to facilitate effective magic. He reminds us in Liber Null and Psychonaut that it’s far easier to generate the magical effect of causing someone to fall under a 16-ton weight than it is to make a 16-ton weight fall down on someone because fewer variables, and therefore far less information, is required to create the first effect. In the same way, it is much easier to overcome subconscious resistance when working with lighter information loads. 

As the cutting edge of consciousness science and chaos magic continue to inform each other’s areas of study, we’ll be keeping close tabs on both Radin and Carroll’s work. Learn more about the SIGIL experiment here and read the full text of their interviews here. 

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Molly Hankins is a Neophyte + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum

From Line to Constellation

Eugen Gomringer, 1953. Wind.

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Eugen Gomringer is a poet and literary critic regarded as the father of European concrete poetry. In this 1954 essay, he sensed a change in the way we engaged with language, and began to set out a new understanding of poetry that could not only respond but operate in harmony with this change. This short essay served as his manifesto and would go on to inspire countless other poets to join this new movement. 70 years later, Gomringer’s ideas seem like prophecies as language has increasingly simplified, and the line between text and image that he posited has blurred even further in a visual, digital age. Yet Gomringer’s solutions, his ‘Constellations’, or concrete poems as they became more commonly known, have remained on the fringes of experimental writing.

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Eugen Gomringer December 17, 2024

Our languages are on the road to formal simplification. Abbreviated, restricted forms of language are emerging. The content of a sentence is often conveyed in a single word. Longer statements are often represented by small groups of letters. Moreover, there is a tendency among languages for the many to be replaced by a few which are generally valid. Does this restricted and simplified use of language and writing mean the end of poetry? Certainly not. Restriction in the best sense-concentration and simplification is the very essence of poetry. From this we ought perhaps to conclude that the language of today must have certain things in common with poetry, and that they should sustain each other both in form and substance. In the course of daily life this relationship often passes unnoticed. Headlines, slogans, groups of sounds and letters give rise to forms which could be models for a new poetry just waiting to be taken up for meaningful use. The aim of the new poetry is to give poetry an organic function in society again, and in doing so to restate the position of poet in society. Bearing in mind, then, the simplification both of language and its written form, it is only possible to speak of an organic function for poetry in terms of the given linguistic situation. So the new poem is simple and can be perceived visually as a whole as well as in its parts. It becomes an object to be both seen and used: an object containing thought but made concrete through play-activity (denkgegenstanddenkspiel), its concern is with brevity and conciseness. It is memorable and imprints itself upon the mind as a picture. Its objective element of play is useful to modern man, whom the poet helps through his special gift for this kind of play-activity. Being an expert both in language and the rules of the game, the poet invents new formulations. By its exemplary use of the rules of the game the new poem can have an effect on ordinary language.

The constellation is the simplest possible kind of configuration in poetry which has for its basic unit the word, it encloses a group of words as if it were drawing stars together to form a cluster.

The constellation is an arrangement, and at the same time a play-area of fixed dimensions.

The constellation is ordered by the poet. He determines the play-area, the field or force and suggests its possibilities. the reader, the new reader, grasps the idea of play, and joins in.

In the constellation something is brought into the world. It is a reality in itself and not a poem about something or other. The constellation is an invitation.

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Eugen Gomringer is a Bolivian-Swiss poet, professor, and the father of the European Concrete Poetry movement that he began in the 1950s.

Film

Troyka - Troyka (Out of Print)

Matt Sweeney December 23, 2024

Self-titled LP. Crude, menacing and savagely rocking Canadian raw power trio with unhinged vocal nastiness. Another gem brought forward via Endless Boogie’s Jesper Ecklow. 

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Matt Sweeney is a record producer and the host of the popular music series “Guitar Moves”. He is a member of The Hard Quartet (debut album out Fall of 2024). Rick reached out to Matt Sweeney in 2005 after hearing his “Superwolf” album, and invited him to play on albums by Johnny Cash, Neil Diamond, Adele and many others. Follow Matt Sweeney via Instagram.

Meditations on the Tarot

Six of Disks

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Name: Success, Six of Disks
Number: 6
Astrology: Moon in Taurus
Qabalah: Tiphereth of He

Chris Gabriel December 14, 2024

The Six of Disks is the bountiful harvest that has been accumulating since the seed of the Ace. It is the maternal feeding and caring that comes from having enough.

In Rider, we see two kneeling beggars with outstretched hands receiving  gold coins from a well dressed man. The beggars are in patchy robes and one’s head is bandaged. Their benefactor holds a scale to weigh out his charity.

In Thoth, we find a hexagon formed by the planets atop a hexagonal star. In the center is the rosy cross. The card is made up of dark blues and whites for the moon, and orange red for Taurus. 

In Marseille, there are six coins around a blossoming flower. Qabalistically, this is the Beauty of the Princess. 

Where the five of disks fell apart, the six is a successful harvest. In the five of disks, Rider showed us the economic disparity between the wealthy and the impoverished, but here we see charity and generosity, noblesse oblige.

This is the generosity of the Mother, as the Moon in Taurus.An exalted placement, we are reminded of breastfeeding, cooking, and caregiving. The maternal caring moon in the sign of the comfortable, loving cow. 

This dynamic is expressed well in the I Ching, in the 42nd hexagram Increase, of which Richard Wilhelm says “A sacrifice of the higher element that produces an increase of the lower is called an out-and-out increase: it indicates the spirit that alone has power to help the world.”

This card is one of sacrifice from the higher for the sake of the lower. Not giving with the expectation of return, but out of true maternal love andthe desire to see growth and flourishing. A good mother does not eat more than her child, for she wants the child to strive.

This generosity is a  rarity in the world, as most power and wealth hordes itself and gives back nothing to the world. This is  Thanksgiving: a home cooked dinner with family and friends, a selfless kindness. This is true love in the earthly dimension. 

Mythologically, we can think of Ymir, the father of Giants, who drank the milk of Audhumla, the primeval cow. Audhumla’s name is a perfect expression of this card, translating to “rich in milk and hornless”. We can also think of the Milky Way in which we all live, one formed, in Egyptian mythology, by the cow goddess Bat, and the milk of Hera, to the Greeks. Our celestial home exists thanks to the milk of a mother.

When we pull this card we can expect comfort and good times. This is a good investment paying off. We may be given something, or be called on to give to others. A loving exchange.

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Film

Fragment from “America”

John Margolies, 1987. Road sign near Santa Rosa, New Mexico.

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Jean Baudrillard was amongst the most consequential sociologists and philosophers of the modern age, formulating ideas of cultural consumption, hyperreality, and simulation that came to define our collective understanding of the technological age. In 1986, this titan of French academia published his American travel journals, written while driving across the United States. The work is insightful and biting, laden with humor, cynicism and awe for the country. Here is a fragment of these journals; concerning the joy of driving, the nature of artificiality, and the vast American desert to create a theory of America as land defined by, and powered by, speed.

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Jean Baudrillard December 12, 2024

Speed creates pure objects. It is itself a pure object, since it cancels out the ground and territorial reference-points, since it runs ahead of time to annul time itself, since it moves more quickly than its own cause and obliterates that cause by outstripping it. Speed is the triumph of effect over cause, the triumph of instantaneity over time as depth, the triumph of the surface arid pure objectality over the profundity of desire. Speed creates a space of initiation, which may be lethal; its only rule is to leave no trace behind. Triumph of forgetting over memory, an uncultivated, amnesic intoxication. The superficiality and reversibility of a pure object in the pure geometry of the desert. Driving like this produces a kind of invisibility, transparency, or transversality in things, simply by emptying them out. It is a sort of slow-motion suicide, death by an extenuation of forms - the delectable form of their disappearance. Speed is not a vegetal thing. It is nearer to the mineral, to refraction through a crystal, and it is already the site of a catastrophe, of a squandering of time. Perhaps, though, its fascination is simply that of the void. There is no seduction here, for seduction requires a secret. Speed is simply the rite that initiates us into emptiness: a nostalgic desire for forms to revert to immobility, concealed beneath the very intensification of their mobility. Akin to the nostalgia for living forms that haunts. 

Still, there is a violent contrast here, in this country, between the growing abstractness of a nuclear universe and a primary, visceral, unbounded vitality, springing not from rootedness, but from the lack of roots, a metabolic vitality, in sex and bodies, as well as in work and in buying and selling. Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society. The fascinating thing is to travel through it as though it were the primitive society of the future, a society of complexity, hybridity, and the greatest intermingling, of a ritualism that is ferocious but whose superficial diversity lends it beauty, a society inhabited by a total metasocial fact with unforeseeable consequences, whose immanence is breathtaking, yet lacking a past through which to reflect on this, and therefore fundamentally primitive. . . Its primitivism has passed into the hyperbolic, inhuman character of a universe that is beyond us, that far outstrips its own moral, social, or ecological rationale. Only Puritans could have invented and developed this ecological and biological morality based on preservation - and therefore on discrimination -which is profoundly racial in nature. Everything becomes an overprotected nature reserve, so protected indeed that there is talk today of denaturalizing Yosemite to give it back to Nature, as has happened with the Tasaday in the Philippines. A Puritan obsession with origins in the very place where the ground itself has already gone. An obsession with finding a niche, a contact, precisely at the point where everything unfolds in an astral. 

Edward S. Curtis, 1904. Cañyon de Chelly.

There is a sort of miracle in the insipidity of artificial paradises, so long as they achieve the greatness of an entire (un)culture. In America, space lends a sense of grandeur even to the insipidity of the suburbs and ‘funky towns’. The desert is everywhere, preserving insignificance. A desert where the miracle of the car, of ice and whisky is daily re-enacted: a marvel of easy living mixed with the fatality of the desert. A miracle of obscenity that is genuinely American: a miracle of total availability, of the transparency of all functions in space, though this latter nonetheless remains unfathomable in its vastness and can only be exorcised by speed. 

The Italian miracle: that of stage and scene. 

The American miracle: that of the obscene. 

The profusion of sense, as against the deserts of meaninglessness. 

It is metamorphic forms that are magical. Not the sylvan, vegetal forest, but the petrified, mineralized forest. The salt desert, whiter than snow, flatter than the sea. The effect of monumentality, geometry, and architecture where nothing has been designed or planned. Canyonsland, Split Mountain. Or the opposite: the amorphous reliefless relief of Mud Hills, the voluptuous, fossilized, monotonously undulating lunar relief of ancient lake beds. The white swell of White Sands. It takes this surreality of the elements to eliminate nature’s picturesque qualities, just as it takes the metaphysics of speed to eliminate the natural picturesqueness of travel. 

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“Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.”

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In fact the conception of a trip without any objective and which is, as a result, endless, only develops gradually for me. I reject the picturesque tourist round, the sights, even the landscapes (only their abstraction remains, in the prism of the scorching heat). Nothing is further from pure travelling than tourism or holiday travel. That is why it is best done in the extensive banality of deserts, or in the equally desert-like banality of a metropolis - not at any stage regarded as places of pleasure or culture, but seen televisually as scenery, as scenarios. That is why it is best done in extreme heat, the orgasmic form of bodily deterritorialization. The acceleration of molecules in the heat contributes to a barely perceptible evaporation of meaning. 

It is not the discovery of local customs that counts, but discovering the immorality of the space you have to travel through, and this is on a quite different plane. It is this, together with the sheer distance, and the deliverance from the social, that count. Here in the most moral society there is, space is truly immoral. Here in the most conformist society, the dimensions are immoral. It is this immorality that makes distance light and the journey infinite, that cleanses the muscles of their tiredness. 

Sinclair Lewis, 1908.

Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated. Admittedly, there is the primal shock of the deserts and the dazzle of California, but when this is gone, the secondary brilliance of the journey begins, that of the excessive, pitiless distance, the infinity of anonymous faces and distances, or of certain miraculous geological formations, which ultimately testify to no human will, while keeping intact an image of upheaval. This form of travel admits of no exceptions: when it runs up against a known face, a familiar landscape, or some decipherable message, the spell is broken: the amnesic, ascetic, asymptotic charm of disappearance succumbs to affect and worldly semiology. This sort of travel creates its own peculiar type of event and innervation, so it also has its own special form of fatigue. Like a fibrillation of muscles, striated by the excess of heat and speed, by the excess of things seen or read, of places passed through and forgotten. The defibrillation of the body overloaded with empty signs, functional gestures, the blinding brilliance of the sky, and somnabulistic [sic!] distances, is a very slow process. Things suddenly become lighter, as culture, our culture, becomes more rarefied. And this spectral form of civilization which the Americans have invented, an ephemeral form so close to vanishing point, suddenly seems the best adapted to the probability - the probability only - of the life that lies in store for us. The form that dominates the American West, and doubtless all of American culture, is a seismic form: a fractal, interstitial culture, born of a rift with the Old World, a tactile, fragile, mobile, superficial culture - you have to follow its own rules to grasp how it works: seismic shifting. 

The only question in this journey is: how far can we go in the extermination of meaning, how far can we go in the non-referential desert form without cracking up and, of course, still keep alive the esoteric charm of disappearance? A theoretical question here materialized in the objective conditions of a journey which is no longer a journey and therefore carries with it a fundamental rule: aim for the point of no return. This is the key. And the crucial moment is that brutal instant which reveals that the journey has no end, that there is no longer any reason for it to come to an end. Beyond a certain point, it is movement itself that changes. Movement which moves through space of its own volition changes into an absorption by space itself - end of resistance, end of the scene of the journey as such (exactly as the jet engine is no longer an energy of space penetration, but propels itself by creating a vacuum in front of it that sucks it forward, instead of supporting itself, as in the traditional model, upon the air’s resistance). In this way, the centrifugal, eccentric point is reached where movement produces the vacuum that sucks you in. This moment of vertigo is also the moment of potential collapse. Not so much from the tiredness generated by the distance and the heat, as from the irreversible advance into the desert of time.

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life.

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Jean Baudrillard was a French philosopher, sociologist and cultural theorist. He was born in 1929 and died in 2007.

Ben Greenfield

Wounds

Robert White, Compleat Discourse of Wounds (1678).

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Sofia Luna December 10, 2024

For most of human existence, our wounds signified that we were part of the natural world. They wrote the story of life without separation as we not only blended into, but were an active part of the ecosystem. Last week, noticing a boy having breakfast with his mother rocking a severely bruised eye, it felt like a novelty. In a modern, western world, physical wounds and battle scars have all but disappeared from everyday reality. What, I wondered, are the global repercussions of the sterilisation of our physical plane?

We no longer walk through irregular terrains filled with natural pigments, or scramble over cliffs with battered bodies. We construct buildings to keep nature out and monuments to hold our ambitions together. We walk with slicked back hair, and polished suits through angular concrete landscapes. We refine and decorate our avatars, surgically 'enhance' our geometries, and homogenise the surface of our lives and our bodies the same way we do to our walls. We call this progress. Beneath our skin, though, lies irregularity—festering deep, invisible wounds, not of flesh but of spirit. 

In the gradual fabrication of the modern metropolis, we transferred our bodily wounds to earth. To her soil, her small ferns, to past predators, waters, rivers, and birds—not realising that they too, give us life. We looked away from the damage caused as we dreamt of a human centric world, building structures to keep dangers out. And they did  but the fact that wounds incrementally disappeared from the visual field made it really difficult for us to track what was hazardous to our new existence. 

As our infrastructures mutated, so did our wounds, but our definitions of danger stayed the same. Only in cases of mass destruction or abuse in focused areas are we able to look from afar and say “yes, there is a problem we need to work on!”.That which invisibly infects the collective beyond time and space is really hard to put a finger on, and so is difficult to heal. Consequently, moving from tiger scratches 20,000 years ago to inexplicable spirit aches have left us living "in a space without a map," as Joanna Macy remarked. 

Few of us  could survive in a forest right now, but we need not be that adventurous—a lot of humans can't even deal with free time at home. We require constant stimulation, and have become completely averse to the uncharted. We follow paths that have been clearly traced before in fear of getting lost. Is this a place worth existing in? A lot of people have started to realise it is not and I have witnessed the ample collective inkling that we should recalculate our relationship with the world and ourselves.

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“Wounds are holes, holes are doors, doors into something, openings, where, if we choose to enter them, the person that walks out is not the same who walked in.”

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We have been so isolated from nature that we don't even consider its absence as one of the causes for global unsettlement or the sharp rises in anxiety, loneliness, depression and spiritual voids that so many of us experience. Isn't she Mother Earth? We are the child that has cut their parent off and have been left traumatised. 

We talk about rewilding gardens but it is time to talk about rewilding society. We are hungry for something that was taken from us. When certain religions first appeared, they replaced our connection to the wild with a relationship to something more abstract. Slowly we have been extracted out of the symbiotic relationship we had with our planet, as institutions of belief arranged themselves on top of everything and everyone as the source. Religion replaced nature. It reasoned with the invisible and colonised our imagination for the past millennia. Thank God, time,  and the increasing access to information, that  what was hiding underneath—the incoherence,  the imposed patriarchy, intolerance, and the general abuse of power that was then mimicked by corporations— was exposed. Today, younger generations are unsubscribing from this expired belief system and in that process have started seeking something else. Many of us are returning back to nature, to our nature.

Caravaggio, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1602)

Hosting Shinrin-Yoku experiences (the science backed Japanese practice of Forest Bathing, known to balance the body and mind) one quickly sees how fulfilling, cleansing, healing, energising, and surprisingly simple the practice feels when all you do is walk through a forest, fully present, without the intrusion of technology. This evidence shows how much nature feels like home—how nurturing she is, how much our bodies need her, and yet, how absent she is in modern cities.

I have found that the more I heal my insides, the closer I feel to the natural world, the more natural it feels to live in this world, and the more I unearth my own self and the old memories of the soul. Wounds are holes, holes are doors, doors into something, openings, where, if we choose to enter them, the person that walks out is not the same who walked in. Unhealed wounds propagate, the same way good energy creates more good energy and healed wounds attract healed people. There is no need to try and save the entire world, because the entire world is simply the one You inhabit—you choose what to do with it. 

I write this to speak into reality a transformation, I believe, is happening to many. We are interconnected, and in this floating rock, no one experiences anything alone, the Human Experience is shared. Regardless of the 'never-ending horrors', we are on our way back to nature.  And Nature is not just a tree, a fish and a squirrel. Nature is you, in essence. Nature is beauty, it is The Grand, it is Vast. It is Vital, it is Infinite, it is Eternally Alive. It is Robust, Real, Complex. It is Us. It is also everything we are not right now, and everything we are becoming. 

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Sofia Luna explores and builds tools that facilitate this time's modern cognitive shift. She is a Colombian artist, creative consultant, entrepreneur and imaginator living In The Middle of The Future. 

Film

Iggy Pop Playlist

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Iggy Pop is an American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and actor. Since forming The Stooges in 1967, Iggy’s career has spanned decades and genres. Having paved the way for ‘70’s punk and ‘90’s grunge, he is often considered “The Godfather of Punk.”

The Undiscovered Self

Hannah Peel Playlist

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Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello and Emmy-nominated, RTS and Music Producers Guild winning composer, with a flow of solo albums and collaborative releases, Hannah Peel joins the dots between science, nature and the creative arts, through her explorative approach to electronic, classical and traditional music.

The Ten of Swords

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Name: Ruin, the Ten of Swords
Number: 10
Astrology: Sun in Gemini
Qabalah: Malkuth of Vau

Chris Gabriel December 7, 2024

The Ten of Swords is the end of all the plots and schemes of the suit of swords. Here all of the lofty ideas are brought down to their material conclusion - ruin.

In Rider, we see a man bled out, struck through by ten swords in an act of excessive violence. His hand points two fingers down. The sun has set, and darkness rolls in. All the swords of the suit are brought down to Earth, the craftsman is killed by his own work.

In Thoth, we have ten swords breaking at their points. Together, they form the Tree of Life. Their handles are, respectively, the sun and moon, a scale, stars, crosses, and compasses. All about them are jagged, deformed geometric figures. Astrologically this is the Sun in Gemini.

In Marseille, we have eight curved swords, and two swords crossing one another from outside the oval. Here the ideas formed throughout the suit come into reality. A positive view of the placement in comparison with Rider and Thoth. Qabalistically this is the Kingdom of the Prince.

This is the material end of high ideas. Rider’s depiction calls to mind Julius Caesar, whose visions of domination and rulership ended in 23 stab wounds. This is expressed perfectly in Ezekiel 28:9: “Wilt thou yet say before him that slayeth thee, I am God? but thou shalt be a man, and no God, in the hand of him that slayeth thee.”

Like the tragic ending of Hamlet, who is ultimately killed by his own mind, his dreams, and an unwillingness to deal with the reality of his opponent’s blade, this is a card concerned with the simple, material ending of death in the face of lofty ambition.. 

For Rider, we can imagine that beyond ten enemies stabbing a man in the back, his own hubris wielded those deathly blades. Just as the Nine of Swords was like the Sword of Damocles, here the thread breaks and the sword falls.

When read positively as in Marseille, we see the painstaking process of bringing ideas into reality  that can leave the artist feeling like the man struck in Rider. The artist’s vision of beauty is never translated into reality, instead they must make compromises to bring something into the world. This is necessary and good for we must materialize and not simply ideate. The negativity of Rider and Thoth hinges upon the bad nature of the ideas brought to fruition but Marseille shows us that a good idea brought to reality is the ultimate good. Only when ideas remain in the mind for too long do they rot and fester.

It calls to mind an allegory from the Upanishads. 

“We are like the spider,” said the king. “We weave our life, and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream.

“This is true for the entire universe. That is why it is said, ‘Having created the creation, the Creator entered into it’.

“This is true for us. We create our world, and then enter into that world. We live in the world that we have created. When our hearts are pure, then we create the beautiful, enlightened life we have wished for.”

When we pull this card, we can expect the end of a project. If executed well, it will be  a great thing. Otherwise, the plots and schemes we’ve formed will come crashing down. Our ideas, good and bad, will here be brought into reality.

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

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Film

The Subtle and The Gross (Alchemy I)

Illustration from “Thesaurus of Alchemy”. c.1725.

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Molly Hankins December 5, 2024

When it comes to magic, alchemy, or the transformation of matter, can be taken literally or metaphorically. According to the Bulgarian philosopher and spiritual movement UWB founder Peter Deunov’s teachings on Kabbalist philosophy, life on Earth is spirit condensed into matter and so to practice magic inherently involves both literal and metaphorical alchemy. 

His disciple author Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov used the Latin phrase ‘solve et coagula’ to describe the alchemical process, meaning to dissolve and coagulate. Catherine MacCoun, author of On Becoming An Alchemist, uses the Emerald Tablets language of ‘separating the subtle from the gross’ to describe the same phenomena. “Alchemical magic never defies the laws of nature.”, she writes, “Instead, it observes the workings of those laws at an earlier stage than is evident to the physical senses. Whatever manifests on the physical level begins with an idea or intention. While matter is too dense, too heavy, to be altered by the mind alone, ideas and intentions are the mind’s natural medium.”

If physical reality is too dense to be altered by will alone, then using our will to cause such change to occur must inherently involve some dissolution of this density. In order to work with the ‘gross’ body by way of the subtle, according to Deunov’s teachings, involves the life-long alchemical process of consciously disintegrating condensed matter. As Aïvanhov wrote in Fruits of the Tree of Life, “All that is dense, compact and heavy represents unorganized matter in which energy is held prisoner. And the more energy one imprisons oneself with, like those who overeat, the more harm one does to oneself. We must, on the contrary, liberate energy.” 

The Universal White Brotherhood believed that using our consciousness to transform the gross into the subtle simply was the great secret of mastering life itself. There are seven stages of alchemy which are recognized as being both physical and spiritual. MacCoun describes each phase in terms of the base matter to be alchemized and the result of what that matter is ultimately transmuted into.

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“Separation is our phase of spiritual adolescence because we can’t become magical adults without maturing beyond egoic impulses to defend our existential territory.”

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The first is calcination, which technically means burning something to ashes, but according to her interpretation also means suffering caused by attachment to what will inevitably be lost. She posits that every human life is marked by a series of losses that burns away all which is not our true essence. The result of this calcination of ‘false roots’ or over-identification with the material world is self-confidence by way of strengthening the connection to who we truly are. 

The next stage is dissolution, where physically ashes are dissolved into fluid, and existentially, our desires are dissolved into devotion. MacCoun believes this process occurs when we get impatient waiting for our desires to be fulfilled. That gap between our wants and attainments begs the question of whether our desires are true and useful, an essential step in coming to know our true selves. The result is that ultimately we not only get to know ourselves, but also learn to let go of attachment to outcome, which paradoxically results in more favorable outcomes. Our desires themselves transmute from gross to subtle.

From “Compendiolum de Praeparatione Auri Potabilis Veri”, attributed to M. E. Bonacina. c.1790.

Separation occurs next, which involves the physical extraction of matter left in the dissolved substance. Metaphorically, separation refers to extraction of the true self from the personalities acquired through of various life experiences and trauma responses. The base matter is territoriality, which can be anything defining us in relation to others that we have an ego-driven instinct to protect. The transmuted result, then, is integrity, and MacCoun contends that separation is our phase of spiritual adolescence because we can’t become magical adults without maturing beyond egoic impulses to defend our existential territory. 

The fourth stage is conjunction, a combining of the results from the previous three stages. In the physical sense, the process has altered from changing a substance through natural processes to changing a substance using a combination of the other substances generated in each stage of the process. Existentially, it refers to being able to hold opposing forces, transmuting vulnerability into compassion by way of the heart. Rather than trying to make sense of conflict in our heads, we hold it in our hearts and offer hospitality to the opposing forces,  compassion.

Fermentation happens next, which physically involves leaving the substance alone in the dark until it putrefies. In existential terms, this is the “dark night of the soul” that transmutes the base material of obsolete desires and ambitions into magical will. One’s inner life overtakes the outer life because an aspect of our will is an obstacle to what our spirit wishes to express through our physical reality.

Sublimation is the penultimate stage, where the physical substance is heated up until the essence rises to the surface. On a personal level, this is the phase where we realize we’re disconnected from our true intentions. The transmuting of thoughts into deeds starts with the internal panic or “heat” of recognizing when our mentality is misaligned with what we’re doing. After this phase, our will becomes wise because it’s more connected to our spirit. The subtlety of our true essence moves beyond gross matter, freed by being subjected to each stage of the alchemical process.

MacCoun named the final stage radiation, which is where ‘The Philosopher’s Stone’ is formed in medieval alchemy. This essential concept will be covered in part II, but both physically and existentially this phase is one of coagulation. The base matter is arbitrary magic and the transmutation is sacred magic. According to MacCoun, Aleister Crowley’s famous quote, “Do what thou whilst shall be the whole of the law,” is the very definition of arbitrary magic. By contrast, Deunov’s Universal White Brotherhood believe that magical results are achieved by treating everyone and everything as sacred, that we must always be infusing positive vibrations into both the subtle and gross in order to direct our will.

Unlike physical, linear alchemy of a single substance, any number of these existential processes can occur simultaneously,  and through our lifetimes. In part II we’ll explore the true meaning of The Philosopher’s Stone, the supposed secret key to successful alchemy.

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Molly Hankins is a Neophyte + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum