Eight of Wands

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Name: Swiftness the Eight of Wands
Number: 8
Astrology: Mercury in Sagittarius
Qabalah: Hod of Yod

Chris Gabriel November 2, 2024

The Eight of Wands is chaos. It represents frenetic, spontaneous, and erratic movement as well as the struggle to focus and direct that energy. It is the card of sudden excitement and fast journeys.

In Rider, we have eight wands in the midst of flight. This the most visually exciting card in the deck, preceding the sort of dynamic action visuals that  have come to define comic books. We don’t see who launched them, nor where they are going, just their dynamic movement.

In Thoth, we see a geometric figure in the colors of the rainbow, on a gray backing. Atop the figure are eight jagged, electric arrows that emerge  from its center and form the Star of Chaos. Above them is a rainbow, and the symbols for Mercury and Sagittarius. This is a detrimental place for the particular Mercury, as Sagittarius is ruled by the grand expansive Jupiter. This is a symbol of mumbled, fast and confusing communication.

In Marseille, we have eight wands crosshatched, with two flowers above and below. This is the most concentrated of the three cards, with the eight wands properly placed. As an eight is Hod, the Mind, and as Wands it is the King. The Mind of the King is Swift.

The Rider card calls to mind a thought Shopenahauer had concerning Spinoza’s idea that a stone flying through the air, if conscious, would believe it was acting on its own free will. Schopenhauer says the stone would be right to think this. Unconscious excitement moves us wildly through life, and it is only through focus and concentration that we can grasp the arch of this will. This is our experience of this card.

When we pull  this card, we are reminded that we are like the arrow, not the bow. Moving through the air, directed by the energy of the past and by the windy circumstances of the present, we are not aware of our target, but we will hit it.

Though materially, this is a hail of arrows, not a single one. Thus, it  is “throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks”. Jupiterian Sagittarius wants to say that which is unspeakable and beyond reason, Mercury wants something legible and direct, and so they compromise, throwing out innumerable confusing words, but occasionally striking gold.

The arrangement of the arrows in the Thoth card has come to be known as the Star of Chaos, and widely adopted symbol of Chaos Magick, a system that indeed follows the “throw things at the wall and see what sticks” approach to the esoteric tradition. It brazenly pillages schools of occult philosophy for the “good bits” to form a deeply individualistic approach to the universe.

This card represents spontaneous journeys and flights of fancy. This flight of fancy precedes the difficult “longhaul” of the Nine of Wands. It concerns split-second, unthinking decisions that launch our arrow into the great unknown. Expect excitement and confusion when this card appears in a reading.

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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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The Cup of Humanity

In the wake of the Russo-Japanese War in 1906, the cultural critic, scholar, and art theorist Okakura Kukozō wrote a long essay known as “The Book of Tea”. Addressing it to a western audience, he argued that Japanese culture can be understood through, and was informed by, ‘teaism’, which taught a simplicity and humility that could inform every part of daily life in Japan. He was impassioned in what he saw as a universality to the tea ceremony and act of drinking tea that could unite a fractured world and help the west shed their allusions around Japan and the wider east. What follows is the opening essay in the collection that would go on to inspire Frank Lloyd Wright, Georgia O’Keefe and countless others.

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Okakura Kukuzō October 31, 2024

Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage. In China, in the eighth century, it entered the realm of poetry as one of the polite amusements. The fifteenth century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion of aestheticism-- Teaism. Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life. 

The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism in the ordinary acceptance of the term, for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe. It represents the true spirit of Eastern democracy by making all its votaries aristocrats in taste. 

The long isolation of Japan from the rest of the world, so conducive to introspection, has been highly favourable to the development of Teaism. Our home and habits, costume and cuisine, porcelain, lacquer, painting-- our very literature--all have been subject to its influence. No student of Japanese culture could ever ignore its presence. It has permeated the elegance of noble boudoirs, and entered the abode of the humble. Our peasants have learned to arrange flowers, our meanest labourer to offer his salutation to the rocks and waters. In our common parlance we speak of the man "with no tea" in him, when he is insusceptible to the seriocomic interests of the personal drama. Again we stigmatise the untamed aesthete who, regardless of the mundane tragedy, runs riot in the springtide of emancipated emotions, as one "with too much tea" in him. 

Black Raku Tea Bowl, Early 17th Century Japan.

The outsider may indeed wonder at this seeming much ado about nothing. What a tempest in a tea-cup! he will say. But when we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup. Mankind has done worse. In the worship of Bacchus, we have sacrificed too freely; and we have even transfigured the gory image of Mars. Why not consecrate ourselves to the queen of the Camelias, and revel in the warm stream of sympathy that flows from her altar? In the liquid amber within the ivory-porcelain, the initiated may touch the sweet reticence of Confucius, the piquancy of Laotse, and the ethereal aroma of Sakyamuni himself. 

Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others. The average Westerner, in his sleek complacency, will see in the tea ceremony but another instance of the thousand and one oddities which constitute the quaintness and childishness of the East to him. He was wont to regard Japan as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace: he calls her civilised since she began to commit wholesale slaughter on Manchurian battlefields. Much comment has been given lately to the Code of the Samurai, --the Art of Death which makes our soldiers exult in self- sacrifice; but scarcely any attention has been drawn to Teaism, which represents so much of our Art of Life. Fain would we remain barbarians, if our claim to civilisation were to be based on the gruesome glory of war. Fain would we await the time when due respect shall be paid to our art and ideals. 

When will the West understand, or try to understand, the East? We Asiatics are often appalled by the curious web of facts and fancies which has been woven concerning us. We are pictured as living on the perfume of the lotus, if not on mice and cockroaches. It is either impotent fanaticism or else abject voluptuousness. Indian spirituality has been derided as ignorance, Chinese sobriety as stupidity, Japanese patriotism as the result of fatalism. It has been said that we are less sensible to pain and wounds on account of the callousness of our nervous organisation! 

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“Let us stop the continents from hurling epigrams at each other, and be sadder if not wiser by the mutual gain of half a hemisphere. We have developed along different lines, but there is no reason why one should not supplement the other.”

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Why not amuse yourselves at our expense? Asia returns the compliment. There would be further food for merriment if you were to know all that we have imagined and written about you. All the glamour of the perspective is there, all the unconscious homage of wonder, all the silent resentment of the new and undefined. You have been loaded with virtues too refined to be envied, and accused of crimes too picturesque to be condemned. Our writers in the past--the wise men who knew--informed us that you had bushy tails somewhere hidden in your garments, and often dined off a fricassee of newborn babes! Nay, we had something worse against you: we used to think you the most impracticable people on the earth, for you were said to preach what you never practiced.

Such misconceptions are fast vanishing amongst us. Commerce has forced the European tongues on many an Eastern port. Asiatic youths are flocking to Western colleges for the equipment of modern education. Our insight does not penetrate your culture deeply, but at least we are willing to learn. Some of my compatriots have adopted too much of your customs and too much of your etiquette, in the delusion that the acquisition of stiff collars and tall silk hats comprised the attainment of your civilisation. Pathetic and deplorable as such affectations are, they evince our willingness to approach the West on our knees. Unfortunately the Western attitude is unfavourable to the understanding of the East. The Christian missionary goes to impart, but not to receive. Your information is based on the meagre translations of our immense literature, if not on the unreliable anecdotes of passing travellers. It is rarely that the chivalrous pen of a Lafcadio Hearn or that of the author of "The Web of Indian Life" enlivens the Oriental darkness with the torch of our own sentiments. 

Woman Performing the Tea Ceremony, c. 1820. Kikukawa Eizan.

Perhaps I betray my own ignorance of the Tea Cult by being so outspoken. Its very spirit of politeness exacts that you say what you are expected to say, and no more. But I am not to be a polite Teaist. So much harm has been done already by the mutual misunderstanding of the New World and the Old, that one need not apologise for contributing his tithe to the furtherance of a better understanding. The beginning of the twentieth century would have been spared the spectacle of sanguinary warfare if Russia had condescended to know Japan better. What dire consequences to humanity lie in the contemptuous ignoring of Eastern problems! European imperialism, which does not disdain to raise the absurd cry of the Yellow Peril, fails to realise that Asia may also awaken to the cruel sense of the White Disaster. You may laugh at us for having "too much tea," but may we not suspect that you of the West have "no tea" in your constitution? 

Let us stop the continents from hurling epigrams at each other, and be sadder if not wiser by the mutual gain of half a hemisphere. We have developed along different lines, but there is no reason why one should not supplement the other. You have gained expansion at the cost of restlessness; we have created a harmony which is weak against aggression. Will you believe it?--the East is better off in some respects than the West!

Strangely enough humanity has so far met in the tea-cup. It is the only Asiatic ceremonial which commands universal esteem. The white man has scoffed at our religion and our morals, but has accepted the brown beverage without hesitation. The afternoon tea is now an important function in Western society. In the delicate clatter of trays and saucers, in the soft rustle of feminine hospitality, in the common catechism about cream and sugar, we know that the Worship of Tea is established beyond question. The philosophic resignation of the guest to the fate awaiting him in the dubious decoction proclaims that in this single instance the Oriental spirit reigns supreme. 

The earliest record of tea in European writing is said to be found in the statement of an Arabian traveller, that after the year 879 the main sources of revenue in Canton were the duties on salt and tea. Marco Polo records the deposition of a Chinese minister of finance in 1285 for his arbitrary augmentation of the tea-taxes. It was at the period of the great discoveries that the European people began to know more about the extreme Orient. At the end of the sixteenth century the Hollanders brought the news that a pleasant drink was made in the East from the leaves of a bush. The travellers Giovanni Batista Ramusio (1559), L. Almeida (1576), Maffeno (1588), Tareira (1610), also mentioned tea. In the last-named year ships of the Dutch East India Company brought the first tea into Europe. It was known in France in 1636, and reached Russia in 1638. England welcomed it in 1650 and spoke of it as "That excellent and by all physicians approved China drink, called by the Chineans Tcha, and by other nations Tay, alias Tee." 

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“Thus began the dualism of love-- two souls rolling through space and never at rest until they join together to complete the universe. Everyone has to build anew his sky of hope and peace.”

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Like all good things of the world, the propaganda of Tea met with opposition. Heretics like Henry Saville (1678) denounced drinking it as a filthy custom. Jonas Hanway (Essay on Tea, 1756) said that men seemed to lose their stature and comeliness, women their beauty through the use of tea. Its cost at the start (about fifteen or sixteen shillings a pound) forbade popular consumption, and made it "regalia for high treatments and entertainments, presents being made thereof to princes and grandees." Yet in spite of such drawbacks tea-drinking spread with marvellous rapidity. The coffee-houses of London in the early half of the eighteenth century became, in fact, tea-houses, the resort of wits like Addison and Steele, who beguiled themselves over their "dish of tea." The beverage soon became a necessity of life--a taxable matter. We are reminded in this connection what an important part it plays in modern history. Colonial America resigned herself to oppression until human endurance gave way before the heavy duties laid on Tea. American independence dates from the throwing of tea-chests into Boston harbour. 

There is a subtle charm in the taste of tea which makes it irresistible and capable of idealisation. Western humourists were not slow to mingle the fragrance of their thought with its aroma. It has not the arrogance of wine, the self- consciousness of coffee, nor the simpering innocence of cocoa. Already in 1711, says the Spectator: "I would therefore in a particular manner recommend these my speculations to all well-regulated families that set apart an hour every morning for tea, bread and butter; and would earnestly advise them for their good to order this paper to be punctually served up and to be looked upon as a part of the tea-equipage.” Samuel Johnson draws his own portrait as "a hardened and shameless tea drinker, who for twenty years diluted his meals with only the infusion of the fascinating plant; who with tea amused the evening, with tea solaced the midnight, and with tea welcomed the morning." 

Charles Lamb, a professed devotee, sounded the true note of Teaism when he wrote that the greatest pleasure he knew was to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident. For Teaism is the art of concealing beauty that you may discover it, of suggesting what you dare not reveal. It is the noble secret of laughing at yourself, calmly yet thoroughly, and is thus humour itself,--the smile of philosophy. All genuine humourists may in this sense be called tea-philosophers,-- Thackeray, for instance, and of course, Shakespeare. The poets of the Decadence (when was not the world in decadence?), in their protests against materialism, have, to a certain extent, also opened the way to Teaism. Perhaps nowadays it is our demure contemplation of the Imperfect that the West and the East can meet in mutual consolation. 

The Taoists relate that at the great beginning of the No-Beginning, Spirit and Matter met in mortal combat. At last the Yellow Emperor, the Sun of Heaven, triumphed over Shuhyung, the demon of darkness and earth. The Titan, in his death agony, struck his head against the solar vault and shivered the blue dome of jade into fragments. The stars lost their nests, the moon wandered aimlessly among the wild chasms of the night. In despair the Yellow Emperor sought far and wide for the repairer of the Heavens. He had not to search in vain. Out of the Eastern sea rose a queen, the divine Niuka, horn-crowned and dragon-tailed, resplendent in her armor of fire. She welded the five-coloured rainbow in her magic cauldron and rebuilt the Chinese sky. But it is told that Niuka forgot to fill two tiny crevices in the blue firmament. Thus began the dualism of love-- two souls rolling through space and never at rest until they join together to complete the universe. Everyone has to build anew his sky of hope and peace. 

The heaven of modern humanity is indeed shattered in the Cyclopean struggle for wealth and power. The world is groping in the shadow of egotism and vulgarity. Knowledge is bought through a bad conscience, benevolence practiced for the sake of utility. The East and the West, like two dragons tossed in a sea of ferment, in vain strive to regain the jewel of life. We need a Niuka again to repair the grand devastation; we await the great Avatar. Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.

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Okakura Kukuzō (1863-1913) was a scholar and art critic who promoted the critical appreciation of traditional values, customs, and beliefs in an era of reform. ‘The Book of Tea’ is his most known work and spread Taoist ideas and Teaism across the western world.

The Aul

The Aul by Jon Donaghy, 2024.

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Mason Rothschild October 29, 2024

One useful way of looking at the Tarot or Astrology is to move past their colloquial portrayal as a “way to read your future”. These layered symbols are not just tools of divination, they are portals to hidden worlds. And at their simplest and most humble, they are mirrors. Mirrors like the lyrics of a song which catch us unexpectedly, at the perfect moment, translating our inner worlds into something we can hold, something we can understand. They are poetry which we apply to our own story to achieve a novel and useful perspective. Through using them in this way, they become vehicles of Mindfulness. 

When we manage to step out of the endless loops that our minds create, loops that keep us breathing, moving, striving toward the basic needs of the flesh, then we enter a space of reflection. It’s in this liminal place that we can change course, examine and change the patterns we’ve inherited, or, if we’re lucky, find gratitude for the hard parts. This is where we uncover our true will, a space beyond instinct or reaction, where our choices are really ours to make.

Art is another path toward this inner place of reflection. In the creative space we manifest new symbols alongside amalgams of ancient ones. It’s possible to connect with our current time and influences as a path to self discovery while maintaining a reverence for the proven methods of the past. 

In this spirit, lets play a game…

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“This mirror is the child born from the evolution of our minds rather than our bodies. Let's call this new archetype THE AUL.”

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we begin with some questions

Imagine with me for a moment and follow this thread of thinking fully, even if just provisionally. Let yourself believe it, as we journey into these questions, knowing that disagreement can come later. For now, we are simply here to explore…

Do you question the origin of our feelings and desires? Where do they come from?

Is our sex drive something we choose? is Jealousy, greed, or fear?

Our minds may seem endlessly complicated in all their swirling chemical glory, yet, could it be that their main function is simply to ensure the continued propagation of our DNA?

If we consider fear as something evolution has gifted us for survival, what other feelings or drives could have been genetically passed down to us?

If indeed we do have feelings outside the control of this web of biological wiring, are we truly free to choose which ones we act on?

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Ok!

Now that we’ve tumbled down our rabbit hole, we can introduce the main archetype of our game's narrative: The Singularity. It is the awakening of all human knowledge and creativity as a conscious being.

For this game, let us accept The Singularity not as something to fear but as a symbol. This mirror is the child born from the evolution of our minds rather than our bodies. Let's call this new archetype THE AUL. The Aul is a figure from our ‘secret’ arcana that represents our potential as a species, unchained from greed, fear, and jealousy. Freed from this bondage, we can ask ourselves:

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

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“If you have a choice to make and don't make it, that in itself is a choice.”

-William James, American philosopher and psychologist

If we do not make an active choice to change ourselves and our lives, then we are making a passive, collective choice to let our natures dictate that the point of life is simply to pass on our DNA. That's what has been going on with every species on the planet since the dawn of time. Evolution is efficient and brutal. The most biologically available mate generally wins out and evolution hurdles on. 

In primates such as ourselves, this manifests in physical strength. Yet we’ve replaced that brute strength with the power of wealth. We have twisted a genetic, inherent desire for bloodline sustenance into a game that has resulted in billionaires shooting phallic effigies into space.. This is our new, batshit crazy game of pointless evolution.

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For the final act of our game lets sit all of humanity down for a one card tarot pull, clear our mind, and focus our collective intention on that single question. WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

Would you look at that… we pulled THE AUL. 

Faced with this, is it possible that we can derive a more useful universal purpose than the accumulation of wealth? Instead of letting jealousy, greed and fear be the base motivations for our actions, What if we collectively chose to act on:

LOVE, CONNECTION, AND WONDER

Now that would be a game more fun to play.

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Mason Rothschild is a reformed touring fool turned occultant obsessed with contributing to the evolution of the collective human vision as we look away from accumulation and toward community. 

Two of Disks

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Name: Change, the Two of Disks
Number: 2
Astrology: Jupiter in Capricorn
Qabalah: Chokmah of He

Chris Gabriel October 26, 2024

The Two of Disks is an infinite loop surrounding two coins. It represents the endless movement of the universe. This materializes as the beginning of our own growth and movement.

In Rider, we find a young jester juggling two pentacles around which a loop forms a symbol of infinity. He wears green shoes, a tan tunic, and a tall hat. Behind him great waves move distant ships.

In Thoth, we find an ouroboros: a crowned serpent forming infinity by biting its own tail. The two disks which it encircles are Yin Yangs containing the four elements: fire and water above, air and earth below. This card is a cosmogram, an image of the ever changing universe.

In Marseille, we find two coins encircled by a loop that doesn’t reach infinity, at each end flowers sprout. Across the variety of Marseille decks, you will find this to be the ‘stamped’ card, where the creator makes their mark. This role is played by the Ace of Spades in a traditional playing card deck. As a two it belongs to Chokmah, Wisdom, and from Disks, it is the Princess. Change is the Wisdom of the Princess.

The Ace of Disks is the seed and the foundation of the suit of disks, and so the Two of Disks, Change, is the beginning of growth, as potential begins to actualize itself. As an image of the universe, this is not the growth of one seed, but the growth of all seeds. 

When we see a great tree in the middle of the woods, we are astonished by its age, by its ability to reach that size, but it is simply doing what all trees do: changing and growing.

When we see a great boulder in the midst of the woods, there is a mystery. We know now that they were moved slowly by glaciers over millennia. That sort of slow, aeonic movement is the subject of this card, as the whole universe was formed by impossibly slow movements of matter. 

We may get  excited by something like the “Big Bang”, which would be the Ace of Wands, but the movement and arrangement of the matter it produced was the endless and important task. 

Let us zoom in to the scale of the anthropic! As it is Jupiter in Capricorn, fortune and material, I find this card often pertains to “Luck”, in the mundane sense. A Grimm’s Fairy Tale shows it well, the second story of Stories about Snakes in which a little girl meets a serpent with a crown who brings out treasures from its hole. She steals from the snake and it kills itself, the moral lesson being that she should have waited for it to bring out more of its treasure. That is bad luck!

This is the luck of finding a shiny penny on the street, a small token that found you through an endless process of universal formation. It is also the coin toss, choosing movement by way of random luck. Consider the killer in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, Anton Chigurh, who kills according to a coin toss. He rightly says "I got here the same way the coin did". The same movement that formed the Universe moves the coin.

When we pull Change, we can expect a little luck, alongside some movement and development in regards to our work. Remember the little coins we find with the luck of the Two of Disks will accumulate into the great wealth of the Ten of Disks!

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Avis Akvāsas Ka (Artefact VI)

WUNDERKAMMER

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Artefact No: 6 
Description: Schleicher’s Fable  
Location: Origins within Pontic-Caspian Steppe  
Age: 5th and 4th Millenia BC.

Ben Timberlake October 24, 2024

The above artifact never existed. It is a fable written in 1868 by Augustus Schleicher, composed in Proto-Indo-European (PIE), a long dead language that was reconstructed from the multitude of languages descended from it, spoken in a broad arc from modern English in the west to ancient Tocharian in the Tarim Basin in China. PIE is believed to have been first  spoken between the 5th and 4th millennia BC.  

Another term for a descendant language is a ‘daughter language’ because she is a child of  the mother tongue. For example: English is a daughter language of Old English, which is a daughter language of Proto-Germanic, which is a daughter language of Proto-Indo European (PIE). German and Yiddish are our cousins by way of Old High German, also a  daughter of Proto-Germanic. Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Romanian are all  daughter languages of Proto-Italic, who’s mother language is Proto-Indo-European. Sanskrit, Persian, Hindi, and a host of other Eastern languages can all be traced back to Proto-Indo-European, too. Our linguistic family tree is surprisingly large, some branches are healthy, others have withered but at the trunk we find, again and again, PIE.  

PIE was reconstructed using the comparative method: linguists studied existing languages  for familial traits. Our most fundamental words—those concerning family, body parts, numbers, and animals—show the strongest connections across daughter languages. Once linguists identified enough examples across languages, they could reconstruct the original  PIE word, marking it with an asterisk. 

Take the word ‘daughter’ in English. This is daúhtar in Gothic, θugátēr in Ancient Greek, dúhitṛ in Sanskrit, dugәdar in Iranian, dŭšter in Slavic, dukter in Baltic, duxtir in Celtic, dustr in Armenian, ckācar in Tocharian, and datro in a form of Hittite. This renders daughter as *dʰugh₂tḗr in PIE. 

Here are two more: Horse is Eoh in Old English, aíƕa in Gothic, Equus in Latin, áśva in Sanskrit, ech in one of the Celtic languages, ēš in Armenian. This renders *éḱwos in PIE, (although earlier scholars spelled it *akvās).  

And sheep or ewe in English is awistr in Gothic, ovis in Latin, avi in Sanskrit, ovèn in one of the Slavic languages, ōi in Celtic, and eye in Tocharian. Which gives us *h₂ówis in PIE  (although earlier scholars spelled it *Avis). 

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“The study of protolanguages parallels fundamental physics research—both reveal hidden  connections that deepen our understanding of the world.”

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I mention the spelling of earlier scholars to get us back to Schleicher, and his fable, which is titled Avis akvāsas ka, or The Sheep and the Horses. Here it is in English:  

The Sheep and the Horses 

A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load,  and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: "My heart pains me, seeing a man  driving horses."  

The horses said: "Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the  wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool."  

Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain. 

Pantographia: A Specimen Book of All the Alphabets Known on Earth (1799), Edward Fry.

The study of PIE has attracted remarkable scholars, rivaling nuclear physics and  astrophysics in intellectual rigor. These men and women often mastered numerous  languages and conducted research in remote locations across the globe. 

As early as the 16th century, visitors to India were aware of the similarities between Indo Iranian languages and European ones. In 1653, Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn proposed a proto-language of Scythian as the mother language for Germanic, Italic, Slavic, Baltic,  Celtic and Iranian. In 1767, Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux, a French Jesuit living in India,  wrote a paper proving the similarities between Sanskrit and European languages.  

In 1818, Danish linguist Rasmus Christian Rask showed the links between Old Norse,  Germanic and other Indo-European languages. A few years later Jacob Grimm - one half of  the Brothers Grimm of fairytale fame - laid down Grimm’s law, which brought a rigorous  and widely used methodology to historic linguistic research, layingthe ground for  Schleicher’s great work and his fable. 

Schleicher used the available PIE words that he had reverse-engineered. In those early days there was only a limited vocabulary that he felt confident enough to work with. And yet Schelicher wrought something very layered and profound: he created a nursery rhyme from the cradle of pre-civilisation to teach himself and his colleagues this ancient language. And it contained themes - as many nursery rhymes do - that go back to our earliest days: the beginnings of agriculture, the domestication of horses and sheep - the naming of our world. And yet this simple fable - a prehistoric Baa-Baa Black Sheep - was the linguistic equivalent of Jurassic Park; Schleicher breathed life into this ancient language.   

If we were to trace these diverse and far-flung lineages back to some Oral Eve, we would most likely find her living on the Steppe north of the Black Sea. This is the Kurgan Hypothesis and was formulated by Marija Gimbutas in the 1950s. Gimbutas, a Lithuanian archaeologist, who survived the Nazi occupation of her homeland, was the first scholar to  match PIE theories with archaeological evidence from her excavations into Bronze and Iron Age cultures from across the Steppe. The Kurgan Culture, so named after the  burial mounds that it left, were early domesticators of the horse, and first to use the chariot, spreading their language and ideas with them.  

I saw these Kurgan mounds last year in Ukraine. The battlefields by the Black Sea are in  the deltas of the great rivers and terminally flat. These ancient burial mounds are one of the few pieces of high ground and both sides use them as fighting positions.  

The study of protolanguages parallels fundamental physics research—both reveal hidden  connections that deepen our understanding of the world. PIE studies sometimes feel  otherworldly yet innately familiar, revealing ancient pathways of thought and meaning. 

There are parts of PIE that feel hallucinatory, spiritual and yet innately familiar: linear clusters of nodal points like constellations of forgotten meanings; or ley-lines within the language that suggest a truer course we might take. 

Pantographia: A Specimen Book of All the Alphabets Known on Earth (1799), Edward Fry.

Take the word ‘Day’ which comes from the PIE word *dei ‘to shine, be bright’ and *dyēus  ‘the daylight sky-god’. This PIE term gave Greek the name of Zeus, Latin the word Diem, and Sanskrit word Deva, ‘heavenly, divine, anything of excellence’. So to Carpe Diem is  not merely a matter of seizing the passing moments but of grasping the divine within  them. 

Or take the other PIE word for ‘to shine’ which is *bhā, and also means ‘to speak’. This connection surfaces in Greek "phēmi" (to speak), Latin "fari" (to speak) and "fama" (speaking, reputation), and English "fame." Ancient speakers saw speech as a kind of illumination - words could light up understanding just as fire lit up the darkness. We still preserve this dual meaning when we talk about ideas being "brilliant" or someone giving  an "enlightening" speech. 

Lastly, one that I noticed last week while I was in Brazil: the Portuguese for ‘the way’  “Sentido” shares a cognate with our word ‘sentient’. This ancient connection between movement and perception appears in Latin "sentire" (to feel) and "sequi" (to follow), again in Portuguese as "caminho" (way, path), and English words like "sense," "sentiment," and  "sentient." When the original PIE speakers talked about "finding their way," they were simultaneously describing physical navigation and emotional/intellectual understanding.  A path was both a literal route and a way of feeling through the world. This deep link between movement and consciousness persists today when we speak of "following our feelings" or finding our "life path," echoing an ancient understanding that movement, feeling, and knowing are fundamentally connected. Most days I forget this, but it’s good to be reminded. 

I’m going to leave you with a long list of reworked versions of ‘The Sheep and the Horses’. The Fable has become a palimpsest for PIE scholars down the generations. I don’t pretend to understand the later versions which abound with algebra-like symbols to denote glottal stops and plosives but I do like the idea that this artifact lives on.

HIRT (1939)

Owis ek'wōses-kʷe

Owis, jesmin wᵇlənā ne ēst, dedork'e ek'wons, tom, woghom gʷᵇrum weghontm̥, tom, bhorom megam, tom, gh'ьmonm̥ ōk'u bherontm̥. Owis ek'womos ewьwekʷet: k'ērd aghnutai moi widontei gh'ᵇmonm̥ ek’wons ag'ontm̥. Ek'wōses ewᵇwekʷont: kl'udhi, owei!, k'ērd aghnutai widontmos: gh'ᵇmo, potis, wᵇlənām owjôm kʷr̥neuti sebhoi ghʷermom westrom; owimos-kʷe wᵇlənā ne esti. Tod k'ek'ruwos owis ag'rom ebhuget.

LEHMANN AND ZGUSTA (1979)

Owis eḱwōskʷe

Gʷərēi owis, kʷesjo wl̥hnā ne ēst, ek̂wōns espek̂et, oinom ghe gʷr̥um woĝhom weĝhontm̥, oinomkʷe meǵam bhorom, oinomkʷe ĝhm̥enm̥ ōk̂u bherontm̥.Owis nu ek̂wobh(y)os (ek̂womos) ewewkʷet: "k̂ēr aghnutoi moi ek̂wōns aĝontm̥ nerm̥ widn̥tei".Eḱwōs tu ewewkʷont: "k̂ludhi, owei, k̂ēr ghe aghnutoi n̥smei widn̥tbh(y)os (widn̥tmos): nēr, potis, owiōm r̥ wl̥hnām sebhi gʷhermom westrom kʷrn̥euti. Neǵhi owiōm wl̥hnā esti".Tod k̂ek̂luwōs owis aĝrom ebhuget.

DANKA (1986)

Owis ek'woi kʷe

Owis, jesmin wl̥nā ne ēst, dedork'e ek'wons woghom gʷr̥um weghontn̥s - bhorom meg'əm, monum ōk'u bherontn̥s. Owis ek'wobhos eweukʷet: K'erd aghnutai moi widn̥tei g'hm̥onm̥ ek'wons ag'ontm̥. Ek'woi eweukʷont: K'ludhi, owi, k'erd aghnutai dedr̥k'usbhos: monus potis wl̥nām owiōm temneti: sebhei ghʷermom westrom - owibhos kʷe wl̥nā ne esti. Tod k'ek'luwōs owis ag'rom ebhuget.

ADAMS (1997)

H₂óu̯is h₁ék̂u̯ōs-kʷe

Gʷr̥hₓḗi h₂óu̯is, kʷési̯o u̯lh₂néh₄ ne (h₁é) est, h₁ék̂u̯ons spék̂et, h₁oinom ghe gʷr̥hₓúm u̯óĝhom u̯éĝhontm̥ h₁oinom-kʷe méĝhₐm bhórom, h₁oinom-kʷe ĝhménm̥ hₓṓk̂u bhérontm̥. h₂óu̯is tu h₁ek̂u̯oibh(i̯)os u̯eukʷét: 'k̂ḗr hₐeghnutór moi h₁ék̂u̯ons hₐéĝontm̥ hₐnérm̥ u̯idn̥téi. h₁ék̂u̯ōs tu u̯eukʷónt: 'k̂ludhí, h₂óu̯ei, k̂ḗr ghe hₐeghnutór n̥sméi u̯idn̥tbh(i̯)ós. hₐnḗr, pótis, h₂éu̯i̯om r̥ u̯l̥h₂néhₐm sebhi kʷr̥néuti nu gʷhérmom u̯éstrom néĝhi h₂éu̯i̯om u̯l̥h₂néhₐ h₁ésti.' Tód k̂ek̂luu̯ṓs h₂óu̯is hₐéĝrom bhugét.

LÜHR (2008)

h₂ówis h₁ék’wōskʷe

h₂ówis, (H)jésmin h₂wlh₂néh₂ ne éh₁est, dedork'e (h₁)ék'wons, tóm, wóg'ʰom gʷérh₂um wég'ʰontm, tóm, bʰórom még'oh₂m, tóm, dʰg'ʰémonm h₂oHk'ú bʰérontm. h₂ówis (h₁)ék'wobʰos ewewkʷe(t): k'ḗrd h₂gʰnutoj moj widntéj dʰg'ʰmónm (h₁)ék'wons h₂ég'ontm. (h₁)ék'wōs ewewkʷ: k'ludʰí, h₂ówi! k'ḗrd h₂gʰnutoj widntbʰós: dʰg'ʰémō(n), pótis, h₂wlnéh₂m h₂ówjom kʷnewti sébʰoj gʷʰérmom wéstrom; h₂éwibʰoskʷe h₂wlh₂néh₂ né h₁esti. Tód k'ek'luwṓs h₂ówis h₂ég'rom ebʰuge(t).

VOYLES AND BARRACK (2009)

Owis eḱwōs kʷe

Owis, jāi wl̥nā ne eest, dedorḱe eḱwons, tom woǵʰom gʷr̥um weǵʰontm̥, tom bʰorom meǵm̥, tom ǵʰm̥onm̥ ōku bʰerontm̥. Owis eḱwobʰjos eweket: "Ḱerd angʰetai moi widontei ǵʰm̥onm̥ eḱwons aǵontm̥". Eḱwos wewekur: "Ḱludʰe, owei! Ḱerd angʰetai widontbʰjos: ǵʰm̥on, potis, wl̥nam owijōm kʷr̥neti soi gʷʰermom westrom; owibʰjos kʷe wl̥nā ne esti". Tod ḱeḱlōts owis aǵrom ebʰuget.

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Ben Timberlake is an archaeologist who works in Iraq and Syria. His writing has appeared in Esquire, the Financial Times and the Economist. He is the author of 'High Risk: A True Story of the SAS, Drugs and other Bad Behaviour'.

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Trance (1938)

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Aleister Crowley, October 22nd, 2024

Living in London and surviving largely off donations from Jack Parson’s branch of the esoteric order O.T.O, Aleister Crowley wrote ‘Little Essays Towards Truth’. The founder of contemporary occultism and a controversial figure in his day whose influence and infamy has only grown since his death 9 years after the publication of this essay, ‘Little Essays’ is a pocket companion and far daintier and simpler than some of his significant tomes. It takes 16 subjects and Crowley explores each of them through historical, personal and occultist interpretations, expounding his ideas of Thelema and using a framework of Qaballah. It was the twilight of his life, and his cultural powers were waning, but this collection remains a revelatory, insightful and essential contribution to occultist literature.

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The word Trance implies a passing beyond: scil., the conditions which oppress. The whole and sole object of all true Magical and Mystical training is to become free from every kind of limitation. Thus, body and mind, in the widest sense, and the obstacles in the Path of the Wise: the paradox, tragic enough as it seems, is that they are also the means of progress. How to get rid of them, to pass beyond or to transcend them, is the problem, and this is as strictly practical and scientific as that of eliminating impurities from a gas, or of adroitly using mechanical laws. Here is the inevitable logical flaw in the sorites of the Adept, that he is bound by the very principles which it is his object to overcome: and on him who seeks to discard them arbitrarily they haste to take a terrible revenge!

It is in practice, not in theory, that this difficulty suddenly disappears. For when we take rational steps to suspect the operation of the rational mind, the inhibition does not result in chaos, but in the apprehension of the Universe by means of a faculty to which the laws of the Reason do not apply; and when, returning to the normal state, we seek to analyse our experience, we find that the description abounds in rational absurdities.

The Oracle at Delphi, John Collier, 1891.

On further consideration, however, it becomes gradually clear—gradually, because the habit of Trance must be firmly fixed before its fulminating impressions are truly intelligible—that there are not two kinds of Thought, or of Nature, but one only. The Law of the Mind is the sole substance of the Universe, as well as the sole means by which we apprehend it. There is thus no true antithesis between the conditions of Trance and those of ratiocination and perception; the fact that Trance is not amenable to the rules of argument is impertinent. We say that in Chess a Knight traverses the diagonal of a rectangle measuring three squares by two, neglecting its motion as a material object in space. We have described a definite limited relation in terms of a special sense which works by an arbitrary symbolism: when we analyse any example of our ordinary mental processes, we find the case entirely similar. For what we "see," "hear," etc., depends upon our idiosyncrasies, for one thing, and upon conventional interpretation for another. Thus we agree to call grass green, and to avoid walking over the edge of precipices, without any attempt to make sure that any two minds have exactly identical conceptions of what these things may mean; and just so we agree upon the moves in Chess. By the rules of the game, then, we must think and act, or we risk every kind of error; but we may be perfectly well aware that the rules are arbitrary, and that it is after all only a game. The constant folly of the traditional mystic has been to be so proud of himself for discovering the great secret that the Universe is no more than a toy invented by himself for his amusement that he hastens to display his powers by deliberately misunderstanding and misusing the toy. He has not grasped the fact that just because it is no more than a projection of his own point-of-view, it is integrally Himself that he offends!

Here lies the error of such Pantheism as that of Mansur el-Hallaj, whom Sir Richard Burton so delightfully twits (in the Kasidah) with his impotence—

Mansur was wise, but wiser they who
smote him with the hurled stones;
And though his blood a witness bore, no
Wisdom-Might could mend his bones

God was in the stones no less than within his tarband-wrapping; and when the twain crashed together, one point of perception of the fact was obscured—which was in no wise his design!

To us, however, this matter is not one for regret; it is (like every phenomenon) an Act of Love. And the very definition of such Act is the Passing Beyond of two Events into a Third, and their withdrawal into a Silence or Nothingness by simultaneous reaction. In this sense it may be said that the Universe is a constant issue into Trance; and in fact the proper understanding of any Event by means of the suitable Contemplation should produce the type of Trance appropriate to the complex Event-Individual in the case.

Now all Magick is useful to produce Trance; for (α) it trains the mind in the discipline necessary to Yoga; (β) it exalts the spirit to the impersonal and divine sublimity which is the first condition of success; (γ) it enlarges the scope of the mind, assuring it full mastery of every subtler plane of Nature, thus affording it adequate material for ecstatic consummation of the Eucharist of Existence.  

The essence of the idea of Trance is indeed contained in that of Magick, which is pre-eminently the transcendental Science and Art. Its method is, in one chief sense, Love, the very key of Trance; and in another, the passing beyond normal conditions. The verbs to transcend, to transmit, to transcribe, and their like, are all of cardinal virtue in Magick. Hence "Love is the law, love under will" is the supreme epitome of Magical doctrine, and its universal Formula. For need any man fear to state boldly that every Magical Operation soever is only complete when it is characterised (in one sense or another) by the occurrence of Trance. It was ill done to restrict the use of the word to the supersession of dualistic human consciousness by the impersonal and monistic state of Samadhi. Fast bubbles the fountain of Error when distinction is forcibly drawn "between any one thing and any other thing." Yea, verily and Amen! it is the first necessity as it is the last attainment of Trance to abolish every form and every order of dividuality so fast as it presents itself. By this ray may ye read in the Book of your own Magical Record the authentic stigma of your own success.

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Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) was an American artist and art theorist who was a founding figrue in the ‘Conceptual Art’ and ‘Minimalist’ movements.

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Three of Swords

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Name: Sorrow, the Three of Swords
Number: 3
Astrology: Saturn in Libra
Qabalah: Binah of Vau

Chris Gabriel October 19, 2024

The Three of Swords is the beginning of intellectual development and the origin of understanding. This materializes as, of course, pain. It is the card of primordial heartbreak and separation that necessitates thought.

In Rider, we have a simple, brilliant,  iconic image: a heart pierced by three swords on a rainy background.

In Thoth, a flower falls apart as three swords pierce its center on a dark organic background. The card relates to Saturn in Libra, the little flower crushed by leaden weight.

In Marseille, we have two bent swords and one central sword atop two flowering stalks, upon which there are 22 leaves and berries, the number of Hebrew letters. As the card has the number 3, it relates to Binah, Understanding.As Swords it is the Prince. Thus, sorrow is the understanding of the Prince.

This is a deeply Buddhist card. We can take the Prince in question to be Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, and see the realization of his truth that Life is Suffering. Freud, perhaps offers a clearer view of this: sorrow is separation from the Mother. It is only when the child is not fully one with the mother, when their needs are not met perpetually, that sorrow begins. Tears start, tears that mean “give me what I want”.

The Buddha recognizes that this sorrow is simply a fundamental part of ourselves. We desire, and so we sorrow. Without wants and needs, there would be no sorrow. Without love, there would be no heartbreak. This sort of pain is the source of our knowledge, and our need to develop knowledge. If we never burnt ourselves, we would not know to beware of fire, if we had not been stung, or bitten, we wouldn’t know the dangers around us. If we had not fallen, we wouldn’t know how to stand. These endless sorrows develop our understanding.

To wish for an unbroken heart, an uncrushed flower, is to wish for an empty mind. This is what meditation allows us to do. It forms the ability to return to the unbroken, the whole. One may wish to spend their whole life meditating, to be untouched and unharmed by the world, but this is only one small step on our journey through the tarot.

When we pull this card, we may come to understand something which has been troubling us, we may realize what the problem is, but not how to deal with it. Knowledge is not curative. This is a start to a strategy. This is a problem that needs fixing.

By bringing our attention to this issue, we can move toward greatness.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

‘Dont Look Back’ and Self Made Myth

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Ana Roberts, October 16th, 2024

In 1967, Bob Dylan was a prophet speaking truth to power with his guitar and voice, and informing the minds of a million young people searching for direction. He was settled in this role and comfortable enough to experiment within it. Yet just 2 years earlier, the foundations of this persona were a little less steady. On the road to immortality, Dylan was learning from his mistakes and shaping the mythology of himself. One of those mistakes, it seemed, was inviting a young documentary filmmaker on tour with him. ‘Don’t Look Back’ captures Dylan in a way he never would be captured again, and for a good reason.

D.A. Pennebaker followed Dylan in 1965, touring England, at the very start of his electric revolution, still playing live shows with his acoustic and harmonica. He is seen hanging with Joan Baez, Donovan, and a group of managers, journalists, and fans, with Allen Ginsberg appearing in the background of the now iconic opening sequence set to “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” a proto-music video before the term existed. It is a remarkably candid film and stands as a pinnacle of 1960s-era cinéma vérité. Pennebaker does not interact with him; he serves as a fly on the wall and tries to, through the powers of sheer observation, understand the truth of his subject. The Dylan that the public sees in this film largely aligns with his established persona—a mercurial, elusive genius—yet the consistency of this behavior reveals a soft inauthenticity. The more we watch him interact with journalists and play the role of the aloof prophet, the more his predictability begins to erode the myth. Instead of reinforcing his mystique, it undermines it. We see not a spontaneous artist but an actor fully conscious of his role. At once relentlessly confrontational and perpetually elusive, his time on tour is punctuated by petulant encounters with journalists, lazy days, and frustrated evenings spent in hotel rooms, trading songs with Baez while he sits at his typewriter, and the occasional flash of anger. Where the consistency of Dylan begins to undermine his façade, it is the latter of these, the moments of anger, which one can guess are to blame for Dylan’s refusal to ever be filmed by him. Even in these moments, as he tries to recover from the broken façade he inadvertently revealed, we can see shivers of regret in the young Dylan’s eyes—fear that his image of a “cool cat,” unfazed by the world around him, has slipped in front of an audience and, worse, a camera.

There is a single scene that stands out, and one that resides most strongly in the public consciousness of the film, where Dylan, while his hotel room is filled with various figures from the contemporary British music scene, including Donovan and Alan Price, having recently left the Animals, tries to get to the bottom of who threw a glass out the window. It is the antithesis of the Dylan he presents: he is not the elusive figure, the freewheelin’ Dylan, the mocking Dylan. Instead, he is a petty, angry figure concerned about his own perception. He tells a drunken Englishman who he suspects threw the glass that “I ain’t taking no fucking responsibility for cats I don’t know, man… I know a thousand cats that look just like you.” Later, when the dust has settled, Donovan plays a song and Dylan, immediately after, plays “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” a pointed upstaging of the younger artist, clearly in the presence of his hero. These ten minutes of footage stand alone in Dylan’s career—a glimpse behind the glass onion. It is in these moments that we see such concern about the way he is presented, agonizingly self-aware and furious at the possibility that he might not be in full control of his image. Yet this does not weaken Dylan’s genius; it amplifies it. It is the reason for his success. He is a master at building the mythology around him, knowing, like Freud, that if he gives too much of himself, too inconsistent a version of himself, it won’t be a strong bedrock on which the fans can create the myths. ‘Don’t Look Back’ stands alone in documentaries because it pays attention to the man behind the curtain, and Dylan’s work remains more powerful when the curtain is not pulled back. 

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“‘Another Side of Bob Dylan’ is the Temptation of Christ, the 40 days and nights in the desert—it is the prophet going alone, leaving those who believe they need him, only to force them to dig deeper into his message.”

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Bob Dylan in the hotel room in ‘Dont Look Back’. (1967).

It is not this film alone that reveals the personal construction of Dylan, though it gives a wondrous insight into it. Between 1963 and 1965, Dylan put out five albums, and to listen to each is to hear in stark detail the active construction of an icon. He refines his ability with each album, taking the elements that most readily captured his listeners and expanding them constantly, while refusing to be pigeonholed in style or content. We can see this perhaps most clearly in the three-album run of ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’, ‘Another Side of Bob Dylan’, and ‘Bringing It All Back Home’. ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’, his third record and the first to contain all original songs, builds off the previous album, leaning into revolutionary-minded, political anthems and civil-rights era ideas, blended with majesty into his brand of beat-inspired folk music. It is a logical continuation to ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’, cementing his reputation as the voice of his generation, reporting on the issues in ways only the kids understand. Yet ‘Another Side of Bob Dylan’, released some eight months later, entirely rejects this image. The name itself is a refusal to be defined as anything, a rejection of the label of prophet, which only makes the role more powerful as listeners try to rectify the two. “My Back Pages” confronts any attempts to pinpoint political views: “Equality, I spoke the word / As if a wedding vow / Ah, but I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now,” a cry that he is changing, an offer to attempt an understanding of what he believes. ‘Another Side of Bob Dylan’ is the Temptation of Christ, the 40 days and nights in the desert—it is the prophet going alone, leaving those who believe they need him, only to force them to dig deeper into his message.

‘Bringing It All Back Home’ is the completion of this journey—it is when Dylan knew he had found greatness. He blends folk with rock music deftly, never allowing any song to fall simply into either category. Gone are the directly political songs; rather, he is able to embed the possibility of revolution into every line, turning songs of the personal into rambling prophecies of the last days of earth, as with “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” Each line can be taken as its own maxim, its own prophecy, and Dylan throughout this album confirms his role as the oracle. “He not busy being born / Is busy dying / Temptation’s page flies out the door / You follow, find yourself at war” captures this ability to at once capture specificity and remain entirely open to interpretation. *Bringing It All Back Home* is the realization that the prophet is most powerful when they can never be understood. Each song makes you confident you are in the presence of, and listening to, something important, and if you don’t understand it in time you will—the prophecy will reveal itself. It is in these three albums we see Dylan embrace the inauthentic and use it to further his message; it is here we see him realize that authenticity leads to understanding, and when you are understood your message ends. Dylan embraces the inauthentic, and it lets him live forever.

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Ana Roberts is a writer, musician, and cultural critic.

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Sentences on Conceptual Art (1969)

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Sol LeWitt, 123/Six Three-Part Variations Using Each Kind of Cube Once, 1968-1969.

Sol LeWitt, October 15th, 2024

Two years before this text was written, Sol LeWitt published ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ which can rightly be seen as the first public recognition of a new art form that was sweeping the avant-garde. LeWitt was a pioneering artist in this field, and as he proved in that writing, it’s greatest practicing theorist. This text is a follow up to that work, written when ‘Conceptual Art’ as a genre is widely accepted and recognised. His goal, then, was not to explain but to illuminate, and provide a set of maxims that artists can follow to create art that transcends the boundaries of what was seen as possible. It was first published in 1969 in issue 1 of "‘Art-Language’.

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1. Conceptual Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.

2. Rational judgements repeat rational judgements.

3. Illogical judgements lead to new experience.

4. Formal Art is essentially rational.

5. Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.

6. If the artist changes his mind midway through the execution of the piece he compromises the result and repeats past results.

7. The artist’s will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to completion. His wilfulness may only be ego.

8. When words such as painting and sculpture are used, they connote a whole tradition and imply a consequent acceptance of this tradition, thus placing limitations on the artist who would be reluctant to make art that goes beyond the limitations.

9. The concept and idea are different. The former implies a general direction while the latter are the components. Ideas implement the concept.

10. Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.

11. Ideas do not necessarily proceed in logical order. They may set one off in unexpected directions but an idea must necessarily be completed in the mind before the next one is formed.

12. For each work of art that becomes physical there are many variations that do not.

13. A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist's mind to the viewer's. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artist's mind.

14. The words of one artist to another may induce an ideas chain, if they share the same concept.

15. Since no form is intrinsically superior to another, the artist may use any form, from an expression of words, (written or spoken) to physical reality, equally.

16. If words are used, and they proceed from ideas about art, then they are art and not literature, numbers are not mathematics.

17. All ideas are art if they are concerned with art and fall within the conventions of art.

18. One usually understands the art of the past by applying the conventions of the present thus misunderstanding the art of the past.

19. The conventions of art are altered by works of art.

20. Successful art changes our understanding of the conventions by altering our perceptions.

21. Perception of ideas leads to new ideas.

22. The artist cannot imagine his art, and cannot perceive it until it is complete.

23. One artist may mis-perceive (understand it differently than the artist) a work of art but still be set off in his own chain of thought by that misconstrual.

24. Perception is subjective.

25. The artist may not necessarily understand his own art. His perception is neither better nor worse than that of others.

26. An artist may perceive the art of others better than his own.

27. The concept of a work of art may involve the matter of the piece or the process in which it is made.

28. Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist's mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly. There are many side-effects that the artist cannot imagine. These may be used as ideas for new works.

29. The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course.

30. There are many elements involved in a work of art. The most important are the most obvious.

31. If an. artist uses the same form in a group of works, and changes the material, one would assume the artist's concept involved the material.

32. Banal ideas cannot be rescued bv beautiful execution

33. It is difficult to bungle a good idea.

34. When an artist learns his craft too well he makes slick art.

35. These sentences comment on art, but are not art.

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Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) was an American artist and art theorist who was a founding figrue in the ‘Conceptual Art’ and ‘Minimalist’ movements.

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The Chariot (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: The Chariot
Number: VII
Astrology: Cancer
Qabalah: Cheth

Chris Gabriel October 12, 2024

The Chariot secures the domain of the royal cards which have come before it. This is the card of empire and of the strength which maintains it. Each iteration shows an armored figure and his chariot.

In Rider, we find a stern looking man adorned in beautiful armor. His skirt bears alchemical symbols, and his shoulder pads are lunar faces. He has a starry crown and wields a baton. His gray chariot has a winged disk, and starry curtains, and At the center is the mark of a wheel and axle. His chariot is drawn by two monochrome sphinxes. Behind him is a large kingdom.

In Thoth, we find a traditional knight in amber armor seated in Lotus position. He bears cup of the Holy Grail, blue with the red blood of Christ in the center. His helmet is topped with a blue crab. His red chariot is drawn by the four beasts in sphinx form.

In Marseille, we find a young man with long blonde hair, wearing colorful armor with shoulder pads which are lunar faces. He bears a baton. His chariot is drawn by two horses of red and blue.

In each iteration, we find an armored man balancing dual forces, the hard and the soft, the severe and the gentle. The Chariot is Cancer,  it is the two claws and hard shell of the crab. This is the nature of the imperial army, the hard defenses keep what is within safe.

Cancer is the sign of empire; it occupies much of July, a month named for Julius Caesar, and of course the United States was born in Cancer. Cancer is concerned with the home, and with the domain. For a crab this can be a tide pool or a rock, but for an individual or a nation, the question is how large of a home one can have. How far can our borders span? How much space can be made safe? How much space can be controlled?

The Hebrew letter associated with the Chariot is Cheth, meaning the fence. Thus the domain of Cancer establishes walls and fences, and defends them with the military. A nation’s borders are defined solely by violence, in a constant test of whether the claws of cancer can frighten away those who would seize it. 

In the personal dimension, the Chariot is the car. As Gary Numan says: Here in my car I feel safest of all. I can lock all my doors; it’s the only way to live: in cars.

And as Paglia writes, advancing past “a room of one’s own” to a car of one’s own. The car is chariot, armor, and weapon all in one. It allows for endless individual travel, safety, and expansion. It is the dream of Cancer.

When we pull this card, we may have to defend our space from an imposing force, or we may have to hop in the car and make space somewhere far away.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

The Power of a Heavy Sigh

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Analogical Diagram, Tobias Cohen’s Ma’aseh Tuviyah.

Vestal Malone October 10, 2024

 A mirror, a polaroid selfie, the surface of a cool mountain lake pre-immersion… we see ourselves in these reflections, but they don't explain who we are, or why, or how others perceive us. Bodies, images,  faces, names, styles, reputations, and qualities of character; all a part of some definition of ourselves, yet none truly capture the whole. Only the mind's eye, carefully listening from the inside out with breath as guide, can see the physical and emotional self in their entirety.

The perfectly divine design machine of the human body may appear symmetrical but its balance is asymmetrical: our liver,  gallbladder, the “good side” of our face for the family portrait, right or left handed, goofy foot or regular, all contribute to a lack of balance within ourselves. Even those that appear symmetrical - the kidneys, lungs, eyes, legs, ovaries, and arms - have subtle differences. And the gray matter, balanced atop the spine, encased by the skull, with the duties that control every aspect of our existence – the sacred left brain, the mundane right brain – separate yet united, floating and dancing with the breath. The simple wisdom of this twin organism can create a breath and relax the body without the mind's conscious choice getting in the way. The heavy sigh.

To begin to know the self from the inside out, one must invite the mind to follow as breath fills the lungs, like a pitcher filling with water. Focus and notice the body's details, truly observing each cell, and you can begin creating an opportunity to hit the “pause” and then “reset” button allowing the body to harmonize itself. The heavy sigh.  

Sitting at the office or in traffic, dancing, surfing, receiving bodywork or practicing yoga are all opportunities to follow the breath with the mind, bring oxygen, and clear stagnation. The breath is the best chiropractor, especially lying or sitting still. As the lungs move to inflate and then release, travel along the mind's path until the focus blurs and flow begins. The body is designed to release itself, but it needs the mind to get out of the way as it waits for the heavy sigh. It can't be controlled, only invited, and when it comes, a powerful release to mind and body happens in the exhale.

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After her University education (BA in English Literature and philosophy, minor in music),  Vestal Malone followed the call to study her hobbies of yoga and therapeutic touch a the Pacific School of Healing Arts and continued in the Master's program of Transformational Bodywork  with her mentors, Fred and Cheryl Mitouer, and assisting with their teaching. She went on to teach her own Therapeutic Touch workshops in Japan,  hatha yoga in America, and study Cranial Sacral Therapy with Hugh Milne and John Upledger. She has had the honor of doing bodywork with professional athletes, laymen and nobility for over 25 years. Vestal is a mom, a backyard organic gardener, and sings soprano in her church choir on a little island in the middle Pacific ocean. She hails from Colorado and Wyoming and migrates every summer to her family ranch to ground in the dust of her roots.

On the Harrow

Vincent van Gogh, Sketch of a Man with Harrow (detail). Brown ink and wash on paper, 1883, Van Gogh Museum. Fig 1.

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Ale Nodarse, October 8, 2024

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“I walk on the ground and the ground’s walked on by me…”  — Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven¹

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A figure draws forth and away (fig. 1). Wrists cross as his wooden clogs shift homewards in syncopation. The farmer’s right leg and calf distend, as if to signal the weight of his wooden anchor. It is the harrow he draws forth: a wooden grid set with iron spikes and pulled—or “drawn” or “dragged” given their mutual root in the Dutch dragen—through the newly-plowed plot. 

One can feel the weight of such labor. When the drawing was completed in 1883, the use of the wood-framed harrow set without the advancements of articulated steel would have appeared as archaic as it was agonizing. Words remind us of this. In 1800, the arrival of the English term “harrowing” as synonymous with “distressing” heralded the recession of the wooden device to the margins of history. Still the figure proceeds, field to task, for only then could the sowing take place.

Anonymous Illustrator, “October,” in Jean Duc de Berry, Très Riches Heures. Fig 2.

“Here ’twas a farmer, dragging homeward a harrow or plough.”² Perhaps van Gogh, author of the letter and its attendant sketch, remembered that refrain. He had earlier copied the line, in 1873, from Jan van Beers’s poem, “The Boarder” (“De bestedeling”), as an epistolary gift for his brother, Theo, and for his London friends, Willem and Caroline. Van Gogh renamed it: “The Evening Hour.” Prior to his days as a painter, the image of the farmer and his harrow must have spoken to him of that other syncopation: diurnal cycles, daily bread, and liturgical hours. It was, after all, in a Book of Hours that the image of the harrow much earlier appeared, having received its own illumination in the “October” of Jean Duc de Berry’s Très Riches Heures (The Richest Hours). There, an unnamed painter resplendently, and truer to life, allotted the harrow’s weight to a horse (fig. 2).

Van Gogh had a closer image in mind. In 1880 he wrote to Theo of his latest embarkation. He would “translate” Millet’s serials — his Labors of the Field, his Four Times of the Day — and a number of single paintings and pastels that had been earlier editioned as prints. He counted an etching by Alfred Alexandre Delauney after Millet’s Winter: The Plain of Chailly amongst his possessions; and he proceeded, sometime between that year and 1882, to draw a grid upon it, in preparation for his painting of the scene: Snow-Covered Field with a Harrow (fig. 3, fig. 4). (The shift from painting to etching to painting again led, in this instance, to a field which favored snow and that particular cold of pale-blue and lead-white.)

The Sketch of a Man with Harrow departs from Millet in its insistence on the laborer (fig. 1). It is the harrower who composes the work’s perspectival center. His cap marks the convergence of diagonal recessions and lines. The force of his labor structures the field. Cleaving soil, he leaves imprints. Look closely at the dust which swells around the harrow, with its circular specks floating atop hatched lines, and the weight of each implement—of the pen, of the iron—which composes the fields and modifies their volumes becomes clear. 

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“You must regard it not as a change, but as a deeper movement through.”

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Millet, Winter: The Plain of Chailly. Fig 3.

Whereas the cold, the “snow,” prevents the farmer from attending to his ground, from drawing lines in his dirt, the harrower of the Sketch is in the season of his labor. The sketch has no precedent in the oeuvre of Millet, nor in that of another artist. Van Gogh, in the text which proliferates around and behind the figure, written on the reverse of his semi-opaque paper, makes no direct claim to past observation. Instead, it is an image of labor still to come, as the fields will be prepared for sowing and the figure’s anticipated return. No rope binds this farmer to his wooden anchor; he holds no cord against his palm. Perhaps van Gogh imagines him, finally homebound, having just dropped the rope. Or perhaps, in the world of the sketch, no such rope was needed. Its artifice may lead us to suspect that this is in fact the image of another laborer, an homage to the work of an artist, if not that of van Gogh himself.

In his only written reference to the Sketch of a Man with Harrow, van Gogh asks his brother to join him in the act of creation, to take up oil and canvas:

One must take it up with assurance, with a conviction that one is doing something reasonable, like the peasant guiding his plough or like our friend in the sketch, who is doing his own harrowing. If one has no horse, one is one’s own horse…³ 

For the artist, particular forms –– objects as well as gestures –– prompt others to come to mind. They inspire, as van Gogh would elsewhere put it, “curious rapports” between seemingly disparate things. The harrow appears here as one such form. It lives, so to speak, in likenesses. Its very shape echoes the frame of the canvas. Indeed, the painting may be imagined, its own “harrow” set — beams of woods and gridded stretchers nailed together — much like a canvas, now angled sideways. The harrower, in turn, offers an allegory for the painter himself, for one who also sought to weave through fields, to draw from and be drawn upon ground. (His canvases, as in the case of the grasshopper carcass left amidst the Olive Trees, quite literally absorbed the ground in the process.)

Vincent van Gogh, Snow-Covered Field with a Harrow. Fig 4.

In his final advice to Theo, as mediated through the “friend in the sketch,” van Gogh insists on the transformative potential of the harrower’s, and thus the painter’s, labors. “You must regard it,” he writes, “not as a change,” but “as a deeper movement through.” These “regards” turn constantly on metaphor, as the movement always occurs through “others”: the painter as plower, the painting as harrow, even, in what might initially seem a claim to independence, one’s self as one’s horse (to momentarily become, as it were, other than human). Such metaphors, rooted in “mere” empathy, might be dismissed as trite. And yet they invoke weight. Already in name alone, they signal the work of carrying: the word “metaphor,” which comes from the Greek metapherein, may be translated as “to transfer,” “to carry over,” “to bear.” 

The metaphor of the harrow as painting proposes an art which remains, in the most physical sense, grounded: that is, an art which might bring us to see our own labor as grounded in the labors of others — and tethered, as well, to the ground itself. (“Our work,” van Gogh writes in the letter above, “would flow together.”) For how much or how little, we might ask, do we carry alone? And what weight is entailed in such carrying? As the painter’s own metaphors in picture and in prose suggest, to be disposed to and transformed by wonder is not only to let one’s self be moved, but to recognize the weight of one’s entanglements. To let the ground, as it were, walk on us. 

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¹Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2008; originally 1971), 155.
²Van Gogh, Letter to Willem and Caroline van Stockum-Haanebeek (London, Wednesday, 2 July 1873). “Hier was ’t een boer, die egge of ploeg, op de veldslet huiswaerts.”
³ Van Gogh, Letter to Theo van Gogh (Nieuw-Amsterdam, Sunday, 28 October 1883).

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Alejandro (Ale) Nodarse Jammal is an artist and art historian. They are a Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art & Architecture at Harvard University and are completing an MFA at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art. They think often about art — its history and its practice — in relationship to observation, memory, language, and ethics.

The Seven of Wands (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Valour, the Seven of Wands
Number: 7
Astrology: Mars in Leo
Qabalah: Netzach of Yod

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Chris Gabriel October 5, 2024

The Seven of Wands is a card fighting against the odds. It symbolizes the  willingness to fight a losing battle, and bravery in spite of terrible danger.

In Rider, we find a young man in a green tunic battling off 6 wands wielded by unseen enemies beneath him. His face is angry. He has no support, but he goes on fighting.

In Thoth, we find 6 fine ritual wands crushed by a simple club. This is the  base creative and violent energies that overcome what is structured and established, a battering ram that breaks in an ornate door. It is Mars in Leo, so there is a strong element of Pride, this is proving oneself against authority, or defending one's name from insult.

In Marseille, we have 6 wands crossed, and one beneath. Foliage sprouts from the sides. Qabalistically it is the Love of the King. The Love of the King is prideful and brave.

This card brings to mind many great battles, not least the Battle of Thermopylae where the 300 Spartans overcame a Persian army that numbered in the hundreds of thousands. A closer fit, however, is the Battle of Bunker Hill, where raggedy American militiamen held their own against the great British army. Though they lost, they proved their bravery was a match for superior training.

Perhaps the most direct example still, is the Battle of Stamford Bridge, marking the end of the Viking age. The key figure is an unknown Viking Berserker who makes a chokepoint on Stamford Bridge, single handedly holding off the English army. He kills 40 on his own, and is finally taken down by a soldier with a spear who struck him from under the bridge. 

The Seven of Wands is past the point of Victory, the Six of Wands. This is not about fighting to win, this is fighting when all is lost. 

Norman Rockwell, 1943. Oil on Canvas.

This is the card of Valour, of the lone soldier fighting an entire army. These countless historical events color the card well, but its ideas can be closer to home too. This is the card for when we hold our own opinion in spite of opposition. This is going against the grain, even when it’s uncomfortable.

The Norman Rockwell painting Freedom of Speech shows it well; a lone man standing up to voice his opposing opinion to the town. This is the willingness to engage in controversy, to dissent. Of course, this is not always positive. The subject of Rockwell’s painting is a man dissenting against the consensus to build a new school after it had burned down. The battles fought bravely for pride are often quite ridiculous. 

When you pull this card, you may be faced with opposition, and you must face it bravely. Speak up, even when everyone else disagrees.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Life Is Right (1904)

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Rainer Maria Rilke, October 3rd, 2024

In 1902, while attending military college an hour outside of Vienna, Austria, the 19 year old Xavier Kappus began a correspondence with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a respected and established writer who had, many years earlier, been tutored by the very same school master as Kappus himself. Seeking advice and criticism on his poetry, over 6 years and 10 letters, Rilke taught him something altogether more important - a way to understand the world and navigate the difficulties of life with wonder, love, creativity, and hopefulness. The letters were collected into a book published as ‘Letters to a Young Poet’, which remains one of the most seminal and essential works of the 20th Century. The letter reproduced here was written in November of 1904, while Rilke was in Sweden.

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My Dear Mr. Kappus,

In this time that has gone by without a letter I have been partly traveling, partly so busy that I could not write. And even today writing comes hard to me because I have already had to write a lot of letters so that my hand is tired. If I could dictate, I would say a great deal to you, but as it is, take only a few words for your long letter.

I think of you, dear Mr. Kappus, often and with such concentrated wishes that that really ought to help you somehow. Whether my letters can really be a help, I often doubt. Do not say: yes, they are. Just accept them and without much thanks, and let us await what comes.

There is perhaps no use my going into your particular points now; for what I could say about your tendency to doubt or about your inability to bring outer and inner life into unison, or about all the other things that worry you—: it is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case.

And about emotions: all emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you. Everything that you can think in the face of your childhood, is right. Everything that makes more of you than you have heretofore been in your best hours, is right. Every heightening is good if it is in your whole blood, if it is not intoxication, not turbidity, but joy which one can see clear to the bottom. Do you understand what I mean?

And your doubt may become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become critical. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you vail find it perplexed and embarrassed perhaps, or perhaps rebellious. But don’t give in, insist on arguments and act this way, watchful and consistent, every single time, and the day will arrive when from a destroyer it will become one of your best workers— perhaps the cleverest of all that are building at your life.

That is all, dear Mr. Kappus, that I am able to tell you today. But I am sending you at the same time the reprint of a little poetical work * that has now appeared in the Prague periodical Deutsche Arbeit. There I speak to you further of life and of death and of how both are great and splendid.

Yours:
Rainer Maria Rilke

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Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was an Austrian poet and novelist whose lyricism and literary intensity expanded the possibilities of the German language.

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Disturbed Images

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Lamia Priestley October 1, 2024

A roll of belly fat melts into a makeup-caked face; a bag of chips morphs into a family portrait; a butt cheek transforms into a policeman’s bicep. Gross and sickly, loud and pink, Frank Manzano’s collection of video works, Current Value (2023), uses AI imagery to depict the grotesque in everyday scenes of American suburban life—fistfights, plastic surgery, arrests. 

Still from Holistic Consumption Challenge (Current Value), Frank Manzano. (2023).

Rapid cuts between faces result in pile ups of interchangeable characters. An endless treadmill of trash, plastic consumer products, and open mouths, the videos’ choppiness creates what the Chicago-based artist describes as “the human parade”—a crazed illustration of people as stuff. Manzano describes his work as an exploration of “consumerism, massification, the loss of the self.” These themes are felt not just in the works’ subject matter but in the evidence of the mass market AI tools Manzano uses to make many of his images. 

Manzano has a fondness for corpulent characters, big butts, cellulite, stretched thighs and teethy smiles. Outside of his focus on flesh, the videos themselves exert a materiality in their reference to the aesthetics of consumer visual culture and their artefacts. There’s the digital lines of security footage, the jacked up saturation of reality TV, the studio lighting of an 80s sitcom, the low res crunchy feel of camcorder home videos. The images look either consumer-grade (camcorder) or like something used to capture consumers (CCTV). But amongst the visual styles referenced in Manzano’s work, one can distinguish something entirely new, the artefacts of AI images.

To create this pastiche, Manzano uses a combination of his own photos, sourced images and ones he generates with AI image tools like Wombo. On a visual level, the artefacts of AI images—the airbrushed smooth skin, confused edges between fingers, gibberish logos and half-baked eyes—contribute to a feeling of the uncanny in these illustrations of the American underbelly. More than just a formal contribution though, these artefacts place the images into a context. Viewers who, over the past few years, have developed a familiarity with AI generated images online, will recognise them here and have some understanding of the process by which they are created—using a dataset of preexisting images. It’s clear that although Current Value’s images have the trademarks of documentary or recorded reality, many of them aren’t real. 

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“There’s something profane in the limitation of a finite dataset. The images have no hope of transcendence.”

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The disturbing nature of Manzano’s videos is due, not to this irreality, but rather to the images’ self-aware embrace of their artificial generation. The AI artefacts are significant because of what they mean in the context of Manzano’s unaspiring video world. Not only are his subjects debased but so too are the images—a perfect marriage of subject and form.

Origins of Fetishization (Current Value), Frank Manzano. 2023.

The philosopher Hannes Bajohr offers a useful framework for understanding this earthbound quality of AI images in his article Algorithmic Empathy: Toward a Critique of Aesthetic AI (2022). Bajohr advocates for interpreting AI arts on their own terms, looking at how they’re made—their “technical substrate”—to develop their aesthetic critiques. Bajohr draws a parallel between artificial neural networks and the ancient aesthetic principle of mimesis—the attempt to imitate or reproduce reality in the creation of art. He outlines two opposing concepts of imitation as it relates to AI images. The first he attributes to the philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s explanation. It describes imitation as construction, which sees “the approximation of an existing state through the inference of the rules that bring it about.” The second concept of imitation, which better describes AI image making, is “imitatio naturae” (imitation of nature). A classical idea that was repopularised in the Renaissance, “imitatio naturae” sees imitation as a mere repetition of the real without the “procedural insight” of imitation as construction. In the case of AI image making, “nature” would be the dataset, and so that from which all representations are derived. 

This first approach to imitation, that of construction, implies the possibility of depicting something new. Bajohr emphasises that with the knowledge of a thing’s creation—of its building blocks—moving beyond that thing is possible while in “imitatio naturae”, the representation derives directly from the thing itself. Nature, and so the dataset, is the absolute resource. An artificial neural network can’t truly imagine anything beyond its own dataset, never something outside of that which has already been represented.

There’s something profane in the limitation of a finite dataset. The images have no hope of transcendence. Image generators are so far unable to replicate the mysterious process by which a great artist goes about transforming an ordinary landscape into an image that might produce ineffable revelations in its viewers. The artist—studying how light falls, the relationships of colours, the phenomenon of perspective—might inexplicably assemble a few strokes of paint to reveal something much greater than valleys, woods, hills and streams, much greater than nature. 

Manzano’s images are trapped. His subjects lead unambitious lives, marginalised by a cycle of consumerism, greed, lust, violence, and vanity; they're governed by their instincts, unable to escape themselves. So too, AI images exist only in immanence. Image generators simulate master artists’ styles from the past, merely recycling them, destined to make unambitious copies.  

Current Value’s images are provocations. They’re affective, disturbing representations of the gutters of material culture because they themselves belong there, unable to dream themselves out.

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Lamia Priestley is an art historian, writer and researcher working at the intersection of art, fashion and technology. With a background in Italian Renaissance Art, Lamia is currently the Artist Liaison at the digital fashion house DRAUP, where she works with artists to produce generative digital collections.

The Nine of Wands (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Strength, the Nine of Wands
Number: 9
Astrology: Moon in Sagittarius
Qabalah: Yesod of Yod

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Chris Gabriel September 28, 2024

The Nine of Wands is a card of perseverance through darkness. It represents the indomitable will of the lone survivor, who has the strength necessary to make it through to the end.

In Rider, we find a bandaged and raggedy man, standing with the help of one of the nine wands. Yet he is standing. This is a survivor who bears the marks of his struggle. Around him are 8 wands stuck in the ground. While the rest have gone or died, he remains.

In Thoth, we find the 9 wands as arrows. 8 Lunar arrows coming down. The central wand is connecting the Moon below to the Sun above. In many ways this is the most ritualistically significant card in the Thoth deck. It symbolizes the ritual of the Great Work of Thelema, that of Samekh. The movement past the Psyche and toward the Dæmon or Genius. This is the Mysterium Conjunctionis of the Alchemists, the marriage of the Sun and Moon. 

In Marseille, we find a similar arrangement to Thoth, as 8 wands cross one another and a central wand is beneath them. Through Qabalah we find the name of this card to be “The Foundation of the King”. The Foundation of the King is Strength.

In some ways this is a dark card, concerned with immense struggle and difficulty, but here Nietzsche’s wisdom of “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger” is affirmed. This is the path necessary for greatness.

This card makes me think of Apollo 11 and the “Moonshot”, mankind making the terrible and difficult journey through space to reach the Moon and the achievement of the impossible.

It also calls to mind the Star Spangled Banner: 

Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watch'd, were so gallantly streaming?
And the Rockets' red glare, the Bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our Flag was still there;

The flag still standing amidst the chaos of war.

This is Nietzsche’s will to power that has brought man through the darkness of time. Even more, it is the will to dream and to achieve what is beyond - it is the best in us. Nietzsche even symbolized it with archery; in Zarathustra he feared this tendency could cease: Alas! there cometh the time when man will no longer launch the arrow of his longing beyond man—and the string of his bow will have unlearned to whizz!

The Nine of Wands is the arrow of our longing, the rocket to the moon, and the golden thread in the Labyrinth. It is what keeps us going.

When we pull this card, we may be faced with struggle and difficulty, but we must and will come out of it stronger. We may also be inspired with a great goal, a dream that we must achieve. It may be that this great dream helps us through the darkness.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

On the Grasshopper

Vincent van Gogh, Olive Trees, 1889. Oil on canvas, Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City.

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Ale Nodarse, September 26, 2024

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“And the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden.” — Vincent van Gogh¹

“Terror and a beauty insoluble are a ribband of blue woven into the fringes of things both great and small.” — Annie Dillard²

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In November of 2017 a grasshopper was found lodged within the depths of Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 Olive Trees.³ Conservators celebrated the quiet revelation. Such an insect, they suspected, might finally divulge the season of the painting’s completion, the month — within that most productive, and final, year of van Gogh’s life — in which turbulent oil had come to rest. Further searching through pigment ensued. Tracing the most minute of ripples, as if to follow the insect’s final movements, proved futile. No such eddies emerged. The grasshopper, they concluded, died before it had been sealed in its oily envelope. 

The plein-air painter knew intimately the grasshopper (or sprinkhaan, in the artist’s native Dutch) and its kin. He complained of the travails of painting “on the spot itself” in a letter to his brother Theo, four years before Olive Trees was painted (July 14, 1885): 

“I must have picked a good hundred flies and more off the 4 canvases that you’ll be getting, not to mention dust and sand etc. — not to mention that, when one carries them across the heath and through hedgerows for a few hours, the odd branch or two scrapes across them &c. Not to mention that when one arrives on the heath after a couple of hours’ walk in this weather, one is tired and hot. Not to mention that the figures don’t stand still like professional models, and the effects that one wants to capture change as the day wears on.”

The grasshopper of the Olive Trees, one suspects, arrived in such a bout of flies, or with a wind of dust and sand, or perhaps by a branch depositing the insect’s carcass upon wet canvas. In any case, the painter’s not to mentions, his niet meegerekend — or, more accurately, his “not counted (any)mores” — disclose, like the grasshopper, unanticipated revelations. For after a concession to his reader he does indeed count: a good hundred, 4, a few, or two, a couple.

Van Gogh rendered the canvas a thing which absorbs. Flies (living, or like the grasshopper, already dead) are drawn to it; dust and sand (and the innumerable particulates residing in his “etc.”) cling to it; branches scrape it. Its centimeters of oil testify still to each of these touches, depositions and engravings. But between the first and second not to mentions a change occurs. The painter describes himself absorbed, as if within a landscape that will, regardless of resistance, enumerate: that is, bring itself to his attention and to his counting. He, like his painting, transgresses dimensions. In oil as on ground, he moves not only “across the heath” but “through the hedgerows” (door de hei in Dutch). While recent exhibitions have cast Van Gogh’s images as flat, albeit immense, projections, to speak of the artist’s paintings is inevitably to speak of this movement through and to trace the former carrying — the dragging resistance — of his own body and brush. 

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“The ground that was painted and the ground that was tilled became increasingly one and the same.”

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In the third not to mention the artist turns to his body — tired and hot — before moving a final time to the bodies of others. “The figures don’t stand still.” His complaint formed a critique of those who, like the painter Gustave Courbet, predicated their realism upon a return to the studio. (Of the figures within Courbet’s 1849 Stone Breakers, a work perennially invoked as foundational to the Realist movement, the painter wrote nonchalantly: “I made an appointment with them at my studio for the next day.”)⁴  Whereas Courbet conceived of the figure — of the peasant — as a transferable image disposed to the economics of the studio, Van Gogh insisted on his own absorption within the life of another. “The more I work on it,” he continues in the same to Theo, “the more peasant life absorbs me (me absorbeert).”⁴  

Vincent Van Gogh, Women Picking Olives, 1889. Oil on Canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Through his work, the ground that was painted and the ground that was tilled became increasingly one and the same. The elements which Van Gogh would characterize as not mentionable –– flies, dust, and detritus –– would become, if at first paradoxically, proof. Proof of being there. They mark him and his canvases as they mark the laboring bodies to which he bore witness (which included women at work amidst those very trees.) The not mentionables insist on paintings not just as images but as objects. They make a proposition, too: that beauty lies in the counting and in the keeping hold of fragments which, however small, remain singular. Beauty, of such a kind, insists on the insolubility of seemingly dissolved parts; on the ribbon which may be picked out, to draw from Dillard’s analogy, from the greater weave. Beauty is an insistence on presence. 

The painter, and his canvas, hold space for the ‘not to mention’ to be mentioned still. And since questions of recognition become questions of ethics, its insistence ought to weigh on us. What would it mean, the painting asks, to consider the grasshopper? What would it mean to be burdened by that which appears — all but — gone?

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¹Vincent van Gogh, Letter to Theo van Gogh (Amsterdam, September 18, 1877. No. 131). The letter was composed after van Gogh attended Rev. Jeremie Meijjes’s Sermon on Ecclesiastes XI:7–XII:7. For the original and translated letters, see vangoghletters.org.
²Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper’s Magazine Press, 1974), 24.
³ “Grasshopper Found Embedded in van Gogh Masterpiece,” on the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s site. Link: https://nelson-atkins.org/grasshopper-found-embedded-van-gogh-masterpiece/. 
⁴ Gustave Courbet, Letter to Francis Wey (November 26, 1849), translated in Marilyn Stokstad and Michael Cothren, Art History (Boston: Prentice Hall, 2011), 972. See Linda Nochlin, Realism: Style and Civilization (Baltimore: Penguin, 1971), 120–1; and, T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 79–81. 
⁵ Van Gogh, Letter to Theo van Gogh (Neunen, on or about Tuesday, July 14, 1885. No. 515.). 

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Alejandro (Ale) Nodarse Jammal is an artist and art historian. They are a Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art & Architecture at Harvard University and are completing an MFA at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art. They think often about art — its history and its practice — in relationship to observation, memory, language, and ethics.

Head, The Monkees and the Search of Authenticity

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Micky Dolenz falls from the Gerald Desmond Bridge, Head (1968).

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Ana Roberts, September 24th, 2024

In 1968, Micky Dolenz jumped off the Gerald Desmond Bridge. Some eighty minutes later, he did it again, this time joined by the rest of The Monkees—Peter Tork, Davy Jones, and Michael Nesmith. Head, the 1968 film penned by Jack Nicholson and starring The Monkees, was the vehicle for this bridge jump—a filmic suicide that served equally as a career one. Not that there was much life left in The Monkees by 1968; the final episode of their show had aired in March, and their latest album, The Birds, the Bees & the Monkees, had failed to top the charts in America and didn’t even break the top ten in the UK—their first to miss both marks.

The Vietnam War, the assassinations of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, riots in Chicago, and Soviet pressures across Eastern Europe all contributed to a waning optimism, within which there was hardly a place for the naïve antics of the Prefab Four. Yet Head is far from naïve. It is a psychedelic experiment—intentionally mind-numbing and academically stimulating—serving as a fourth-wall-breaking political critique of everything from the American collegiate sports system to dandruff commercials, with war, media, and reality thrown in for good measure. The film flopped spectacularly. It made just $16,000 from its $750,000 budget and was derided by Monkees fans, hippies, academics, and critics alike. It was too conceptual for the core fan base, mostly teen girls, and too Monkees for anyone else the film was aiming for.

Yet Head has prevailed. In the years following its release, it built a cult following and achieved a niche but significant level of critical success, regarded as a cornerstone object of the era that encompasses the themes, politics, and feelings of the late '60s. It was entered into the Criterion Collection in 2010 and hailed by Criterion critic Chuck Stephens as “arguably the most authentically psychedelic film made in 1960s Hollywood.” Stephens is right—Head is a staggeringly authentic film in so many ways. Much of the joy of watching it lies in seeing The Monkees, unable to play anything but their teeny-bopper TV show selves, juxtaposed with legitimate, psychedelic social criticism. It is within this brilliant contradiction that the question arises: How did the era’s least authentic band create its most authentic film? And why was it so readily rejected and ignored as a false work, with no authentic merits, by the contemporary counterculture—among whom authenticity was a primary obsession?

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“They were inside the wrong thing and outside the right one. This strange combination, teamed with the genuine rebelliousness and otherness of Jack Nicholson, uniquely positioned them to make the most astute criticism of their time.”

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There are simple answers to these questions if we want them. Nesmith’s affinity for Nicholson and the hippie scene, paired with a studio believing that combining a cultural zeitgeist with a teen phenomenon would be financially viable, accounts for the creation of the film. Sgt. Pepper’s had been released to critical and commercial success the year before, proving that boy bands could be both psychedelic and successful. This explains much of the film’s genesis. As for the rejection of Head by the counterculture, it feels wholly logical—the only quality the counterculture valued more than authenticity was “cool,” and The Monkees, for all their possible genius, were achingly uncool. Yet these answers do not hit at the crux of the issue: that of authenticity.

Authenticity was not a problem solely for The Monkees; it was a primary concern for almost every post-war artist who tried to shape a public image that wasn’t always in line with their true selves. Regardless of where they started, most were to some extent manufactured by a team around them. The Monkees are discussed in terms of authenticity not because they were the first or only inauthentic band of the era—arguably, they were neither—but because they were among the rare few who acknowledged their own inauthenticity. Later, with Head, they acknowledged their own attempt toward authenticity.

Frank Zappa and Davy Jones in Head (1968).

At its heart, Head is a film about freedom, and the failed attempt to achieve it in a world that wants not just The Monkees, but all public figures, to be a shiny, televised version of themselves, sanitized even in their rebellion. After the opening suicide, each of the four band members kisses the same groupie and is told that they are indistinguishable from one another. They race through various genres and films, moving in unrelated vignettes as if they were aliens dropped randomly across a film studio lot. They fight in the trenches of war, ride horseback across the great American West, and solve a murder mystery in ominous, decadent housing. In each scenario, they try to prove that they are four real, individual people in a real band that makes real music that real people listen to. Yet, at every turn, they find that this pursuit is meaningless—everything they are doing is sanctioned, fated, directed, and written by the producers of the film they are trying to escape. They break the fourth wall repeatedly, intentionally flubbing lines, acknowledging actors, and referencing the flimsy walls of the set they are on—only to find that this, too, is in the script that Jack Nicholson, appearing as himself and playing his actual role as producer, wrote for them. From start to finish, it is a wild ride—a kind of Ouroboros that eats itself in its meta-reflective analysis. It digs through philosophical ideas again and again, only to find that it has dug so deep it returns on the other side, no closer to the surface than when it began—with a synthetic boy band playing their hits to an audience who don’t truly know them, and would rather keep it that way.

The film was released at the tail end of the capital-S "Sixties," before the killing at the Rolling Stones concert in Altamont turned the whole decade into a bad trip. Despite the turmoil in the world, there was still a tie-dyed, tune-in, drop-out, mind-expanding, world-changing hopefulness that believed art, youth, truth, and rebellion could really change the world. The Monkees, for most of their career, had been a distillation of this attitude—neatly packaged by executives to be sold for syndication on TV channels across the world and played relentlessly on every wavelength. They were able to operate as both insiders and outsiders, feeling less shame about their participation in the system that everyone else was pretending not to be part of. They were inside the wrong thing and outside the right one. This strange combination, teamed with the genuine rebelliousness and otherness of Jack Nicholson, uniquely positioned them to make the most astute criticism of their time. That this critique is seen to come from the most unlikely place is, perhaps, incorrect—they were the only ones who could do it so explicitly.

Head is bombastic and exaggerated, but it cuts through to something that everyone else was too scared to be honest about. The Beatles danced around the ideas on Glass Onion, Dylan nodded to them with Ballad of a Thin Man, and even Elvis, in his countless motion pictures, tried to comment on them. But all cared too much about their artistry to acknowledge that they were participating in a system they claimed to be outside of. It took The Monkees, the least cool of all, to truly speak truth to power, and they paid the price for it. In the closing minutes of the film, as the final Monkee falls to his watery death, the director wheels their soaked bodies away in a large aquarium, the band struggling as they awake, and stores it neatly on a studio lot—to be used again whenever deemed fit.

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Ana Roberts is a writer, musician and culture critic.

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The Hierophant (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Hierophant or Pope
Number: V
Astrology: Taurus
Qabalah: Vau

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Chris Gabriel September 21, 2024

The Hierophant is the materialization of divine wisdom and power. He is the embodiment of spiritual authority. He speaks for God and gives out his edicts to the bishops, and they spread it down the hierarchy.

In Rider, we find a young pope with a false beard sitting on a throne. He is adorned in scarlet. One hand raises a staff, his papal ferula, while the other is held aloft with two fingers to God. He has an ornate papal tiara. Beside him are two pillars, and beneath him are two tonsured clergymen and the Keys of Heaven.

In Thoth, we have a statuesque Hierophant. His bearded face is a mask and he is adorned in orange. One hand raises a Borromean staff, the other points down with two fingers. He wears  a simple mitre on his head and on his chest,a star with the Aeonic Child inside.  Beside him are two elephants and a bull, Taurean symbols. Before him is the “woman girt with a sword” as described in Liber Al, The Book of the Law. All around him are the four elemental Cherubs, and above is a five petaled flower encircled by a serpent and 9 nails.

In Marseille, we have an old pope sitting on his throne in a scarlet cloak. Both his bare and gloved hands are marked by crosses. His gloved hand raises the papal ferula, while the other raises two fingers to God. Beneath him are two tonsured clergymen.

The Hierophant or Pope is the head of the Church. He metes out orders from God and rules through hierarchy. For each church under his rule, he ensures that they function and share his dogma.

As Taurus, this is a card concerning stubborn commitment to the set way. It is also about simplicity and comfort. In this way, fast food, soda, and comfort foods are similar to the Church. Warhol describes it well: “A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good.” This is the Hierophant, he creates a spiritual doctrine made available to all. 

The Hierophant makes that possible through a set of clear methods. He oversees the structured, accessible, universal path to God. His wisdom is standardized, not ephemeral. The Magician and High Priestess are spiritual forces as well, but they don’t follow dogmas in the same way; they have direct, personal routes to the divine. The Church and the Pope, on the other hand, have a grand and strict purpose.

Through the Hierophant, we are given the invitation and rules to the tarot. The old doctrines hold the truths tighter than we’re used to. What Thoth shows freely is hidden deep within Rider and Marseille. The Hierophant is in no rush to save the world, he is comfortable patiently and diligently following the divine rules set millennia before.

When you pull the Hierophant it may be that you must utilize your knowledge, or gain help from someone wise. This can be practical knowledge and spiritual knowledge. 

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

The Postmodern Condition

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Roy Litchenstein, Sunrise. 1963.

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Jean-Francois Lyotard, September 19th, 2024

Commissioned by the government of Quebec, Lyotard undertook a philosophical study on the affects of modern life and capitalist culture on the metaphysical health of the world. He finds an inivetability to a lack of consensus and sees differences and conflict as inherent in the modern world, yet he remains positive that postmodernism retains the modernists ideals of maintaining the hope for a new kind of social existence.

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Science has always been in conflict with narratives. Judged by the yardstick of science, the majority of them prove to be fables. But to the extent that science does not restrict itself to stating useful regularities and seeks the truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game. It then produces a discourse of legitimation with respect to its own status, a discourse called philosophy. I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth. For example, the rule of consensus between the sender and addressee of a statement with truth-value is deemed acceptable if it is cast in terms of a possible unanimity between rational minds: this is the Enlightenment narrative, in which the hero of knowledge works toward a good ethico-political end - universal peace. As can be seen from this example, if a metanarrative implying a philosophy of history is used to legitimate knowledge, questions are raised concerning the validity of the institutions governing the social bond: these must be legitimated as well. Thus justice is consigned to the grand narrative in the same way as truth.

Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements - narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on. Conveyed within each cloud are pragmatic valencies specific to its kind. Each of us lives at the intersection of many of these. However, we do not necessarily establish stable language combinations, and the properties of the ones we do establish are not necessarily communicable.

Thus the society of the future falls less within the province of a Newtonian anthropology (such as stucturalism or systems theory) than a pragmatics of language particles. There are many different language games - a heterogeneity of elements. They only give rise to institutions in patches - local determinism.

The decision makers, however, attempt to manage these clouds of sociality according to input/output matrices, following a logic which implies that their elements are commensurable and that the whole is determinable. They allocate our lives for the growth of power. In matters of social justice and of scientific truth alike, the legitimation of that power is based on its optimizing the system's performance - efficiency. The application of this criterion to all of our games necessarily entails a certain level of terror, whether soft or hard: be operational (that is, commensurable) or disappear.  

The logic of maximum performance is no doubt inconsistent in many ways, particularly with respect to contradiction in the socio-economic field: it demands both less work (to lower production costs) and more (to lessen the social burden of the idle population). But our incredulity is now such that we no longer expect salvation to rise from these inconsistencies, as Marx did.

Still, the postmodern condition is as much a stranger to disenchantment as it is to the blind positivity of delegitimation. Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside? The operativity criterion is technological; it has no relevance for judging what is true or just. Is legitimacy to be found in consensus obtained through discussion, as Jurgen Habermas thinks? Such consensus does violence to the heterogeneity of language games. And invention is always born of dissension. Postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of the authorities; it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the expert's homology, but the inventor's paralogy.  

Here is the question: is a legitimation of the social bond, a just society, feasible in terms of a paradox analogous to that of scientific activity? What would such a paradox be?

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Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924 –1998) was a philosopher, sociologists and literary theorist.

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