The Power of Fear
Suzanne Stabile March 25, 2025
I’m mindful that when I gather with my colleagues at an event that includes several keynote speakers, each of whom are speaking from their expertise, that I’m likely to be well received. While others talk about topics such as scripture, prayer, theology or perhaps cultural challenges that we face, I am talking to people about their preferred topic: themselves…
The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli. 1781.
Suzanne Stabile March 25, 2025
I’m mindful that when I gather with my colleagues at an event that includes several keynote speakers, each of whom are speaking from their expertise, that I’m likely to be well received. While others talk about topics such as scripture, prayer, theology or perhaps cultural challenges that we face, I am talking to people about their preferred topic: themselves. We all like to know more about ourselves, to understand why we do the very things we seem to not want to do, and to change ourselves for the better; we just don’t know how to make the necessary adjustments.
In this series of articles, I’m exploring the emotions of shame, fear and anger as they are related to Enneagram wisdom. Each of us experience all three, and so we must have a healthy respect for each and use it for its value, acknowledge how each can be helpful and harmful. In addition, we need to be mindful of their power without allowing them unnecessary and unwanted influence in our lives.
Shame or fear or anger are respectively the default emotions for each personality type. For Enneagram Fives, Sixes and Sevens - the numbers that make up the Head or Thinking Triad - fear informs how they see themselves, others and the world. If your Enneagram Number is within this Triad, it will be helpful for you to know what fear looks like and how you can manage the ways it shows up in your life.
I have often found that the stories we tell about ourselves and those we love help us become more of who we want to be and less of who we struggle to defend. My husband Joe is a truly gifted pastor, but he is also quite good looking and attracts attention from other women. I usually handle it well but at one point when I was struggling with some professional choices in my work, I found myself over-focused on one woman’s behavior and her desire for Joe’s attention.
We both believe and teach that every person can benefit from having a therapist and a spiritual director and so I took the question as to why I was struggling to my therapist. I guess I must have gotten a little whipped up because after a while he said, “Are you about finished with your need to talk about her?”
Annoyed, I replied, “I might be. Why?”
“Well, I wonder if we might want to explore why you are hanging all of your anxiety on that poor woman’s bones.”
Anxiety in all nine Enneagram Numbers is transformed into either anger, fear or shame. In thinking about and learning from fear, it is helpful for all three numbers in the triad to remember this:
A Seven’s fear is usually focused inward. They are afraid of what they might discover within themselves. Fives are fearful of the outside world and their ability to navigate safely. Sixes are fearful of both, moving back and forth between the two. Regardless of your Enneagram number, we need to be willing to observe our resistance to reality, our attachment to self-image, and our fear. All three apply to everyone but Fear is especially problematic for Fives, Sixes and Sevens.
Sandra Maitri described the fear of a Five in one sentence, “Fives are afraid of engulfment.” They maintain a private inner world, observing rather than actively participating in what goes on around them, perhaps as a means of protection. This is driven by an inner sense of scarcity and emptiness. Afraid that nothing will be coming to them from the outside, they “act” like they don’t want anything and don’t care. They can begin to believe their own performance and thus limit their expressions of wishes and desires.
Fear causes fives to become observers of life rather than active participants. They are run from too much engagement and too much involvement. Part of the reason for this is that they have a limited amount of energy and every encounter of any kind uses the resource that they fear will be depleted before they get back to the safety of what is usually known and predictable.
Sixes, on the other hand, are coping with anxiety instead of fear, though the two often get conflated. Anxiety is about possible futures and that is where most of the mental energy of a Six is invested. They tend to deal with their anxious feelings by finding someone or something to connect with that offers a bedrock of safety.
This can regrettably cause Sixes to trust neither themselves or anyone else. Those not trusting themselves are referred to as Phobic Sixes. They are overly fearful and as a result they often give their allegiance to structures and belief systems. Those not trusting others are known as Counter-phobic, meaning they are intent on proving they are not afraid by conquering the fears that hold the most power over them.
Sevens manage their fear with a smokescreen of activity. They are the Number on the Enneagram that can reframe any negative into a positive almost instantly. To experience anything as other than it should be threatens to bring up buried pain and unresolved grief. Sevens live in the magical world of their imaginations where all is, or shall be, well.
“A quiet mind is a place of knowing and guidance that gives us confidence to act in the world. And when these qualities are unreachable, we feel fear.”
The Thinking triad is about finding a sense of inner guidance and support. And it is a very challenging proposition because these personality types have lost touch with what we refer to in the spiritual tradition as the quiet mind. These are the people who trust what is in their heads over feelings or doing. When they are in their Personality, the mind is not naturally quiet nor is it naturally “knowing.” Instead, it is looking for a strategy that will make it feel, at the very least, okay enough to function in the world.
Our minds have the potential to help us settle down, help us feel supported and safely aware. A quiet mind is a place of knowing and guidance that gives us confidence to act in the world. And when these qualities are unreachable, we feel fear. The three numbers in this Triad each react to fear in different ways.
Fives respond by reducing their personal needs and retreating from life. They have a sense that they are too frail and insubstantial to safely survive in the world. It feels to them as if the only safe place is in their minds, so they use their energy to gather and stockpile information. It’s hard for them to believe they have what is required to meet the daily demands of life, so they move, somewhat seamlessly, between home and the world, and back again, hoping that they will have a new insight or understanding to give them the security to emerge.
Sevens, by contrast, move toward life appearing to be afraid of nothing. They are outwardly so adventurous and entertaining it can be hard to understand why they are in the Fear Triad. They are full of fear but not of the outside world, instead they are afraid of being trapped in emotional pain, grief and especially feelings of anxiety. Their escape route is to plunge into activity or the anticipation of the next thing they have planned. It takes a lot of energy to hold at bay the hurts and anxieties of life. For Sixes, attention and energy are directed both inward and outward in a rhythm that is calming and feels somewhat safe. When they feel anxious on the inside, they greet the world like a Seven would with action, anticipating a favorable outcome. However, if their expectations are not met, they begin to fear they will be overwhelmed by demands from others and incapable of performing proficiently. So, predictably, they jump back inside of themselves like Fives. Sixes look for an authority figure who is trustworthy, strong and authoritative whom they can follow. They lose their inner guidance by seeking guidance from others. While they are looking for enough support to become independent, they find themselves dependent on the very people and systems they were using in their quest to trust themselves and their own ways of seeing the world.
Fives are convinced that support is either not available or it is unreliable. As a result, they try to figure out everything on their own. The problem is that “going it alone” means they must reduce their need for anyone. Independence with no path to interdependence is no solution at all.
Sevens try to break away from fear by pursuing substitutes for the nurturing they think they lack. They go after whatever they believe will make them feel secure and long for satisfaction. They respond to the lack of guidance by trying everything as if by a process of elimination they could discover the nurturing and care they are looking for.
Living in a culture where many institutions capitalize on pedaling fear and encouraging anxiety, is very difficult for those who are in the Thinking triad. Contemplative practices can help calm the fear. Responding from a quiet mind will always be helpful. And for these numbers it is essential that you trust yourself.
Suzanne Stabile is a speaker, teacher, and internationally recognized Enneagram master teacher who has taught thousands of people over the last thirty years. She is the author of ‘The Path Between Us’, and coauthor, with Ian Morgan Cron, of ‘The Road Back to You’. She is also the creator and host of The Enneagram Journey podcast. Along with her husband, Rev. Joseph Stabile, she is cofounder of Life in the Trinity Ministry, a nonprofit, nondenominational ministry committed to the spiritual growth and formation of adults.
The Six of Wands (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel March 22, 2025
The Six of Wands is the highpoint of the suit - the fires burn their brightest and ascend, the efforts of the past cards are rewarded here. This is individuality, notability, and power. This is a card of victory…
Name: Victory, the Six of Wands
Number: 6
Astrology: Jupiter in Leo
Qabalah: Tiphereth of Yod
Chris Gabriel March 22, 2025
The Six of Wands is the highpoint of the suit - the fires burn their brightest and ascend, the efforts of the past cards are rewarded here. This is individuality, notability, and power. This is a card of victory.
In Rider, we have a triumphant man dressed in laurels, with another carried atop his wand. His horse is cloaked in green, and he is cloaked in red. All around him, figures hold up their wands and hail him as a hero returning from a victorious campaign.
In Thoth, there are six wands, two topped by lotuses, two topped by Set-creatures, and two topped with solar disks. Flames rise from their intersections. The wands are the orange of Leo, and the background is the violet of Jupiter.
In Marseille, the six wands form an X, from which plants and flowers emanate. Qabalistically, this is the Beauty of the King.
This is the end of the republic and the rise of Caesar, when one figure stands out above the rest. As Jupiter in Leo, it is a card of nonconformity and eccentric genius, not for the sake of standing out, but for the sake of gaining power.
Many cards in the suit of Wands concern the difficult amassing and keeping of power. This, however, is the desired state of the suit; the Ace sparked the fire, but it burns warmest and brightest at six, and only gets more difficult from here.
The same is true of victory, it is always short lived - a temporary reward in an endless power struggle. But this period produces immense change and revaluation can occur. What was slow and tiresome before now becomes easy, the victorious powers are able to move freely.
Rider shows us that the victorious one is a “head above the rest”, able to see past the crowds and chaos. A line from Guilliame Apollinaire’s Victoire puts it perfectly:
Victory will be above all
To see truly into the distance
To see everything
Up close
So that everything can have a new name
The “New” motif of the Three of Wands comes to fruition here as the “Make it New” is now able to occur. This is God allowing Adam to name all the animals, according to his uppermost role. This is the renaming of months after Julius and Augustus, the Revolutionary government of France creating Thermidor, a new month, for a new calendar, and far more. Ancient Christians sought to change the pagan names of the planets and zodiac. To reshape the world in one’s own image is the will of God, and those that would be as Gods. These sweeping actions are only possible at the highest point of power.
When we pull this card, we can expect to achieve our desires, enjoy the rewards of our work,and stand out in what we do. Be sure to make good use of this time and move things forward toward your long term goals. Do not rest on your laurels.
The Principles of the Nature Cure System, A Fragment
Benedict Lust March 18, 2025
Since the earliest ages, Medical Science has been of all sciences the most unscientific. Its professors, with few exceptions, have sought to cure disease by the magic of pills and potions and poisons that attacked the ailment with the idea of suppressing the symptoms instead of attacking the real cause of the ailment…
One of the founding fathers of so called ‘Alternative Medicine’, Benedict Lust established a principle of Naturopathy which promoted non invasive self healing, using the medicine of the world around us rather than chemical or developed drugs. Though many of the practices Lust called for have since been widely and rightly discredited, many have become accepted into the mainstream, and scientifically endorsed. His criticisms of the pharmaceutical industry, from the turn of the 20th century up until his death in 1945, remain relevant and potent today. This piece is a fragment from the introduction to his ‘Universal Naturopathic Encyclopedia’, a guide to drugless therapy that combined and utilised folk practices, vitalism, and other alternative cures, published in 1918.
Benedict Lust, March 18, 2025
Since the earliest ages, Medical Science has been of all sciences the most unscientific. Its professors, with few exceptions, have sought to cure disease by the magic of pills and potions and poisons that attacked the ailment with the idea of suppressing the symptoms instead of attacking the real cause of the ailment.
Medical science has always believed in the superstition that the use of chemical substances which are harmful and destructive to human life will prove an efficient substitute for the violation of laws, and in this way encourages the belief that a man may go the limit in self indulgence that weaken and destroy his physical system, and then hope to be absolved from his physical ailments by swallowing a few pills, or submitting to an injection of a serum, that are supposed to act as vicarious redeemers of the physical organism and counteract life-long practices that are poisonous and wholly destructive to the patient's well-being.
From the earliest ages to the present time, the priests of medicine have discovered that it is ten times easier to obtain ten dollars from a man by acting upon his superstition, than it is to extract one dollar from him, by appealing to reason and common sense. Having this key to a gold mine within their grasp, we find official medicine indulging at all times in the most blatant, outrageous, freakish and unscientific methods of curing disease, because the methods were in harmony with the medical prestige of the physician.
Away back in pre-historic times, disease was regarded as a demon to be exorcised from its victim, and the medicine man of his tribe belabored the body of his patient with a bag in which rattled bones and feathers, and no doubt in extreme cases the tremendous faith in this process of cure that was engendered in the mind of the patient really cured some ailments for which mental science, not the bag of bones and feathers, should be given credit.
Coming down to the middle ages, the Witches' Broth — one ingredient of which was the blood of a child murderer drawn in the dark of the moon — was sworn to, by official medicine, as a remedy for every disease.
In a later period, the docteur a la mode, between his taking pinches of snuff from a gold snuff box, would order the patient bled as a remedy for what he denominated spirits, vapors, megrims, or miasms.
Following this pseudo-scientific diagnosis and method of cure, came the drugging phase in which symptoms of disease were unmercifully attacked by all kinds of drugs, alkalis, acids and poisons which were supposed, that by suffocating the symptoms of disease, by smothering their destructive energy, to thus enhance the vitality of the individual. All these cures have had their inception, their period of extensive application, and their certain desuetude. The contemporary fashion of healing disease is that of serums and pills, which, instead of being an improvement on the fake medicines of former ages are of no value in the cure of disease, but on the contrary introduce lesions into the human body of the most distressing and deadly import.
The policy of expediency is at the basis of medical drug healing. It is along the lines of self-indulgence, indifference, ignorance and lack of self-control that drug medicine lives, moves and has its being. The sleeping swineries of mankind are wholly exploited by a system of medical treatment, founded on poisonous and revolting products, whose chemical composition and whose mode of attacking disease, are equally unknown to their originators, and this is called "scientific medicine."
Like the alchemist of old who circulated the false belief that he could transmute the baser metals into gold, in like manner the vivisector claims that he can coin the agony of animals into cures for human disease. He insists on cursing animals that he may bless mankind with such curses.
The natural system for curing disease is based on a return to nature in regulating the diet, breathing, exercising, bathing and the employment of various forces to eliminate the poisonous products in the system, and so raise the vitality of the patient to a proper standard of health.
The prime object of natural healing is to give the principle of life the line of least resistance, that it may enable man to possess the most abundant health.
What is life? The finite mind of man fails to comprehend the nature of this mysterious principle. The philosopher says "Life is the sum of the forces that resist detail," but that definition only increases its obscurity. Life is a most precious endowment of protoplasm, of the various combinations of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen, and other purely mineral substances in forming organic tissues. As Othello says, referring to Desdemona's life, which he compares to the light of a candle —
"If I quench thee thou flaming minister,
I can thy former light restore
Should I repent me; but once put out thy light,
I know not whence is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume."
The spark of life flickers in the sockets of millions and is about to go out. What system of medicine will most surely restore that flickering spark to a steady, burning flame?
Benedict Lust (1872 – 1945) was a German-American doctor who was one of the founders of naturopathic medicine. He helped introduce ideas of psychotherapy, Yoga, and Ayurveda therapy to an American audience.
The Four of Wands (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel March 15, 2025
In the four of wands we see both the quick fulfilment of desires and the ability to regularly achieve them. The daily virtue taught by the three of wands pays off here, with an effective and pleasurable routine…
Name: Completion, the Four of Wands
Number: 4
Astrology: Venus in Aries
Qabalah: Chesed of Yod
Chris Gabriel March 15, 2025
In the four of wands we see both the quick fulfilment of desires and the ability to regularly achieve them. The daily virtue taught by the three of wands pays off here, with an effective and pleasurable routine.
In Rider, we see two robed figures holding up small boughs. Immediately in the foreground are four wands, with a bough of fruits and ribbons atop them. Behind the two figures is a castle and a group of revellers.
In Thoth, we are shown an astrological image - four wands tipped by the ram of Aries and the dove of Venus. They oppose one another, and form a circle. There is fire in the center, and the earthy green of Venus decorates the background.
In Marseille, there are four wands, out of which two plants and two flowers emerge. Qabalistically, this is the Mercy of the King.
Astrologically, Venus in Aries is a detrimental position, but as this card shows, that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun. This is a ‘shotgun wedding’ rather than an extravagant and beautiful ball. It is a passionate relationship, but not necessarily one with a future.
The four of cups is a good mood, with the comfort of home, but it already bears the seeds of its undoing. Venus in Aries is much like “Beauty and the Beast”, which may work out in fairy tales, but usually proves unstable in our lives. Aries seeks immediate satisfactions while Venus enjoys the dance. Venus takes its time to converse with a partner. Aries wants just one thing, and it wants it now. They are naturally opposed, but can be exciting when the chemistry is right.
Both Jodorowsky and Crowley emphasise this card's relation to routine. Our natural drives and whims form a circuit, and while this can work well for a time, routine can wear down creativity. This is the relationship that sexually satisfies both parties, but fails to reach higher resonance.
In its most dignified form, it represents a passionate bout of work, a relationship, or a period of partying that leads to greater satisfaction and ability. So long as it is not permanent, all is well.
When pulling this card, we can expect a good time. We may find inspiration in a new flame, or find a good rhythm to our life. The key is passion; as soon as things get boring, this card is out of play.
Cosmic Respiration and the Four Elements
Molly Hankins March 13, 2025
In Kabblaistic tradition, many of life’s truths are revealed through natural functions and the greatest mystery of all is revealed through our breath. We come in and out of physical form with the rhythmic pattern of our breathing, and by paying attention to this, we learn where we must focus to align with the natural rhythm of life…
God Breathing Life into Adam. Franz Xaver Karl Panko, c.1760.
Molly Hankins March 13, 2025
In Kabblaistic tradition, many of life’s truths are revealed through natural functions and the greatest mystery of all is revealed through our breath. We come in and out of physical form with the rhythmic pattern of our breathing, and by paying attention to this, we learn where we must focus to align with the natural rhythm of life. Alchemy teaches us that transforming each element into one of greater subtlety is how we extract the most energy from matter. So when we learn to breathe consciously we can absorb the subtle energies of the universe more readily, in the same way that we can extract more nutrients from our food by thoroughly chewing.
Presenting at The Science of Consciousness conference last year, professor and spiritual teacher Hide Saegusa presented research showing a correlation between the depth and slowness of breath and an increase in reports of synchronicity and manifestation experiences. His work points to what 20th century Kabbalah teachers such as Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov believe -conscious breathing allows us to absorb more energy, which increases our capacity for magic. Deep, slow, deliberate breathing not only aligns us with the natural ebb and flow of life, but also sets free the subtle energies contained in the air we breathe.
As Aïvanhov wrote in his book Fruits of the Tree of Life, “The air we breathe is like a mouthful of food, a mouthful of extraordinary forces and energies. If you let it out too quickly, the lungs don’t have time to cook, digest and assimilate it for the benefit of the whole body.” By consciously holding air in our lungs, he contends that our body is able to perform a function equivalent to the ignition and explosions of an internal combustion engine. This energy can only be generated by the compression created when we hold our breath such that it’s forced to circulate through all the tiny alveoli in our lungs.
The Wim Hof method, by contrast, asks us to hold our breath after exhalation rather than inhalation, but from the perspective of generating subtle energy the result is the same. The element of air is converted into fire by the inherent discomfort of the process. Subtle energies are then absorbed by our cells, which are predominantly made of water. Our physical, Earthly-matter bodies can then use this energy in a process that unifies the four elements of air, fire, water, and Earth in alignment with a natural process he calls ‘cosmic respiration.’The harmonization and alignment this provides leads to reality becoming more malleable. Practitioners of these methods then, Aïvanhov asserts, become more adept at influencing reality.
“By consciously creating more energy to fuel these natural processes, we free up more energy for creativity, magical practice and anything else we care to do.”
We can apply the same conscious practice to absorbing light from the sun, By deliberately observing the light as it travels through air, we can “hold onto it” with our awareness and thereby recreate the same process of using the four elements. “We absorb the light through a network of minute channels in our bodies and our whole being vibrates with greater intensity. Of course, light can affect some work in us without our conscious collaboration, but if we are attentive to the work it is doing and eager to take part in it, the results will be greatly enhanced.” The “luminous particles” released by consciously focusing on absorbing the sun’s rays strengthen our energy and physical bodies by optimizing the process of cellular turnover. Everyday, 1% of our cells, around 330 billion, are replaced with new ones. By consciously creating more energy to fuel these natural processes, we free up more energy for creativity, magical practice and anything else we care to do.
Saegusa’ suggests that breathing two to three times per minute is the threshold at which there is a statistically significant increase of synchronicity and successful manifestation. While this is impossible to achieve when our autonomic nervous system is in control, consciously practicing slow breathing activates our parasympathetic nervous system, which makes 10 to 15-second inhalations and exhalations attainable. Through practice, we can train our autonomic nervous system to naturally take longer, deeper breaths. Apply this to the cosmic respiration of sunlight and we can approximate a method of holding our awareness of absorbing sunlight for 10 to 15 seconds at a time for a few minutes a day. Each time we perform this practice, we do so knowing that sunlight causes us to grow and flourish, whether we’re basking in physical sunlight or consciously connecting with the sun metaphysically.
Most of us have been conditioned to believe we are human beings with a soul, but the premise of cosmic respiration is exactly the opposite. We are souls that have a human body, and by attuning ourselves to this practice, we can supercharge the energy fueling our physical form.
Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.
A Deeper Sense of Home
Tuukka Toivonen March 12, 2024
What does home mean to you? Is it a place you like to return to at the end of a long day? Is it a container of calm solitude? The warm presence and familiar smiles of significant others or the enthusiastic welcome of a furry pet? Passing through the front door, do you see yourself exiting a stressful, chaotic world and entering a domestic realm where the rumblings and unpredictable movements of that world outside give way to security and comfort?
M. Palacio, 1890.
Tuukka Toivonen March 11, 2025
‘The predicament of private life today is shown by its arena. Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible. […] The functional modern habitations designed from a tabula rasa, are living-cases of manufactured by experts for philistines, or factory sites that have stayed into the consumption sphere, devoid of all relation to the occupant.’
- Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia (1951/1994¹)
What does home mean to you? Is it a place you like to return to at the end of a long day? Is it a container of calm solitude? The warm presence and familiar smiles of significant others or the enthusiastic welcome of a furry pet? Passing through the front door, do you see yourself exiting a stressful, chaotic world and entering a domestic realm where the rumblings and unpredictable movements of that world outside give way to security and comfort? My guess is that this sense of relative peace and interiority is integral at least to your idea of the home, if not its entire reality.
If we take a moment to reflect, most of us can probably call to mind the feeling of being ‘at home’ in a place or dwelling. We can also easily imagine its opposite, being ill at home and feeling uncomfortable, unsettled or like one does not really belong to a place. Until a short while ago, I had never thought very seriously about the meaning of home beyond these basic distinctions. Then a brief post on trail hiking prompted me to think again about the nature of being-at-home-ness.
The post recounted how a good number of the hikers appear to find a sense of home on the trail. These explorers seem to feel most ‘at home’ not when sheltered inside a fixed structure or a familiar daily setting, but when in movement – under the open sky, traversing and surviving challenging terrains in unpredictable conditions – often taking considerable risks along the way.
This subtle, perhaps simple insight got me wondering whether our assumptions of fixedness and insularity associated with the home, which now seem normal and even ideal to many of us, were but distortions that kept us from seeing a more complex reality. If it really is possible for some of us to experience a sense of home out in the open, in constantly changing conditions, does that not suggest that physical seclusion and stability are in fact not essential for feeling at home in a place and in our present lives? Does it not imply, further, that we might not be quite as fulfilled and nurtured in our contemporary physical and social home environments as we tend to assume? Perhaps the truth is that many of us have yet to fully explore what could truly make us feel at home in the world.
If we look at architectural history and anthropology of the home, we can help set these ponderings in a wider context. In the classic work Experiencing Architecture, Steen Eiler Rasmussen notes that before the onset of modernity, the very crafting of homes and essential implements was a communal, rather than private or commercial, enterprise that entire villages took part in. The individuals who would come to occupy a building were directly involved in its formation, and the consequence was that ‘houses were built with a natural feeling for place, materials and use and the result was a remarkably suitable comeliness’ (Rasmussen 1959/1992, preface). By the middle of the 20th century, much of this had changed and not for the better, according to Rasmussen: ‘in our highly civilized society, the houses which ordinary people are doomed to live in and gaze upon are on the whole without quality’. What had been lost was not merely the aesthetic harmony of housing or the communal, situated dimension of the home-building process, but also a broader sense of attunement with local ecosystems, landscapes and even seasons. The anthropologist Tim Ingold has written extensively on dwelling, environmental perception and settings that should be viewed as fully alive rather than inert. He observes that industrialized modes of production have disrupted the sense of reciprocity that people feel towards the land they inhabit while also stymieing the local material and relational flows that constitute a living place.
“Despite the dramatic erosion of all that used to root our physical dwellings in something greater than their most visible features, what should we do to find a deeper sense of home in contemporary conditions?”
This understanding can help us appreciate why the alienation and isolation of our present-day homes is at once more profound and tragic than we might initially envisage. It is as if the living roots and rich entanglements that used to make up a home have been surgically removed, leaving behind a mere empty shell, an anonymously designed structure without personality serving as a socially unmoored container. We may have become more mobile and free from the constraints of place-based communities as a result, but at what cost?
Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, Richard Hamilton. 1956.
As disturbing as this may seem, it can also bring us some relief. If our abodes have themselves become radically untethered from the life-giving relations and processes that used to ground them in place, it should not then come as a surprise that we struggle to feel fully alive in them. How could we feel a deep sense of homeliness and rootedness in buildings or places that have become so abjectly rootless, lifeless, and deprived of the flows that used to both constitute them and nurture the inhabitants’ souls?
Before you pack up your rucksack and set out on a long hike or pilgrimage, consider instead searching for a nearby place that retains some degree of rootedness, history and entanglement. For Jenny Odell, the artist and author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, such qualities could be found in Oakland’s Rose Garden, built into a quiet hillside. Having made the decision to ground herself in this tangible place, Odell quickly came to value the way in which the garden offered her an enriching, contemplative space. Far from furnishing an experience of total isolation, the garden opened her up to notice the diverse forms of life frolicking around her, starting with birdsong. As her moments of ‘doing nothing’ continued, the sound of ravens, robins, song sparrows, chickadees, goldfinches, tomawhees, hawks, nuthatches and others became so familiar to her that she no longer had to strain to recognize them. These unexpected friendships and the coziness she felt within the garden’s labyrinthine layout gave Odell a real sense of home not in a building or even a group of humans but in a fluid bubble that while removed, was a fruitful setting for connection, affective experience and fulfilment. It does not matter whether or not Odell viewed the Rose Garden as an actual home but that she found something that powerfully grounded her life, her thinking and her artistry, through stillness as well as movement, and through her newfound other-than-human acquaintances.
Architects and designers, too, are starting to pay attention to how a stronger sense of home, or at least homeliness, might be supported by their creations and the ways in which these interact with their surroundings, even in urban environments. The maverick Japanese architect Yamashita Taiju elevates coziness into a core design principle that informs how he creates everything from offices to commercial complexes. He seeks to also cultivate a sense of flow (nagare) and movement in and around the structures he enacts, believing that without a lively sense of dynamism spaces grow stale and boring. Many other designers are experimenting with how the boundaries between the 'inside’ and ‘outside’ of a structure could be erased or at least minimized when crafting comfortable new dwellings and how they might rejoin local ecological rhythms and regenerative material flows.
So, despite the dramatic erosion of all that used to root our physical dwellings in something greater than their most visible features, what should we do to find a deeper sense of home in contemporary conditions? I believe that, as a first step, it will help if we set aside binary thinking and embrace how privacy and connection, shelter and openness, stability and movement can combine to generate a fulfilling experience of being ‘at home’. Indeed, it is the presence of these seemingly opposing dynamics that used to bestow our homes with aliveness and meaning. That said, we do not need to (and cannot) revive past realities; instead, what we can do is translate the search for a deeper sense of home into a creative act. We can rediscover the kinds of flows and nurturing qualities that feel both anchoring and enlivening for us in our unique life-worlds. In doing so, we are at liberty to draw inspiration from those who feel truly at home on the trail as well as those who feel more cozy in capsule-like concrete apartments floating above sprawling cities. Perhaps this is how we will ultimately find a more enduring sense of home on Earth as well, as a species that so often appears ill at ease on the very planet that birthed it.
Tuukka Toivonen, Ph.D. (Oxon.) is a sociologist interested in ways of being, relating and creating that can help us reconnect with – and regenerate – the living world, in this age of the artificial.
¹ Adorno, T. W. (1994). Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (E. F. N. Jephcott, Trans.; 8th ed.). Verso. (Original work published 1951)
² Rasmussen, S. E. 1992. Experiencing architecture (23rd ed). MIT press. (Original work published in 1959).
³ Odell, J. 2019. How to do nothing: Resisting the attention economy. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House.
The Six of Cups (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel March 8, 2025
The Six of Cups is just enough: a perfect amount of wine, a good cigarette, the right portion of a meal. This is a card of enjoyment, of the feeling when we find exactly what we want. It is harmony and balance between ourselves and the world…
Name: Pleasure, the Six of Cups
Number: 6
Astrology: Sun in Scorpio
Qabalah: Tiphereth of He
Chris Gabriel March 8, 2025
The Six of Cups is just enough: a perfect amount of wine, a good cigarette, the right portion of a meal. This is a card of enjoyment, of the feeling when we find exactly what we want. It is harmony and balance between ourselves and the world.
In Rider, we find a picturesque scene. A boy in blue with a red cowl hands a potted flower to a little girl in a spotted yellow dress. They are in a little village square. A guard with a pike stands in the distance. Four cups are in the foreground, while one sits on a column behind the boy. It is a picture fit for Norman Rockwell.
In Thoth, we are shown six golden lotuses pouring water into six cups. An ornate, symmetrical network of pipe-like stems hold the flowers aloft. A blue sea lightly churns below, and a clear sky is above.
In Marseille, a flower divides the card into two halves, each containing three cups to create a perfect mirror image. Qabalistically, this is the Beauty of the Queen, taking pleasure in perfectly balanced things.
It is a great rarity to get exactly what we want, but ‘Pleasure’ shows us it is possible. Together with the Five of Cups, ‘Disappointment’, and the Seven of Cups, ‘Debauch”, we are given the image of too little, too much, and just right.
In this way, the Six of Cups is like Goldilocks - just right. We are prone to desire too much of a good thing, turning it to dangerous excess. Or, there is not enough of it to satiate our needs, and we are left wanting. Pleasure is getting exactly the right amount of what we want, and achieving balance.
This is a glass that is neither half empty or half full, it is just a good glass.
As Scorpio, this card directly relates to material pleasures, especially drink and sex. Both of these can cause a great deal of problems, as seen in the 5 and 7 of cups, but in the 6 they are just enough. It is the pure release of orgasm. The symmetry shown in Marseilles and Thoth really paint the picture by way of mirror images, and harmony.
In the words of William Blake “No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.” When we follow our body and nature, we do not restrict all pleasure or over indulge.
The Psychoanalysts understood well that our neuroses quickly do away with balance, leading us to either take all that we can, or reject all.
Wilhelm Reich describes it well in “Listen, Little Man!”:
‘You remember the Swedish institution of smorgasbord. Many foods and delicacies are spread out, and it is left to the guest what and how much he will take. To you this institution was new and alien; you could not understand how one can trust human decency. You told me with malicious joy how you did not eat all day in order to gorge yourself on the free food in the evening.’
Let us listen to our bodies and take only what we will.
When pulling this card we can expect things to be quite good: a dream may come true, we may find our feelings mirrored, and our desires met. Let us then keep our hearts balanced and pure, so we don’t take too much of a good thing.
Sourcing Gesture Pt. 2
Isabelle Bucklow March 6, 2024
Through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the German polymath Aby Warburg devoted his intellectual life to uncovering a ‘psychology of human expression’. His final and unfinished project, a visual Mnemosyne Atlas, showcases certain that persist from Western antiquity to modern advertisements. Warburg forged formal connections across media to trace a certain pose from a tomb carving, to a Roman statue, to a 1920s fashion campaign…
Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Picture Atlas. 1929.
Find part one of ‘Sourcing Gesture’ here.
Isabelle Bucklow March 6, 2025
Through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the German polymath Aby Warburg devoted his intellectual life to uncovering a ‘psychology of human expression’. His final and unfinished project, a visual Mnemosyne Atlas (1927-29), showcases certain gestures that persist from Western antiquity to modern advertisements. Warburg forged formal connections across media to trace the migration of a certain pose from a tomb carving, to a Roman statue, to a 1920s fashion campaign. But it would be remiss to assume this was a historical retracing back to an original source, imitated and gradually adapted until it reaches its current form. Instead, this project uncovered not an original but recurrences: ‘Original worlds exist only as survivals, that is to say, impure, masked, contaminated, transformed, antithetically reversed’.¹ Specifically, Warburg was interested in recurring expressions of heightened emotion/motion, leading him to develop the term pathosformel (pathos formula). Pathos, an individual emotive ephemeral event, is transformed into a generic and permanent symbolic expression (enacted corporeally).
Warburg was concerned with the emotional undercurrents of social memory that informed how past gestures are read in the present. Although gestures might once have claimed stable meanings through time, Warburg noted pathosformel can also be ‘aesthetically reversed’, that is, they both contain and can be flipped into their opposite; joyous laughter becoming sinister mania. The same gesture is capable of communicating different things and Warburg termed this oscillation between opposing forces an ‘energetic inversion’. Thus, for Warburg, gestures are primarily signs of ‘affective intensity and energy’. An affective (and affecting)energy is stored in, released, received and re-enacted through gestures; in short, gestures move (corporeally, temporally) and we are moved by them (but to what psychological ‘affect’ we cannot always be sure for that same gesture, as we have seen, can tip into its opposite meaning).
“Gesture's fragile, fluctuating energy is displaced; a process akin to pinning a butterfly to a mount, which tells you nothing of what a butterfly actually is.”
Returning to Atkins and Zultanski’s Sorcerer, the set was delineated by three cast-iron radiators. The script’s Appendix A states the radiators must be ‘plumbed into the central heating of the theatre […] on and quite warm’.² It is also acknowledged the audience might never notice the radiators are on. There is however a moment in the play when Peter leans in to adjust one of the radiators, ‘his microphone picks up the sound of water moving in it’. For a play propelled by gesture – through ticks and gestural skits (outlined in the stage directions) – and where the use of these gestures conjures a sense of psychological unease, it feels apt to note the explicit circulation of energy in the space as carrying something of a Warburgian charge; Where else does gesture emerge from but the heady concoction of affective intensity and energy.
If gestures have long been defined by a simultaneous charge between kinetic energy and stored energy, today gestures are also stored in energy intensive data centres. The online database Imagenet contains a wealth of gesticulations categorised under the branch: natural object> body> human body>; and there are datasets based on a collection of European early modern paintings, from which hand gestures are ‘extracted using human pose estimation (HPE) methods’. Some datasets are open source while others are bought and sold or generated in-house to train all sorts of AI tools. The first that comes to mind is the gesture recognition feature in Google Meet video calls. Give a thumbs up and an emoji will appear on screen, raise your hand and the host will be notified you have something to say, of course this function is rife with misrecognition, outbursts of emojis and unintended affects. In such datasets the cataloguing may evoke Warburg’s atlas by bringing together disparate sources that share a formal similitude, but the binary order imposed by these datasets flattens and de-contextualises gestures, fixing them to a preordained affect. Stored here, gesture's fragile, fluctuating energy is displaced; a process akin to pinning a butterfly to a mount, which tells you nothing of what a butterfly actually is.
¹ Georges Didi Huberman, The Surviving Image (Penn State University Press, 2016) p. 161
² Ed Atkins, Steven Zultanski, Sorcerer (Prototype, 2023) p. 106
Isabelle Bucklow is a London-based writer, researcher and editor. She is the co-founding editor of motor dance journal.
Sourcing Gesture Pt. 1
Isabelle Bucklow March 4, 2024
I'll begin with observations:: we all gesture everyday, and those gestures are, more often than not, seen and understood by others. Gestures signify and transmit information and so serve a communicative function. This communicative status has led many to neatly package gesture as a language of sorts, that is, decodable, meaningful, shareable and universal. But this understanding can impose hierarchy, establishing language as the source-code that deciphers the gestures…
Antonin Artaud, 1948. Le Cuziat.
Isabelle Bucklow March 4, 2025
Some months have passed since we last spoke about gesture, and we are no closer to conclusivity. I'll begin with simple observations:: we all gesture everyday, and those gestures are, more often than not, seen and understood by others. Gestures signify and transmit information and so serve a communicative function. This communicative status has led many to neatly package gesture as a language of sorts, that is, decodable, meaningful, shareable and universal. We’ve explored in earlier writings that gestures accompany and provide emphasis to language, as in persuasive speeches of antiquity to present day. But this understanding can impose hierarchy, establishing language as the source-code that deciphers the gestures. Here, however, I am interested in those gestures that disrupt semantic meaning, that do not rely on a specific word or stable concept, but instead subtly shift according to their affective intensity, revealing the invisible according to their own symbolic logic.
The French dramatist Antoin Artaud’s impassioned 1938 manifestos for the stage, The Theatre and its Double, speaks of the actor’s need ‘to break through language in order to touch life’, clarifying ‘it must be understood that we are not referring to life as we know it from the surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.’¹ Gesture exists in this precarious point between fragile fluctuating life-force and corporealized form. Writing some years later, British theatre director Peter Brook referenced Artaud, adding the actor’s need to find a ‘form which would be a container and reflector of his impulses [...] We encouraged the actors to see themselves not only as improvisers, lending themselves blindly to their inner impulses, but as artists responsible for searching and selecting amongst form, so that a gesture or a cry becomes like an object that he discovers and even remoulds.’²
If we are to loosen language’s hold on gesture, then we can more wholly consider the forms or gestures an actor selects, and where they came from. For it seems that when you are really into something or someone and your interest is piqued, you’ll quickly get an itch to know the fabled ‘origin story’ and isolate the determining factor that set it all in motion. In anticipation, we are not going to find it.
“Just as a child imitates the actions successfully executed by those with authority over them, the gesture is borrowed from without and performed from within.”
One approach would be to turn to evolution. We have previously considered Andre Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech where he traces ‘The essential traits of human technical gesticulation’ back to the action of grasping. Leroi-Gourhan, like us, was interested in the gestures of human hands, even more so in the ‘mesh of techniques’ that humans inhabit and from which a grasping hand emerges. But dwelling on the prehistoric conditions that produced a certain gesture feels a lot like asking someone their personal history only for them to begin at early bipedal apes roaming the Miocene epoch. So, by way of narrative license, let’s jump from Leroi-Gourhan’s paleoanthropology to a contemporary avant-garde theatre-script: Ed Atkins and Steven Zultanski’s Sorcerer, 2023, in which three protagonists, drinking beer in their friend's apartment, are discussing how they go about putting on and taking off a jumper:
‘I put my arms through like this–
(makes motion, puts her hands through the air like a long glove or like putting hands in a cow, one after the other.)
And then I do–
(swooping motion, ducks head in, almost like going under a short doorway)
[...]
I do an awkward mixture of both. I put my head and one arm though at the same time–
(makes moton, half-lifts one arm and tilts head, like putting head through and checking on the other side of a portal)’³
Described are idiosyncratic combinations of gestures that achieve the same thing, as well as stage directions for gestures that employ metaphor to describe one gesture by way of a different gesture.
One protagonist observes:
‘There’s a way people do it in the movies, which I copied as a kid: you put your arms in first–
(puts arms in.)
And you go–
(pulls over head in a movie way)’
In a seminal, anthropological text on gesture from 1934, Techniques of the Body, Marcel Mauss noted how movies influenced gestures. When lying in a hospital in New York he wondered, ‘where previously I had seen girls walking as my nurses walked…At last I realised that it was at the cinema…Returning to France, I noticed how common this gait was […] American walking fashions had begun to arrive over here, thanks to the cinema… ’.⁴
The walking fashions described by Mauss are not motivated by biological necessity but adopted on the basis of aesthetics, taste and an imitative desire to be like stars in the movies. It is through this opening that we can pursue symbolic gestures that arise from what Mauss terms ‘prestigious imitation’: Just as a child imitates the actions successfully executed by those with authority over them, the gesture is in this sense borrowed from without and performed from within. And so, at the turn of the century you could say many common gestures borrowed their iconography from what was performed in the cinema. But, where then did the cinema source its gestures if not from gestures common to life?
¹ Antoin Artuad, The Theatre and Its Double, (Grove Press, 1958 [1938]) Preface, p. 13
² Peter Brook, The Empty Space (Penguin, 1968), p. 58
³ Ed Atkins, Steven Zultanski, Sorcerer (Prototype, 2023) p. 17-18
⁴ Marcel Mauss, Techniques of the Body ([1934] 1973), Economy and Society, 2(2), p. 72
Isabelle Bucklow is a London-based writer, researcher and editor. She is the co-founding editor of motor dance journal.
The King and Prince of Cups (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel March 1, 2025
The King of Cups is the ruler of the suit. He sits imperiously on a throne, cup in hand. He is the powerful sea, and the paradoxical strength of water…
Name: King of Cups, Prince of Cups
Number: 1 or 3
Astrology: Water or Scorpio
Qabalah: Yod of He or Vau of He
Chris Gabriel March 1, 2025
The King of Cups is the ruler of the suit. He sits imperiously on a throne, cup in hand. He is the powerful sea, and the paradoxical strength of water. As chapter 78 of the Tao Te Ching says:
Nothing in all beneath heaven is so soft and weak as water.
And yet, for conquering the hard and strong, nothing succeeds like water.
And nothing can change it:
weak overcoming strong,
soft overcoming hard.
This is the way of the King of Cups.
In Rider, we find a fair faced King wearing an ornate crown with golden filigree, a greenish gold cape with red scallops, and a blue robe. A fish pendant hangs around his neck and his shoes are scaly. One hand holds the Cup and the other, a scepter. Behind him the sea churns, a ship sails, and a fish swims.
In Thoth, we have the equivalent Prince. He is nude but for his helmet, which bears an Eagle. He stares into his cup which holds a serpent. In his hand is a downward lotus. His fluid chariot is drawn by a great eagle. Waves splash behind him.
In Marseille, we have the simplest image. An old grey bearded king with a large crown under which the flaps of his hat rise up. He is dressed as the other kings, but his cup is the largest.
We can interpret, in this card, the classic 1950’s image of the father, home from a long day of work and having a drink, and all of the negative connotations that may come with this.
In the phrase “Drink like a fish”, you will see the ill dignified form of the King. The solution is the serpent in the cup: St. John’s Chalice.
St. John is given a cup of poison wine. He blesses it, a serpent rises out, and he drinks it just fine. This is the highest form of the Scorpionic Water: a medicinal poison. Harmful substance distilled into a curative form. The King of Cups understands well the maxim of Paracelsus: dosis sola facit venenum. The dose makes the poison.
While the King of Wands will act on aggression and make war with the world, the King of Cups will, like water, slowly erode the foundations of his enemies. He must beware, however, lest his waters dissolve himself. This is shown perfectly in the Fisher King of Arthurian legend who, wounded again and again by the bleeding, poisonous Lance of Longinus (the Lance that wounded Christ on the Cross) and by his own poisoning, poisons his land to become a waste. The only cure is in the Holy Grail.
When pulling this card we may be met with an older, wiser man who has mastered his emotions, and is filled with love. Alternatively, they may be troubled, with a heavy heart. We may also be called on to use our love and power. Emotion is extremely powerful, be sure it sweetens and heals rather than spoil and poison those around us.
Karmic Escape Velocity
Molly Hankins February 27, 2025
The Law of One is based on a series of channeled conversations between physics professor Don Elkins and Ra, the Egyptian sun god. It posits that forgiveness is the path required to exit the wheel of karma…
George Sturdy and Solomon Young, 1869.
Molly Hankins February 27, 2025
The Law of One is based on a series of channeled conversations between physics professor Don Elkins and Ra, the Egyptian sun god. It posits that forgiveness is the path required to exit the wheel of karma. Forgiveness of self and others corrects the imbalance of ‘energetic momentum’ between giver and receiver, described as karma in The Law of One. The momentum is said to take on a circular pattern of repetition that can only be disrupted by complete forgiveness.
Ra is a 2.6 billion year old, sixth-dimensional social-memory complex. They chose a physicist as the preferred channel for The Law of One’s teaching because of Elkin’s advanced understanding of certain physics-based concepts, namely inertia. In physics, inertia is a property that allows matter to exist in a single state unless changed by an external force. Humans caught in the cycle of karma, unable to understand the true purpose of forgiveness, risk never being able to achieve the escape velocity necessary to get out.
Ra, and many other higher dimensional beings who’ve taken an interest in human life, acts as that external force by giving us the information necessary to overcome karmic inertia. From our limited perspective, we can’t understand the utility of forgiveness, particularly radical forgiveness for acts of violence and destruction that are deemed unforgivable. Without being able to understand why it’s useful to forgive, and how forgiveness of self is inherent in true forgiveness of another, we’re unmotivated to do so.
Rather than repeating the lessons created by imbalance, forgiveness allows us to integrate sustainable balance in how we give and receive energy. We benefit from understanding how the physical and emotional experience of balanced energy exchange feels and the gain intellectual experience of the lesson learned. Not only does conscious forgiveness prevent us from making the same mistakes and repeating lessons, it releases us from negativity by allowing us to see others as part of ourselves.
“Achieving peace of heart and mind stronger than rational thinking is what life feels like off the karmic wheel.”
As suggested by the name, the premise of The Law of One is that we are all one. Specifically that all of life is part of the original thought of The Creator, and as we all contain the initial creative spark from one thought, we are all reflections of The Creator. By recognizing ourselves in the reflection of another, we can more easily forgive. Forgiveness is not about condoning a transgression or trying to make it right, it’s about releasing any negative emotions to free ourselves.
Once forgiven, the transgression no longer has power over us, even if the pain caused by it still remains. This frees us to begin healing, and the Bible refers to that healed state of being as “a peace that passes all understanding” (Phillippians 4:7). Achieving peace of heart and mind stronger than rational thinking is what life feels like off the karmic wheel. While the inevitability of human drama will pull us back on,we can always forgive and hit karmic escape velocity once more.
A passage from The Law of One uses the metaphor of a poker game to describe the role of forgiveness as a tool to ‘win’ the game of life: “I am Ra. Let us re-examine this metaphor and multiply it into the longest poker game you can imagine, a lifetime. The cards are love, dislike, limitation, unhappiness, pleasure, etc. They are dealt and re-dealt and re-dealt continuously. You may, during this incarnation begin — and we stress begin — to know your own cards. You may begin to find the love within you. You may begin to balance your pleasure, your limitations, etc. However, your only indication of other-selves’ cards is to look into the eyes.
“You cannot remember your hand, their hands, perhaps even the rules of this game. This game can only be won by those who lose their cards in the melting influence of love; can only be won by those who lay their pleasures, their limitations, their all upon the table face up and say inwardly: ‘All, all of you players, each other-self, whatever your hand, I love you.’ This is the game: to know, to accept, to forgive, to balance, and to open the self in love.”
Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.
Wheel of Fortune (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel February 22, 2025
In the Wheel of Fortune, we find one of the greatest mysteries in the deck. It is the endless flux of our lives and the universe encapsulated in a single image. Understanding this card will allow us to grasp the cosmology of tarot and divination…
Name: Wheel of Fortune
Number: X
Astrology: Jupiter
Qabalah: Kaph, the Palm
Chris Gabriel February 22, 2025
In the Wheel of Fortune, we find one of the greatest mysteries in the deck. It is the endless flux of our lives and the universe encapsulated in a single image. Understanding this card will allow us to grasp the cosmology of tarot and divination.
In Rider, we find a wheel in the middle of a blue sky. The Cross is its center, and around it are the symbols of Salt, Sulphur, Mercury, and Aquarius. On the rim is the Tetragrammaton and TARO, serving duall
purpose as an anagram of ROTA, or Wheel. Atop the Wheel we have a Sphinx bearing a sword. A snake falls down its left side, and Hermanubis flies up from below. At the corners are the four Cherubs, winged and reading in their clouds.
In Thoth, there are vibrant purples and golds - the colors of the divine. In the center is a ten spoked wheel. Riding the wheel are the Sphinx who sits above, Apophis or Typhon falling down, and a monkey climbing up. The background is a violet spiral marred by the lightning bolts, which descend from the stars above.
In Marseille, we are shown a more material wheel sat upon a base. It has six spokes. Along the wheel are three monkeys: the one atop is crowned, winged and bearing a sword, to the left one falls and the other rises on the right.
What is the Wheel of Fortune? What is the meaning of this trinity?
Let us look to Jupiter, the God of this card. Jupiter, like the other Gods of the ancient pantheon, is very human. As the king of the Gods he rewards those who please him and punishes those who upset him, and his whims are very fickle. This is the nature of life and luck, where our conditions change extremely easily and with no warning. We find ourselves on top of the world, and then we are plummeted down again, and must fight our way back up. This is an eternal struggle.
This card argues there is a logic to this cycle of change. It can be put concisely into a magic word: IAO.
Isis
Apophis
Osiris
In these three characters, we are given the narrative cycle for life. Isis and Osiris are married, Apophis/Seth kills Osiris and chops him up, then Isis restores and mummifies him.
Isis is the mother and healer, Apophis the son and destroyer, and Osiris, the father and the destroyed.
This is the essential magickal trinity of life, death, and rebirth, and the alchemical trinity of Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury.
I see this pattern very clearly in children’s games: Rock, Paper, Scissor and Kiss, Marry, Kill.
Isis: Salt: Rock: Kiss
Apophis: Sulphur: Scissor: Kill
Osiris: Mercury: Paper: Marry
The trinity is even mirrored in language with the Ablaut Reduplication. Consider: Tic-Tac-Toe, hip-hop, splish splash. If we reverse these, Toe-Tac-Tic, hop-hip, splash splish, we end up with a very awkward phrase, we naturally speak in the IAO pattern.
This may seem silly, but it is through this exact pattern that we can grasp our ever changing conditions in life.
The Wheel of Fortune itself is still used extensively in games: from game shows, various wheel based auctions to, of course, roulette. In all of these, we see a very immediate form of luck and changing fortunes.
When we pull this card, we are seeing a coming change to our situation. Luck and fate will come into play. Whether or not this will bring us higher or drop us farther can only be indicated by the other cards. For example, if a card like “Failure” precedes Fortune things may be ready to improve.
A Start
Anni Albers February 20, 2025
I came to the Bauhaus at its “period of the saints.” Many around me, a lost and bewildered newcomer, were, oddly enough, in white—not a professional white or the white of summer—here it was the vestal white. Clearly this was a place of groping and fumbling, of experimenting and taking chances…
Knot, 1947. Anni Albers.
Anni Albers was one of the key figures of 20th Century Art. Joining Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus School as an untrained, but deeply passionate, novice, she came to create a new language of textiles, a radical theory of color, and an understanding of pattern and form that would change the course of art history. Her career extended long beyond the Bauhaus, blurring the lines between craft and fine art, teaching at Black Mountain College and becoming the first textile artist to have a solo show at the MOMA. In this essay, written in 1947 but not published until Gropius’ death in 1969, she succinctly captures the feeling of a radical place that offered new promises and the development that this philosophy encouraged in all of its practitioners.
Anni Albers, February 20, 2025
I came to the Bauhaus at its “period of the saints.” Many around me, a lost and bewildered newcomer, were, oddly enough, in white—not a professional white or the white of summer—here it was the vestal white. But far from being awesome, the baggy white dresses and saggy white suits had rather a familiar homemade touch. Clearly this was a place of groping and fumbling, of experimenting and taking chances.
Outside was the world I came from, a tangle of hopelessness, of undirected energy, of cross-purposes. Inside, here, at the Bauhaus after some two years of its existence, was confusion, too, I thought, but certainly no hopelessness or aimlessness, rather exuberance with its own land of confusion. But there seemed to be a gathering of efforts for some dim and distant purpose, a purpose I could not yet see and which, I feared might remain perhaps forever hidden from me.
Then Gropius spoke. It was a welcome to us, the new students. He spoke, I believe, of the ideas that brought the Bauhaus into being and of the work ahead. I do not recall anything of the actual phrasing or even of the thoughts expressed. What is still present in my mind is the experience of a gradual condensation, during that hour he spoke, of our hoping and musing into a focal point, into a meaning, into some distant, stable objective. It was an experience that meant purpose and direction from there on.
This was about twenty-six years ago.
Last year some young friends of mine told me of the opening speech Gropius gave at Harvard at the beginning of the new term. What made it significant to them was the experience of realizing sense and meaning in a confused world, now as then—the same experience of finding one’s bearing.
Anni Albers (1899 –1994) was a German born, Jewish artist, writer, teacher, and printmaker. Alongside her husband Josef Albers, she helped redefine color theory in the 20th century, and was the leading voice textile art, ushering in craft practices into fine art.
Wagnerian Painting
Téodor de Wyzewa February 18, 2025
The world we live in, which we declare real, is purely a creation of our soul. The mind cannot go outside itself; and the things it believes to be outside it are only its ideas. To see, to hear, is to create appearances within oneself, thus to create Life…
Portrait of Téoder de Wyzewa, Jacques-Emile Blanche, 1989.
Téodor de Wyzewa was Polish born theorist, writer, and critic who in the last decades of the 19th century became amongst the most celebrated minds in Paris, contributing a philosophical grounding to the Symbolist movement. This essay, first published in 1885 of which a section is reproduced here, anticipates the development of abstract art and espouses a number of formalist theories upon which many 20th century movements would be built. Key amongst them is the idea that art is the route to access 'the higher reality of a disinterested life'.
Téodor de Wyzewa, February 18, 2025
The world we live in, which we declare real, is purely a creation of our soul. The mind cannot go outside itself; and the things it believes to be outside it are only its ideas. To see, to hear, is to create appearances within oneself, thus to create Life. But the baneful habit of creating the same things has made us lose the joyful awareness of our own creative power; we thought real the dreams we gave birth to, and also this inner self, limited by objects and subject to them, that we had conceived.
Consequently, we have been the slaves of the world, and the sight of this world, where we engaged our interests, has since ceased to give us pleasure. And the Life which we had created - created in order to give us the joy of creating - has lost its original character. It is necessary therefore to recreate it; one must build, over and above this world of defiled, habitual appearances, the holy world of a better life: better, because we can make it intentionally, and know that we make it. This is the very business of Art.
But from where will the artist take the elements of this higher life? He can find them nowhere unless in our normal life, in what we call Reality. This is to say that the artist, and those to whom he wants to communicate the life that he creates, cannot, as a result of what their minds normally do, erect a living work of art in their souls, unless it presents itself to them under the very conditions in which they have always perceived life.
And so, this explains the necessity of realism in art; not a realism which transcribes the vain appearances that we think real, with no other end, but an artistic realism, which tears these appearances from the false reality of interest where we perceive them, in order to transport them into the higher reality of a disinterested life. We see around us trees, animals, men, and we assume they are living; but, seen in this way, they are only vain shadows which drape the shifting decor of our vision. They will only live when the artist, in whose special soul they have a more intense reality, inspires them with this higher life - recreates them before us.
As minds become more refined, Art requires increasingly more diverse methods than those operative in reality to suggest the same life. Thus, a polychrome statue resembles the models it has reproduced too much in its material.
And so again, a drama, when read, will appear more alive to delicate souls than the same drama played in a theatre by living actors. In order to preserve the feelings of art, we have an ever more urgent need that the impressions of life should be given us, in the life of art, by means other than those of real life.
Painting responds to this need. The means it employs to suggest sensations to us artistically differ entirely from the means employed by reality. For the colours and lines in a. painting are not reproductions of the quite different lines and colours which are in reality; they are only conventional signs which have become equivalent to what they signify as the result of an association between the images. But they are just as different, finally, from real colours and lines as a word differs from a thought, or a musical note from the emotion it suggests.
A few outstanding masters, their eyes endowed with an almost pathological sensitivity, accustomed artists to seeing objects surrounded by the air that bathed them. From that moment, the vocabulary of painting became modified; new signs were introduced which created new sensations.
“Marrying them in such a way as to produce in us, by their free play, a complete impression comparable to that of a symphony.”
Painting, Literature and Music each suggest just one mode of life. But life exists in the intimate union of these three modes. Soon, their art must have appeared to painters, as it did to writers, to be insufficient to create the whole life which they conceived. Therefore, long ago they wanted to expand the possibilities of their art, to employ it to reconstitute diverse forms of life. For example, writers noticed that words, over and above their precise conceptual meaning, had assumed special resonances for the ear, and that syllables had become musical tones, as had the rhythms of the sentence. Then, they attempted a new art: poetry. They employed words no longer for their conceptual value, but as sonorous syllables evoking emotion in the soul by means of their harmonious alliance.
The same need to translate the life of the emotions with the means of their art very quickly drove painters to go beyond the limits of reproducing their sensations in a wholly realistic way.
And a new kind of painting was attempted by them, one which a happy agreement of circumstances made possible. This is to say that colours and lines themselves, like words, had also, through familiarity, assumed for souls an emotional value independent of the objects they represented. We had always seen a certain facial expression, a certain colour or certain contours accompany the objects which inspired us with such-and-such an emotion. And behold, these colours, these contours and these expressions, are linked with these emotions in our soul; they have become not just signs of our visual sensations, but signs of our emotions also; they have become, by the accident of this connection, emotional signs, like the syllables of poetry or musical notes. And so, certain painters were able to leave behind the original purpose of Art, which was to suggest the precise sensations of sight. They employed colours and lines for purely symphonic compositional ends, with no regard for the direct depiction of a visual object. And nowadays, colours and lines - the means of painting - can be used in two quite different kinds of painting: the one sensuous and descriptive which recreates exactly how objects look; the other emotional and musical, neglectful of treating the objects these colours and lines represent, using them only as signs of emotion, marrying them in such a way as to produce in us, by their free play, a complete impression comparable to that of a symphony.
Therefore, emotional painting, as well as descriptive painting, has a legitimate right to exist, and possesses the value of an art which is equally precious. Its first master was the poetic Leonardo da Vinci. He gave us the emotion of lascivious terror through the mystery of perverse and supernatural expressions. Later, Peter Paul Rubens created the most intense symphonies of colour. Whereas with Rembrandt, we find a supernatural play of chiaroscuro which creates an emotion which is at once more troubled and more restrained. Afterwards, Watteau translated elegant melancholy: he devoted the delightful grace of his drawings to light-hearted and sweet poems which seem to recall certain andante movements in Mozart's quartets. And in turn, Delacroix was the lyricist of violent passions, a little vulgar in their romanticism.
All these masters have proved that painting could equally well be descriptive of real sensations, or suggestive of real emotions. Only, they have intuited that these two possibilities demanded two quite different kinds of art, and that they had to choose one or the other, following their natural inclinations. Today, the necessity of making a choice is even more vital.
Téodor de Wyzewa (1862-1914) was a Polish writer, critic, and translator who emigrated to France in 1869. He was a leading exponent of the Symbolist movement.
Four of Cups (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel February 15, 2025
The Four of Cups is comfort, familial love, and emotion. We are given three very different interpretations of this same force in each deck…
Name: Luxury, the Four of Cups
Number: 4
Astrology: Moon in Cancer
Qabalah: Chesed of He
Chris Gabriel February 15, 2025
The Four of Cups is comfort, familial love, and emotion. We are given three very different interpretations of this same force in each deck.
In Rider, we see a youth no longer satisfied by material pleasure. He sits like an ascetic beneath a tree, rejecting the phantom hand that holds out a cup for him. He is like the Buddha, denouncing the world for the sake of what’s higher.
In Thoth, we see four golden cups and elaborate pipe-like roots leading to the Lotus, which is pouring down water into the cups. The clouds in the sky are the silvery gray of the Moon, and the wavey Sea is the light blue of Cancer.
In Marseille, we have four cups and a pillar-like flower. Qabalistically, the card is the Mercy of the Queen. This is the love and kindness of the mother.
A good upbringing with a loving family leads to, at its best, an individual who is secure and can withstand the tumult of the world. Often, however, people lose themselves within the comfort of home, reject the external, and remain in arrested development.
In Rider we see a boy who is becoming unhappy with his comfort. He may be preparing to grow, to expand and transform. When Crowley described his Thoth card, he gave it a subtitle: “The Seeds of Decay”, which lay in the fruits of pleasure.
This is not to say comfort is always bad; there is a time and a need for it. Childhood may be best spent in comfort, butwhen childhood ends, the comfort must be abandoned and the enchanted circle of the mother broken.
If this fails to occur, one will remain in an illusion, a daydream, an oedipal hologram meant to keep an individual from individuating. This is the struggle of the card's astrological placement: the Moon in Cancer, even though it is in the sign of its rulership, is prone to delusions and extreme sensitivity to the world around it.
The card is notably featured in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. The Kid finds it in a destroyed house and then pulls it while having his fortune read:
He took one. He'd not seen such cards before, yet the one he held seemed familiar to him. He turned it upside down and regarded it and he turned it back. The juggler took the boy's hand in his own and turned the card so he could see. Then he took the card and held it up.
Cuatro de copas, he called out.
The woman raised her head. She looked like a blindfold mannequin raised awake by a string.
Cuatro de copas, she said. She moved her shoulders. The wind went among her garments and her hair.
When we pull the Four of Cups we can expect a slow and comfortable energy to be at play, we don’t need to worry. Nothing is falling apart, for now.
Egyptian Tantra and the Ankh
Molly Hankins February 13, 2025
In Drunvalo Melchizedek’s Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life book series, he shares channeled material from Thoth, also known as Hermes Trismegistus. The second book outlines the basics of Egyptian tantra practice, explaining that recycling orgasmic energy is the key to eternal life. This is a vast departure from many other tantra traditions, but makes sense - human life begins with an orgasm…
Sphinx Mystagoga, 1676. Athanasius Kircher.
Molly Hankins February 13, 2025
In Drunvalo Melchizedek’s Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life book series, he shares channeled material from Thoth, also known as Hermes Trismegistus. The second book outlines the basics of Egyptian tantra practice, explaining that recycling orgasmic energy is the key to eternal life. This is a vast departure from many other tantra traditions, but makes sense - human life begins with an orgasm.
From an energetic standpoint, most orgasms are akin to discharging a battery into a ground wire - the energy dissipates and is gone from the battery forever. “This is what all the world’s tantric systems I am aware of believe,” he writes, “That orgasm brings one a little closer to death because a person loses his or her life-force energy in the orgasm.”
For the Egyptians, controlling sexual currents was more important than controlling sexual release. According to Thoth / Hermes, the Egyptian tantric system is unique as it recycles sexual currents as a source of infinite life-force energy. Engaging in this practice, according to the sex magic schools of Isis (partnered) and Horus (solo), can create the conditions allowing for eternal youth and life.
Overlay the Egyptian ankh next to Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vetruvian Man, and the meeting point of his arms is the energetic starting point at which we’re directing the sexual current in our bodies - the heart chakra. The practice is that of pushing energy out from our backs.allowing it to loop back around the top of our head, and re-enter the front of the heart chakra to form the ankh shape.
“Immortality is not living forever in our current form - it’s learning to work with the energy that animate our physical bodies, to the point where we don’t age.”
The goal of Egyptian tantra is to let sexual energy build up the spine, and then move it towards the heart chakra as you’re approaching orgasm. This practice can be used to simply build vital energy or directed towards an intention, and can be performed solo or with a partner. The instructions, as Drunvalo, explains are: .
Allow the sexual energy to rise up your spine and collect at the top of the heart chakra.
The moment you feel orgasm is imminent, fill your lungs 9/10ths of the way full and hold.
At the moment of orgasm, push the energy out the back of the heart chakra at a 90 degree angle relative to your spine, allowing the energy to continue in the round shape like the top of ankh, and recycle it back into your body.
The instant the sexual current energy makes contact with the front of the body, draw in the rest of your breath so your lungs are full, this completes the ankh before exhaling.
To illustrate the power of this practice, Drunvalo uses the example of a standard tuning fork. Once struck, it will vibrate for a certain amount of time upon being struck. A tuning fork with the ankh shape on top, however, will vibrate for a much longer period of time because the energy is being recycled back into itself rather than immediately dissipating.
Egyptian tantra posits that recycling our life-force energy keeps us vibrant in form for longer. Immortality, Drunvalo believes, is not living forever in our current form - it’s learning to work with the energy that animate our physical bodies, to the point where we don’t age. The goal of this practice is to evolve to a point where we can live as long as we wish in a healthy, vibrant body then choose when and how to transition.
Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.
Sound Shapes the Mind: A Binaural Beats Primer
Danny Timur, February 11 2024
We live in a world of noise. We are inundated with honks of traffic, buzzes of phones, and din of conversations that we now spend much of our lives attempting to drown out the sounds of the artificial world, which in turn only pushes us further from nature. We strive for silence, believing that may be the answer, seemingly unaware that nestled within the frequencies we hear are wavelengths that could hold the power to calm our minds, sharpen our focus, or even alter our emotional states…
Danny Timur February 11, 2025
We live in a world of noise. We are inundated with honks of traffic, buzzes of phones, and din of conversations that we now spend much of our lives attempting to drown out the sounds of the artificial world, which in turn only pushes us further from nature. We strive for silence, believing that may be the answer, seemingly unaware that nestled within the frequencies we hear are wavelengths that could hold the power to calm our minds, sharpen our focus, or even alter our emotional states. These are known as binaural beats—a type of auditory illusion that can shape the way we think and feel, and their possible benefits are enormous.
Binaural beats are simple. In a pair of headphones, two different frequencies are played, one in each ear. What seems like a straightforward auditory experience opens a door to something far more profound. Your brain doesn’t hear the two tones separately; instead, it creates a third frequency—a "beat" that is the difference between the two sounds. For example, if one ear hears a tone at 300 Hz and the other hears one at 310 Hz, your brain perceives a 10 Hz beat. This influences the very frequencies of your brainwaves, guiding them into specific states as it synchronizes itself in a process called brainwave entrainment.
Our brains are malleable, and a variety of activities and tools can help us synchronise and rewire them. Meditation, exercise, movement, surges of dopamine from scrolling timelines - all of these are modes of entrainment that alter our consciousness and send us into new states, but they are often scattershot in their efforts. The real power of binaural beats lies in their ability to influence these patterns in a targeted way. Our brainwaves are categorized into distinct frequency bands, each associated with different states of consciousness:
Delta (0.5–4 Hz): Deep sleep or unconsciousness.
Theta (4–8 Hz): Light sleep, meditation, and creativity.
Alpha (8–12 Hz): Relaxation while awake, calm but alert.
Beta (12–30 Hz): Active thought, alertness, and concentration.
Gamma (30–100 Hz): Intense focus and cognitive processing.
When we listen to a binaural beat at 4 Hz, we enter the theta state, which is associated with deep relaxation, creativity, and even meditation. At 10 Hz, we move into the alpha state—calm, but alert. For moments when focus is needed, binaural beats in the beta range (12–30 Hz) can help foster concentration and alertness.
“In the symphony of human experience, music has always informed our emotions. Songs, speech, birdcall - these can change our mood in seconds. Binaural beats are an extension, a distillation, of this eternal idea.”
Binaural beats act as a gentle guide, steering your mind into a particular wavelength. Like a dancer moving in time with music, your brain follows the rhythm, adapting its own frequencies to match the beat. These shifts are not merely psychological. They are physiological, rooted in the way our brains process and respond to sound.
We can be precise in our responses, identify harmful or painful emotions and find their sonic mirror, the audio antidote to reclaim balance. The brain waves in a stressed state, for example, are often fast-moving beta waves which make it hard to focus or think clearly. Listening to binaural beats in the alpha or theta ranges will counterbalance this by promoting slower, more relaxed brainwave patterns. In the same way, if we are tired, Binaural beats can be used to enhance cognitive performance by encouraging brainwave activity that promotes alertness and concentration. Our morning coffee can be listened to, instead of drunk, and the energy that we have so long relied on from external sources can be unlocked within ourself.
This form of deep listening, of allowing the subconscious to be guided by the sonic, has the potential to unlock deeper states of consciousness—states where creativity flows freely, where anxiety dissipates, and where we reconnect with the present moment. The theta state, which binaural beats can induce, brings deep meditative experiences, a sense of inner peace, and heightened creativity. For those who struggle with finding time to meditate or who are unable to quiet their minds on their own, binaural beats offer a shortcut—a gentle, guided entry into mindfulness.
In the symphony of human experience, music has always informed our emotions. Songs, speech, birdcall - these can change our mood in seconds. Binaural beats are an extension, a distillation, of this eternal idea and they offer a unique key to unlocking the mind’s potential. Through the simple act of listening, we can influence our brainwaves, shifting our mental state from tension to relaxation, from distraction to focus, or from confusion to creativity.
There is a deep, almost primal connection between sound and the mind. In a world filled with noise, the quiet power of binaural beats reminds us that the gentlest frequencies can have the most profound effects. By simply tuning into the rhythm of sound, we might just find a way to harmonize our minds with the world around us.
Danny Timur is a musician and DJ based in Hong Kong.
Page of Wands (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel February 8, 2025
The Page of Wands is measuring up, stacking up, and determining value according to the Measure of his wand. The Princess, on the other hand, disregards all this and flies into action…
Name: Page of Wands or Princess of Wands
Number: 4
Astrology: Earth of Fire
Qabalah: He of Yod
Chris Gabriel February 8, 2025
The Page of Wands is measuring up, stacking up, and determining value according to the Measure of his wand. The Princess, on the other hand, disregards all this and flies into action.
In Rider, the Page is a young man with a feathered cap, a yellow tunic adorned with salamanders, a scarf, and fiery yellow boots. His clothes are similar to the Knight, and he is set in the same pyramid spotted desert. He is looking up toward the tip of his wand, holding it in place. The Wand is taller than him.
In Thoth, the Princess is naked, save for a huge double uraeus crown. She has caught a tiger by its tail and is rushing ahead with the flames, dragging the tiger along. There is a burning altar beside her, as she holds a solar wand.
In Marseille, the Page is dressed very simply. He stands in a field with sprouting plants and looks ahead unsure. His wand is kept on the ground, directing his fiery energy into the Earth, causing the growth. The question is, what will make him raise his wand?
In each of these cards we see the interrelation of Fire and Earth. In Marseille, fire is something feeding the earth, in Rider it competes with the earth, and in Thoth, earth is the fuel to fire.
It is here that I find the Page of Rider most fascinating. While the suit of wands is generally proud, aggressive and arrogant, the youngest of them is shown struggling to measure up against his wand, his destiny. If the face cards in the suit of wands are having a “dick measuring competition”, the Page is losing, even against the Queen.
The Page of Marseille appears to be content with his Wand being more of a tool to fertilize the Earth, rather than as a tool of aggression. He is untroubled.
The Princess disrupts both of these modes entirely. She is taking up the creature of the Earth, the tiger, as she ascends with the burning flames. This is a frenetic, excited young woman, who is quick to drag you along on an adventure. She represents extreme and blind enthusiasm, the freedom of the feminine, as opposed to the distinctly masculine insecurity in Rider.
When pulling this card, we may be met with an assisting Page for our greater pursuits or we may assist someone in theirs. We may also be like the Tiger and get dragged along on a greater adventure.
The Power of Shame
Suzanne Stabile February 6, 2025
There are times when I teach Enneagram Wisdom and I become aware that I sound like I’m offering an answer to managing all the things that make life complicated and painful. That may sound somewhat arrogant, but the truth is, it’s exactly what I’m doing…
Detail from ‘Ashes’, Edvard Munch. 1895.
Suzanne Stabile February 6, 2025
There are times when I teach Enneagram Wisdom and I become aware that I sound like I’m offering an answer to managing all the things that make life complicated and painful. That may sound somewhat arrogant, but the truth is, it’s exactly what I’m doing. After thirty years of teaching and studying the Enneagram, it is clear to me that using it every day changes your life for the better. Enneagram wisdom teaches that there are nine ways of seeing and nine ways of processing how we see. We can change what we do with how we see, but we can never change how we see. Knowing that alone is helpful in identifying some of our responses to life that we would like to change.
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There are multiple sets of three to be found in Enneagram Wisdom. Among them are three Triads and their corresponding Default Emotions. All three Triads revolve around a powerful emotional response. For the Thinking triad, fear is the foundational motivation for behavior. For the Doing triad, anger is always within reach. For the Heart Triad, it is shame that guides the way. Each Enneagram number struggles to understand and manage the dominant or default emotion of the Triad. It is challenging work that never ends.
In this series of articles, I’m exploring the emotions of shame, fear and anger as they relate to Enneagram wisdom. We experience all three, and we need to learn to respect each one and use it for its value, understanding how each can be helpful and can be harmful. We also need to learn to respect the power of each one without allowing it to have unnecessary influence in our lives.
One of the three is the default emotion for each personality type or number in the Enneagram. Enneagram Twos, Threes and Fours make up the Heart triad, and these three personalities, shame dominates how they see themselves, others and the world. So, it’s healthy for us to know what shame looks like.
We live our lives telling stories. My work is to teach, and model, the art of connecting the Enneagram with the stories that make up our lives. In doing so, we can “find ourselves” both in the present and the past, and we can also imagine ourselves in new ways as we look to the future.
According to the work of Curt Thompson, M.D., there is a story we tell ourselves about shame, and there is a story that shame tells about us. I’m a Two on the Enneagram and I was adopted at birth. Part of the story shame tells about me, in relation to my birth narrative, is that I am not good, not wanted and not enough. It is challenging to live with the never-ending premise that we are fundamentally unworthy, inadequate and flawed but Enneagram Twos, Threes, and Fours have no other option
Unlike guilt, which is about what we do,shame is about who we are. One might feel guilty about telling a lie to a friend, yet feel shame about being the kind of person who would do such a thing. In the same way, we feel embarrassed because we think we look bad and feel shame because we think we are bad.
Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Masaccio. 1425.
In her work, Brene’ Brown suggests that we need to know these three things about shame. First, we all have it. Second, we are all afraid to talk about it. Third, the less we talk about it the more control it has over our lives. Brown suggests that “shame is the fear of disconnection.” Keeping in mind that it is the default emotion for The Heart triad, it makes sense that the personality types that most want connection would be the perfect target for shame.
A 2011 study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, along with other agencies, found that, “as far as the brain is concerned physical pain and intense experiences of social rejection hurt in the same way.” Think about that! We’ve all experienced shame and often, in trying to talk about it, we describe it using language such as “intensely painful” or “unbelievably exhausting”, because that is literally how it feels.
If everything contains its opposite, what then could be the purpose of shame? Like anger and fear, it is most often a negative emotion. And yet, some professionals say we need to acknowledge that both sides are necessary if we are to function in the healthiest ways possible. In looking back over your own life, I would suggest that there are ways that shame, though painful, has been helpful.
“When we tell our own stories, including the parts we are ashamed of, we get to write the ending.”
Shame can be preventative, helping us to avoid repeating mistakes. It can be helpful in our learning to take responsibility for our actions. And it can provide us with the desire to question ourselves, and the actions we take that have a history of leading us toward regrettable behaviour.
Yet too much shame is overwhelming.. As a Two, I find it to be like a hologram. It looks like me and it shows up, unbidden and unwanted. These days, I question the hologram when she approaches, knowing that she wants to move in and cover me. “Did I behave in ways that caused harm?”, I ask. If the answer is “no” then I move on. If the answer is “yes” then I consider whether it would be harmful if repeated.
We must move through the experience of shame without sacrificing our value or our values. If we address shame appropriately, the experience and lessons offered can be very helpful. The most effective practice I have found for holding the hologram at bay is to know, own, and tell my story honestly. When we tell our own stories, including the parts we are ashamed of, we get to write the ending. Shame hates to have other words wrapped around it. Especially words that would show it for what it is. For obvious reasons our tendency is to hide it but shame is a big emotion that gains strength in the dark and shrinks in the light.
For Enneagram Twos, Threes and Fours shame is always in the wings, just off stage, waiting to enter the story of your life at any moment. Some common expressions of shame as named by Twos are feelings of inadequacy and being unable to live up to expectations. . Twos tell me that when they look inside themselves it’s a struggle to feel joy or pride, they feel I feel inferior to most of the people, and wonder if God is disappointed in them.
Threes express to me that it is common for them to say to themselves, “I am a fake. I feel like if people really knew me, they might have contempt for me. I’m not as successful as I pretend to be.” Fours tell me they feel flawed inside, like they are blemished in some meaningful way. They say they are sure they will never measure up to what they ought to be. “I feel as if I will never be acceptable. I am always either too much or not enough.”
Lucretia, Rembrandt van Rijn. 1666.
Feelings are messy for all of us, but they are particularly problematic for those who are in this triad. Of the three Enneagram Triads, the Heart Triad is the least capable of rational thinking, and shame thrives off irrationality. Often, it is difficult for all of us to distinguish multiple feelings as they flow in and out of our awareness but for Twos, Threes and Four it is particularly challenging because Twos feel other people’s feelings. They will often be unsure of their own feelings, but they read the feelings of others whether they want to or not.
Threes find that feelings interfere with their top two priorities, efficiency and effectiveness. They set them aside waiting for a more convenient time to address them. Unfortunately, that time seldom presents itself to the number that is the best at multitasking. Fours are not content with average feelings. As a result, they find ways to exacerbate feelings so that when they are sad, they can be sadder; and when they are happy, they can engineer ways to be happier.
Shame finds a home in these three Enneagram types because as long as we identify with our number, with our personalities, something deeper goes unaffirmed. Of course, there are three different solutions to this dilemma. Twos begin by creating and identifying with a false reality. “I love everybody.” But we don’t. We follow that with going out of our way to please others so they will like us, and we end up resenting that. Threes have their own false identity which is, “I am successful.” They maintain the image by under-reporting or reframing failure. And they use their energy to become outstanding in every way they can, hoping to avoid failure so they will be admired and affirmed. Fours create a false identity around an image of uniqueness and their own understanding of authenticity. That sense of who they are is usually accompanied by an elaborate story about themselves that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.
At the end of the day, these three numbers struggle to believe that they have value. So, the agendas of their personalities are about hiding that lack of value from others and more importantly from themselves. As a Two this is a very personal part of the journey for me. I still have so much to understand about the shadows of shame. But there is one thing I know for sure: the antidote for shame is found in learning to fulfill your needs from the inside out rather than from the outside in.
Suzanne Stabile is a speaker, teacher, and internationally recognized Enneagram master teacher who has taught thousands of people over the last thirty years. She is the author of ‘The Path Between Us’, and coauthor, with Ian Morgan Cron, of ‘The Road Back to You’. She is also the creator and host of The Enneagram Journey podcast. Along with her husband, Rev. Joseph Stabile, she is cofounder of Life in the Trinity Ministry, a nonprofit, nondenominational ministry committed to the spiritual growth and formation of adults.
Wandering: Farmhouse
Herman Hesse February 4, 2025
This is the house where I say goodbye. For a long time I won’t see another house like this one. You see, I’m approaching a pass in the Alps, and here the northern, German architecture, and the German countryside, and the German language come to an end.
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Caspar David Friedrich, 1818. Oil on canvas.
Herman Hesse helped bring Eastern religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions into the western mainstream through his exquisite writing of poetry and prose. His novel ‘Siddartha’, a story of a young man’s spiritual journey of self discovery in the time of Gautama Buddha, was written in 1922 but became a seminal and influential counter-cultural work of the 1960s, informing much of the hippie movement. ‘Wandering’, published two years before, deals with many of the same themes. A series of short essays and reflections, it explores the longing to return to nature, a journey away from home and into oneself, and the possibility of living a different kind of life. In this, the opening essay, Hesse considers the very nature of movement, and how the landscape of our birth shapes us in unknowable ways.
Herman Hesse February 4, 2025
This is the house where I say goodbye. For a long time I won’t see another house like this one. You see, I’m approaching a pass in the Alps, and here the northern, German architecture, and the German countryside, and the German language come to an end.
How lovely it is to cross such a boundary. The wandering man becomes a primitive man in so many ways, in the same way that the nomad is more primitive than the farmer. But the longing to get on the other side of everything already settled, this makes me, and everybody like me, a road sign to the future. If there were many other people who loathed the borders between countries as I do, then there would be no more wars and blockades. Nothing on earth is more disgusting, more contemptible than borders. They’re like cannons, like generals: as long as peace, loving kindness and peace go on, nobody pays any attention to them — but as soon as war and insanity appear, they become urgent and sacred. While the war went on, how they were pain and prison to us wanderers. Devil take them!
I am making a sketch of the house in my notebook, and my eye sadly leaves the German roof, the German frame of the house, the gables, everything I love, every familiar thing.
Once again I love deeply everything at home, because I have to leave it. Tomorrow I will love other roofs, other cottages. I won’t leave my heart behind me, as they say in love letters. No, I am going to carry it with me over the mountains, because I need it, always. I am a nomad, not a farmer. I am an adorer of the unfaithful, the changing, the fantastic. I don’t care to secure my love to one bare place on this earth. I believe that what we love is only a symbol. Whenever our love becomes too attached to one thing, one faith, one virtue, then I become suspicious.
“I am not complete, and I do not even strive to be complete. I want to taste my homesickness, as I taste my joy.”
Good luck to the farmer! Good luck to the man who owns this place, the man who works it, the faithful, the virtuous! I can love him, I can revere him, I can envy him. But I have wasted half my life trying to live his life. I wanted to be something that I was not. I even wanted to be a poet and a middleclass person at the same time. I wanted to be an artist and a man of fantasy, but I also wanted to be a good man, a man at home. It all went on for a long time, till I knew that a man cannot be both and have both, that I am a nomad and not a farmer, a man who searches and not a man who keeps. A long time I castigated myself before gods and laws which were only idols for me. That was what I did wrong, my anguish, my complicity in the world’s pain. I increased the world’s guilt and anguish, by doing violence to myself, by not daring to walk toward my own salvation. The way to salvation leads neither to the left nor the right: it leads into your own heart, and there alone is God, and there alone is peace.
A damp mountain wind drifts across me, beyond me blue islands of heaven gaze down on other countries. Beneath those heavens I will be happy sometimes, and sometimes I will be homesick beneath them. The complete man that I am, the pure wanderer, mustn’t think about homesickness. But I know it, I am not complete, and I do not even strive to be complete. I want to taste my homesickness, as I taste my joy.
This wind, into which I am climbing, is fragrant of beyonds and distances, of watersheds and foreign languages, of mountains and southern places. It is full of promise.
Goodbye, small farmhouse and my native country. I leave you as a young man leaves his mother: he knows it is time for him to leave her, and he knows, too, he can never leave her completely, even though he wants to.
Herman Hesse (1877-1962) was a German Swiss poet, novelist, and painter who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. Hesse remains one of the most widely read and translated European authors of the 20th century, and his novels have served as essential touchstones for generations of young people looking to find themselves.