The Priestess (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel April 27, 2024
The Priestess is the first woman of the tarot, we meet her enthroned, crowned, and bearing her book or bow. She is calm. From her we will learn a great deal about our journey through the Major Arcana. She is old and wise, yet ready to bear fruit, weep, or sing. She is the Feminine…
Name: The Priestess
Number: II
Astrology: Moon
Qabalah: Gimel ג
Chris Gabriel April 27, 2024
The Priestess is the first woman of the tarot, we meet her enthroned, crowned, and bearing her book or bow. She is calm. From her we will learn a great deal about our journey through the Major Arcana. She is old and wise, yet ready to bear fruit, weep, or sing. She is the Feminine.
In Marseille, we find La Papesse, the female Pope. Legend tells us of only one woman pope, Joan, who held the position for two years before she was swiftly put to death, as women of wisdom so often were throughout history. She is adorned in the papal tiara, fine robes, and a book, likely a Bible. She is the eldest of the three cards, not only chronologically, but in appearance.
In Rider, we find her with a crown of butterflies, a robe covered in clouds, and sitting atop a throne of babes and butterflies. She is the most expressive of the three, with a more intense frown and glaring eyes. She is brunette. Her left hand is raised, as if gesturing for one to come toward her.
In Thoth, we meet the divine lunar goddess Diana. She is naked but for her triple moon crown. In her lap are arrows and a bow, for she is a huntress. Unlike the past two cards, her arms arch upwards but she carries nothing, instead she brings down energy, which is woven toward the flowers, fruits, and crystals beneath her. We also find the Camel, which is the ideogram of her Qabalistic letter, Gimel. Gimel forms the longest path along the Tree of Life, from Kether to Tiphereth, from the Heavens to the Human. She guides us through this long path down, like a camel in the desert.
In Rider and Thoth we are met with a great deal of triplicity. Though the Moon has four primary phases, only three are present here: Waxing, Full, and Waning. This is the very symbol of the feminine, and we find it embodied in the ancient goddesses who form the character of this card.
The first of these is Hekate, the triple lunar goddess, made up of “Maiden, Mother, and Crone”. She is a goddess of magick and witchcraft. Consider the spell from Hamlet:
Thou mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected,
With Hecate's ban thrice blasted, thrice infected,
Thy natural magic and dire property,
On wholesome life, usurp immediately.
Etymologically, we can connect her directly to the Egyptian goddess of magic and medicine, Heka, whose name literally means magic.
And finally, the one directly depicted in Thoth: Diana, the Roman goddess of the Moon who is known by the epithet “Diana Trivia” or Diana of Three.
In Rider, we find another triple, this one taking the form of the anagram in “TORA”, which takes us from “Teaching” to ROTA, or wheel, to our subject, TARO. Tarot teaches us the nature of cyclical change.
From these associates we can begin to grasp the Priestess as a card of wisdom – the wisdom of magic, nature, and the feminine.
When dealt this card, we are being shown the influence of nature and of the feminine in our situation, and we can be sure she will teach us a valuable lesson.
Machine Sex, SRL
Lamia Priestley April 25, 2024
In 1978, Mark Pauline founded a new San Francisco based arts organisation called Survival Research Lab (SRL). The organisation puts on large-scale performances, which through extreme engineering, seek to liberate industrial machines from their own functionality. Machine Sex was their first performance…
Poster for "Machine Sex", San Francisco, February 1979
Lamia Priestley April 25, 2024
In 1978, Mark Pauline founded a new San Francisco based arts organisation called Survival Research Lab (SRL). The organisation puts on large-scale performances, which through extreme engineering, seek to liberate industrial machines from their own functionality. Machine Sex was their first performance.
At a Chevron gas station in San Francisco in February, 1979, encircled by a modest crowd, Pauline brought out “The Demanufacturing Machine,” a creation built of sharp blades, a conveyor belt, a plastic dome and an ejector. The performance began when Pauline placed eight self-caught dead pigeons into the jaws of the machine. The birds whisked through the machine’s innards and came flying out onto the crowd as blood and guts. The pigeons placed in the machine were dressed as “OAPEC dignitaries” wearing traditional middle eastern outfits and, throughout the performance, a loudspeaker played The Cure’s Killing of an Arab at a volume that was reportedly “too loud.”
“When you see an SRL show, you either see God or the insides of your eyelids.”
The Demanufacturing Machine, February 1979
The fact that Machine Sex took place at a gas station and coincided with the fall of the Shah of Iran and the ensuing oil crisis suggests some political commentary on the part of Pauline. On what, it’s hard to be sure. Most of SRL’s performances have exploited a similar kind of absurdity, weaving together seemingly disparate, and often bizarre, cultural references into their machine based theatrics to create an intense experience for the viewer. As one onlooker put it, “when you see an SRL show, you either see God or the insides of your eyelids.”And, as new performances were brought to the “stage” following Machine Sex, the spectacle only grew.
The team spends years dismantling advanced technologies, modifying them and recasting them as characters in their performances which often involve violent clashes between machines, pyrotechnics, and even blood and gore. The charismatic machines, set upon each other to produce military-grade theatre, are themselves impressive feats in engineering. The 1985 New York show starred the flame shooting Stu Walker, the world’s first robot in a performance controlled by an animal, Pauline’s Guinea Pig, and the 1997 Austin show featured the monumental Hand O God, a massive hand of air-cylinder fingers holding 8 tons of pressure. Audiences consistently reported fearing for their safety. The drama swelled as more and more ingenuity was pumped into SRL’s creations, which were often destroyed in the process of performance, sacrificed for the viewer’s entertainment.
The violence alone makes it easy to interpret SRL’s shows as commentary on the threat of technological advancement, especially when set in the context of the late-1970s, early-1980s and the rapid growth of the Bay Area’s tech industry. That interpretation may have even more salience today, in the era of Artificial Intelligence, when it often seems as though technology’s evolutionary drive has been let loose, sheared from our own, wholly out of our control. At a time when the media is inundated with thought pieces on AI’s imminent take over through means most of us hardly understand, a performance that frames the man vs. machine dynamic as a straightforward showdown has resonance.
“The immense workmanship behind SRL’s creations says more about what it is to be human than what our future with machines might look like.”
Mark Pauline and Matt Heckert operate the Inchworm, Inspector, and Big Walker
But despite the gruesome nature of their performances, SRL’s machines also touch on a more profound, spirited side of man’s relationship to machine, a side seldom considered amidst today’s progressively less enchanting experiences of technology. The machines in combat do more than play out a dystopian tech prophecy, they are deliberately made as masterpieces in engineering. Years of unimaginable effort go into rewiring these machines of their designed functions, removing their utilitarian value, rendering them incarnations of time spent. In that sense, the immense workmanship behind SRL’s creations says more about what it is to be human than what our future with machines might look like.
Pauline once described the project of SRL—his life’s work—as a “decade long prank.” This prank, he explained, has been “executed with an unfathomable degree of meticulousness and precision, the uncompromising pointlessness of it revealing the banality of most everything.” In committing his life to the task of undoing purpose in machines, Pauline makes clear an essential difference between man and machine: humans, like Pauline, have the freedom to be pointless, to do pointless things. Goalless in their undertaking of a silly amount of violence, his machines have been endowed with uniquely human qualities. Freed from their banal fates, their irreverence is matched by only that of their makers.
There’s a gleeful thrill in watching the world’s most inventive machines go up in flames for no apparent reason at all. Though they may be perceived as no better than teenage boyishness, SRL performances are life affirming for their audiences. As one critic writes, “Mark Pauline has spent the last 37 years making machines that remind you that you’re going to die.” But perhaps it's not only the machines’ destruction that reminds us of this fact but the machines themselves. As our lives become increasingly tethered to technology, and we ourselves live more mechanically, more efficiently, entrenching deeper technological systems into each and every one of our experiences, SRL’s crazed machines, ironically, wake us up to human life.
“What escapes the machine, even the computer, even networks of computers, even the human mind in its automatic phases is this capacity to escape from its own determination.” - Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and revolution in France, David Bates”
Lamia Priestley is an art historian, writer and researcher working at the intersection of art, fashion and technology. With a background in Italian Renaissance Art, Lamia is currently the Artist Liaison at the digital fashion house DRAUP, where she works with artists to produce generative digital collections.
Body Typologies
Robin Sparkes April 23, 2024
In my youth, I trained with a professional ballet company. Through the experience of being a dancer, learning the semiotics of ballet, I began to understand movement as a structural medium. The classical arabesque pose, for example, embodies suspension…
City Metaphors (1982), O.M. Ungers
Robin Sparkes April 22, 2024
In my youth, I trained with a professional ballet company. Through the experience of being a dancer, learning the semiotics of ballet, I began to understand movement as a structural medium. The classical arabesque pose, for example, embodies suspension when the leg is lifted in derrière (to the back) at a 90-degree angle. It is a delicate balance; the head, neck, chest, back, and suspended leg are held in balance while the supporting leg acts like a stabilising column — a structural support.
From railway to cultural sanctuary: The metamorphosis of Musée d'Orsay, Orléans, France. Originally a train station built in 1900, the building was repurposed into a museum in 1986. The open hall facilitates public exchange, preserving its original geometry which once served the purpose of the train platform, now transcended into a place of contemplating art.
Understanding the body as a structure helped me to understand the body within a structure. Buildings confine the body, and the body responds to their latent potential. The architectural shell produces both positive and negative space. The body’s existence is facilitated by its container, and the movements made within that container affect the manner in which the container is perceived. Movements made within a space can expand that space’s potential uses and, in this way, we can view the body as an architectural object. As the presence of the body alters the description of the built environment: it introduces the body as a type, a vessel within a vessel. Reimagining the body as a typological unit, a part of architecture, can we imagine what it means to live with architecture?
***
“Buildings encapsulate the ideologies of the era in which they were built. As time unfolds, buildings may be repurposed, yet they retain the qualities that mirror the values, beliefs, and priorities of the society that built them.”
City Metaphors (1982), O.M. Ungers
Buildings are physical philosophies. Structures frame experience. Architecture can shape and influences us beyond the material realm. Our sense of place affects our emotions, perceptions, and even our spiritual realities.
The architectural landscape is an archive. Buildings encapsulate the ideologies of the era in which they were built. As time unfolds, buildings may be repurposed, yet they retain the qualities that mirror the values, beliefs, and priorities of the society that built them.
Amphitheater Euripides 300-340 BC.
Different building types are categorized into architectural typologies, which are a system that is used in the process of both design and analysis. These 'types' are defined by the functions that a building provides, such as a library, a swimming pool, or an amphitheatre. Typologies are not set, but evolve to accommodate the requirements of our changing lives, of rapidly evolving technology, new societal needs and belief systems. This is often reflected in a buildings architectural plans. An architectural plan is a detailed drawing outlining the layout, dimensions, and features of a building. The drawing represents the design’s concept, structure and materials. The architectural plans for buildings of the same type can often resemble one another. The plans for the Amphitheater of Euripides, for instance, (dated 300-340 BC) emphasize circulation. Two millenniums later, in 1926, Allied Architects relied on that same emphasis to create the Hollywood Bowl.
Hollywood Bowl, Allied Architects (1926). Various acoustic interventions have been made since by architects such as Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry.
Architecture not only frames but also shapes how we translate and read body language. The way we perceive and interpret movement and sound is influenced by the architectural context in which they occur. Dancing alone in a living room offers a personal and intimate experience, where one's movements are framed by the domestic space. Conversely, performing on a stage with an audience amplifies the gestures and tones, as the architectural setting shapes the communicative exchange between performer and spectator. The relationship between movement and sound in space influences our perception of temporality. Time is an essential current of interpretation, a shared continual reality. The buildings we inhabit construct our experience, and therefore help us construct time itself; shaping how we perceive and interact with the passage of hours, days, and seasons.
“With the sun at its centre, architecture and design can serve as a type of choreography, directing the body’s language and facilitating sociological progression.”
Archaeologists suggest that early architecture built for the collective often hosted rituals. These spaces embodied the inherent bond between human expression and the built environment. For instance, Blombos Cave in South Africa reveals remnants of organized rituals among its ochre-painted cave drawings, suggesting caves may have been architectural settings to host communal dance ceremonies. An understanding of architectural space is intrinsic to the creation and understanding of artistic expression, and our interpretation of culture.
***
Once bacteria, now human, every cell in our bodies have evolved under Earth's closest star, our Sun. Contemplating the body’s role with architecture, and our architecture’s place in the universe draws our focus to sunlight as an all-encompassing force that influences the body’s experience of time and space. With the sun at its centre, architecture and design can serve as a type of choreography, directing the body’s language and facilitating sociological progression. The designer, with sensitivity to the tempo, rhythm, and ritual of life, has the potential to guide the body to light.
City Metaphors (1982), O.M. Ungers
On a planet of severe ecological stress, what are the possible futures of architecture? Modular, flexible designs that build upon and expanding from existing structures like tentacles—that can constantly adapt to our changing needs and climate. Drawing from raw, natural materials, would help us to reimagine space and society by fostering our relationship with nature.
We turn to our environments to meet our needs and desires. In turn, we affect ecosystems both near and far when considering the resources this requires. Similarly, when we enter a building, we shape its purpose and definition—we affect its architectural typology. This process of human interaction with space plays a pivotal role in the evolution of architecture over time. Our presence today shapes future archaeological perceptions and understandings of architectural type as a reflection of our societal values. Can we imagine a type of architecture that lives with us, where time itself is allowed to be an architect?
Robin Sparkes, a is spatial designer, studying the kinesthetic experience of architecture. Her design, research, and writing practice traverses the relationship between the body, temporality, and the acoustics of space.
The Queen of Swords (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel April 20, 2024
The Queen of Swords is a court card. Court cards in tarot differ from the face cards in a playing deck only in their inclusion of a fourth face, the Princess. Each court card in tarot is elemental, all Kings are Fire, all Queens are Water, Princes are Air, and Princesses are Earth. So the Queen of Swords is the watery part of air, thus the clouds that surround her.
Name: Queen of Swords
Astrology: Libra, Water of Air
Qabalah: He of Vau ה of ו
Chris Gabriel April 20, 2024
The Queen of Swords is a court card. Court cards in tarot differ from the face cards in a playing deck only in their inclusion of a fourth face, the Princess. Each court card in tarot is elemental, all Kings are Fire, all Queens are Water, Princes are Air, and Princesses are Earth. So the Queen of Swords is the watery part of air, thus the clouds that surround her.
In these three cards she is enthroned, and she bears the sword indicating her suit. Her expression remains essentially the same, a slight frown.
This is a card of great wit, beauty, and cutting words.
In Marseille, we find her with a simple crown, fine colored robes, and bearing a red bladed sword. In a playing card deck her equivalent would be the Queen of Spades. She is blonde. Her left hand is kept before her.
In Rider, we find her with a crown of butterflies, a robe covered in clouds, and sitting atop a throne of babes and butterflies. She is the most expressive of the three, with a more intense frown and glaring eyes. She is brunette. Her left hand is raised, as if gesturing for one to come toward her.
In Thoth, we find her at her most evocative. Her crown is enormous, made of green crystal, and adorned with a babe’s head. Her breasts are bare, but she has a blue skirt, and she is enthroned by the clouds themselves. She is without a care, her sword is held low and in her left hand the fruits of its labor, the head of a man.
We can grasp the nature of the Queen of Swords by looking for her historical counterparts. We find one in Judith, who beheads her unwanted suitor Holofernes in his sleep, protecting her virtue. And another, in “reversed” form, in Salome, who demands the head of John the Baptist be brought before her on a silver platter.
The Queen of Swords is a woman who knows exactly what she does and does not want.She is both a symbol of purity and of the ruthlessness required to preserve it.. Her character being Libra, we know that this is not wanton violence, but literal justice and a maintenance of balance by her sword.
She is, in fact, a figure of Lady Justice, in her original, unblinded form. The phrase “Justice is blind” is a misunderstanding of a joke on the uncaring nature of the state. Human Justice may be blind, but divine Justice has 20/20 vision.
When dealt this card, we may be forced to “cut off” a negative influence in our lives.
Fork
Mason Rotschild April 18, 2024
"Language keeps me locked and repeating", shouts Ian MacKaye over and over again in the Fugazi song ‘Stacks’. The mantra is raging against the profound influence of language on our perception of reality…
Bizzarie di Varie Figure (1624), Giovanni Battista Bracelli
Mason Rothschild April 20, 2024
"Language keeps me locked and repeating", shouts Ian MacKaye over and over again in the Fugazi song ‘Stacks’. The mantra is raging against the profound influence of language on our perception of reality.
Words are a kind of magic, they are spells that shape our understanding of the world. In our infancy, we are tiny explorers, eager to touch everything and put all of it in our mouths, attempting to grasp existence itself. But without language, we do not have containers for the concepts and ideas we meet and so we thrash and flail and cry. As we mature, we gain the ability to comprehend objects and their permanence. We learn that the sounds emanating from our mouths can represent these objects, and that written symbols can represent both these sounds and ideas. We join these foundational elements together and form a framework of understanding.
Our understanding of the world is not static. Where at first we remain malleable in our definitions and concepts, as we grow up we create a dictionary in our minds and solidify the meanings of words with a sense of certainty. We are beings with linear timelines, born and destined to die, with limited time to allocate and we cannot endlessly dive into the meaning of each word. At a point we must say we know, and move on.
Consider the word ‘fork’. I know that a fork can be made of various materials: metal, wood, plastic. I know that a giant six foot fork is kind of funny to me. I know that one can ineffectively eat soup with a fork. Imagine that I then take these pieces of knowledge, peel open the top of a little brick shaped box in my mind and put everything I know ‘fork’ to be in there. At some point I'm not learning what fork means anymore and I close that little box up and place it on the ground. I stack up more little bricks full of definitions and pretty soon I'm in a house. This house is my reality.
“Our realities are constructed from the definitions we gave to objects, places and ideas. Each symbol in our mind is a cornerstone in the architecture of our personal reality.”
Reality is subjective. We may both gaze upon a flower, but what we truly experience is our own interpretation of what a flower means. We’ve already closed the flower box. Unless we revert back to a state of childlike wonder, allowing the flower's form, color, and scent to wash over us as if for the first time and shove it in our mouths to discover what it is, we merely project our preconceptions onto it. Our realities are constructed from the definitions we gave to objects, places and ideas. Each symbol in our mind is a cornerstone in the architecture of our personal reality.
Yet, while this mode of boxing works well for something like ‘fork’, what's a little terrifying is that ‘love’ occupies the same symbolic space. We enshrine our understanding of love within a mental container and fill it with images of fairy tale romances, our parents' failed marriages, some Beatles lyrics, and poetic verses and then we shut the little box and move on.
In doing so, we condemn ourselves to stay locked and repeated in our understanding of complex and malleable concepts. If our fairytale, Beatles, poetic type love should fail to show up in our lives, we fail to see the other ways we might love and be loved. The solution is simple – We possess the power to deconstruct our reality by deconstructing our definitions. Though the process may be messy, intentional dismantling allows us to become architects of our own existence. We are the magicians, wielding the simple act of focusing intention to shape our world. Thy will be done! We have the agency to change our understanding and relationship with the concept of love, and in doing so realize the love we have and the love we need. We don’t have to open up every word. It may serve us to have a closed box around ‘fork and it may not be so with Love. At least the Greeks had eight words for love. We English speakers have but one and we lock it up quick.
Examining what is going on behind our curtains provides more usefulness than not. Let’s lay around and open some boxes, and paint pictures, and put things in our mouths.
Mason Rothschild is a reformed touring fool turned occultant obsessed with contributing to the evolution of the collective human vision as we look away from accumulation and toward community.
Becoming Alive to the More-Than-Human World
Tuukka Toivonen April 16, 2024
Sometimes life brings us in contact with people who help us discover aspects of reality we did not know existed. Their behaviors can serve as gentle guides to new ways of seeing…
Etidorhpa (1895), John Uri Lloyd
Tuukka Toivonen April 16, 2024
Sometimes life brings us in contact with people who help us discover aspects of reality we did not know existed. Their behaviours can serve as gentle guides to new ways of seeing.
Recently, an old friend and bandmate from South Africa came to visit me in Finland with his wife. On his first morning in a totally new environment, he had taken a dip in the sea and ventured out into a nearby forest. There, he picked up a humongous edible mushroom – the kind I had never noticed before – that he promptly delivered to a hotel chef who generously turned it into a delicious dish on the spot. This delightful episode reminded me of how, by being actively curious and alive to one’s surroundings, it is possible to let joy and wonder emerge.
Etidorhpa (1895), John Uri Lloyd
Years ago, when I was a foreign student in Japan, I shared a university campus – and on occasion, a communal bathtub – with a remarkable young Tongan. A towering man with an angelic singing voice and the warmest smile; it was impossible to walk across the campus with him in any reasonable amount of time, as friend after friend after friend would stop us to say hello. Having grown up in a tight-knit village with around a thousand people whose names and life events he kept track of, he had developed an extraordinary power to connect. Able to detect the nuanced facial expressions and emotions I would miss, it dawned on me that my friend saw reality as something more finely textured than I did. For him, it appeared rich with possibilities for genuine moments of connection.
Several other friends have aroused similar feelings of fascination in me when they have instantly recognised (and eaten!) wild plants; spotted rare birds by ear; or when they have shared magical encounters with nonhuman animals. I also find myself inspired when art and design school colleagues explain how they have learned to create art with multiceullular organisms (like slime molds) or developed new materials from fungi or seaweed.
Compared to the friends just mentioned, I seem to be only half alive to my surroundings, nonhuman living beings and other people, perhaps numbed by long years of indoor living and the stresses of my adopted cities of London and Tokyo. Music became my partial window into this more-alive world through a well-nurtured teenage obsession with electric guitar. In spite of my overall slumber, music opened that window just enough so that I could imagine that a different way to experience the world might exist.
Having subsequently become a sociologist interested in regenerative making and organizing, I have started to wonder whether the mysteries of aliveness could be fruitfully approached by re-engaging with the notion of the more-than-human world. Introduced by the ecological philosopher-anthropologist David Abram in his now-classic book, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human-World (1996). This curious term points to a way of being that recognises and embraces our deep entanglement with the world as experiencing beings. Perhaps by revisiting Abram’s work, we can better comprehend why attuned ways of being feel inaccessible for many of us.
“Whether that which we perceive is a rock, butterfly, another planet, a person or a mushroom does not matter – perception opens up the possibility of discerning rich qualities in another and their environment.”
Etidorhpa (1895), John Uri Lloyd
For Abram and the philosophers he draws upon (most notably, the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1908-1961), everything begins with the contention that human reality is fundamentally rooted in the embodied, perceivable world. Abram invites us to notice the strangeness of how quantified abstract knowledge and measurable ‘systems’ have been given ‘realer’ status in society over the fluid experiential world. He challenges us to think how we might reclaim the primacy of experiential life and knowledge, overcoming our culture’s tendency to de-value direct experience in favour of ‘objective’ scientific knowledge and data.
Re-establishing the centrality of direct experience does not imply (or urge) a withdrawal into hermetically sealed, private experiential worlds – far from it. For in the sensuous, more-than-human world, experience and perception are inherently bound up with meaningful, responsive participation and interaction. For Abram, engaging fully in perception is a gateway to interchange and the formation of relationships:
“In the act of perception, in other words, I enter into a sympathetic relation with the perceived, which is possible only because neither my body nor the sensible exists outside the flux of time, and so each has its own dynamism, its own pulsation and style. Perception, in this sense, is an attunement or synchronization between my own rhythms and the rhythms of the things themselves, their own tones and textures”.
Whether that which we perceive is a rock, butterfly, another planet, a person or a mushroom does not matter – perception opens up the possibility of discerning rich qualities in another and their environment.
This brings us to a challenge: modern society directs us to treat things as dead objects; as materials for consumption or narrow instrumental use. We enjoy wooden furniture but rarely think of where that wood was grown; we enjoy trees as beautiful objects in our parks and forests without considering that delicate habitat that tree provides wildlife, or the mycelial network connecting it to others.
To gain entry to the more-than-human-world, we need to not only acknowledge the intrinsic worth and beauty of all the things we may encounter, but also their animateness, their potential for aliveness and interaction.
Moving beyond societal inhibitors, one assumes, greatly increases the potential to find aliveness in the social and ecological world. Aliveness always has the potential to emerge from the attuned interactions between us and the world when we are willing to imagine that there may be qualities, resonances and possibilities just below the level of conscious awareness that can be brought forth through an active process of ‘perception as participation’. I now realize it is precisely this kind of willingness to imagine (and openness to possibility) that I found so remarkable in my friends from South Africa and Tonga.
“If I so choose, I can allow the living world to have a voice – a voice that ‘beckons to me’, that engages my senses, that calls me to participate in its rhythms and mysteries, that blends with my own presence.”
What The Spell of the Sensuous teaches us is that, through the process of attuned perceiving and imagining, we can enter into an authentic relationship with the world. Conversely, when we refuse to view the world as animate and intelligent, or other people as interesting and worthy of our attention, we deny the possibility of rich, nuanced and mutually nourishing relationships. It is this refusal to perceive and imagine – whether personally, societally or philosophically induced – that kills the potential for aliveness. If I so choose, I can allow the living world to have a voice – a voice that ‘beckons to me’, that engages my senses, that calls me to participate in its rhythms and mysteries, that blends with my own presence.
To make these philosophical and ecological ideas more personally relevant, you may wish to think back to episodes in your own life that have given you a sense of aliveness or that have hinted at new possibilities for relating to other humans and the living world in a more imaginative, responsive way. Is there something in those episodes that might nourish you today and that might invite you to try new ways of connecting with the world?
Tuukka Toivonen, Ph.D. (Oxon.) is a sociologist interested in ways of being, relating and creating that can help us to reconnect with – and regenerate – the living world. Alongside his academic research, Tuukka works directly with emerging regenerative designers and startups in the creative, material innovation and technology sectors.
The Nine of Swords (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel April 13, 2024
The Nine of Swords is elemental air brought down to nearly its lowest form. This is a card of violence and regret. When it comes up in a reading, beware of your own and others unconscious outbursts, and the regrets that inevitably follow.
Name: Cruelty, the Nine of Swords
Number: 9
Astrology: Mars in Gemini
Qabalah: Yesod of Vau ו
Chris Gabriel April 13, 2024
The Nine of Swords is elemental air brought down to nearly its lowest form. This is a card of violence and regret. When it comes up in a reading, beware of your own and others unconscious outbursts, and the regrets that inevitably follow.
In Thoth, we find nine rusty, chipped, well used swords still dripping with blood. There is the rusty brown of Mars and the orangey red of Gemini. This card is explicit about the violent action of which we only see the regret in Rider. One is reminded of the image of Slayer’s “Raining Blood” or the mythical Lance of Longinus, which has continuously dripped blood since it first pierced Christ’s side. As Mars in Gemini, this is again, violent action mixed with indecision.
In Rider, we see clearly the character of regret. A man is weeping late at night, his bed bears a murderous relief, and his blanket is embroidered with astrological symbols, the weight of fate itself. Above his bed, he awakes to a field of nine swords. He is one who has used violence and has great regret.
In Marseille, we see eight arched swords and a central ninth sword; we must use Qabalah to grasp the esoteric significance of this mundane image. As a nine, this card is of Yesod, the Foundation, and as a Sword, it is of Vau, the Prince..
Thus we have the Foundation of the Prince.
A dark image indeed! The Foundation of the Prince is Cruelty. His very nature being secondary, his drive is always toward ascent, not to his own goals, but simply to the position of his Father, the King. A goal which can be achieved only through intellectual, machiavellian schemes built upon a base violence.
It brings me very clearly to a brilliant line from the Diaries of Anaïs Nin: I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.
It is image of both Claudius and Hamlet in this card, the regret of Claudius’ fratricide, and the indecision of Hamlet’s revenge. Both our actions and thoughts can be profoundly violent and cruel, and as we see in these cards, we remain filled with regret long after these terrible things take place.
We can also look at the image of swords dangling over one's head and be brought to Damocles, whose desire to be King puts him on the throne, and above the throne, a sword hanging by a hair, which could fall at any moment.
This card calls us to reflect on our desires and their ultimate consequences. Often when wronged, we want revenge, but can you live with the result?The Prince wants to be King, but can he live with himself if he murders his father?
When we are dealt this card, we should prepare for an outburst, or the consequences of past actions. Our actions must be perfectly aligned and just. Regret must be accepted and understood to be overcome.
Gesticulate Wildly
Isabelle Bucklow April 10, 2024
For time immemorial we’ve been gesturing: toward something over there, to each other, that something tastes good, that we are in pain, in love and sometimes for no (conscious) reason at all. We might gesture alongside language, but gesture is not necessarily a substitute for language. Gestures articulate states of mind or sensations that cannot be encased by language. Gestures can fill gaps left by language or create a gap which they then fill, or overfill. Gestures represent and relay information aesthetically, symbolically; others see them and recognise them as meaningful.
Isabelle Bucklow April 11, 2024
For time immemorial we’ve been gesturing: toward something over there, to each other, that something tastes good, that we are in pain, in love and sometimes for no (conscious) reason at all. We might gesture alongside language, but gesture is not necessarily a substitute for language. Gestures articulate states of mind or sensations that cannot be encased by language. Gestures can fill gaps left by language or create a gap which they then fill, or overfill. Gestures represent and relay information aesthetically, symbolically; others see them and recognise them as meaningful. Those meanings, however, are not fixed. They are hinged on cultural, economic, environmental and psychological variables. But before going further, hell, how do we even distinguish a gesture from other movements we make with our bodies? This question leads to others regarding voluntary and involuntary actions, inculcation, the very notion of freedom itself!
Le Centre de l’Amour (ca. 1687), Peter Rollos
Because we’ve always been gesturing, we’ve also always been thinking about gesture. Aristotle disparaged gestures as crude tools used by orators to manipulate their audience. Cicero’s De Oratore asserted that ‘every emotion of the mind has from nature its own peculiar look, tone, and gesture’.¹ Around 95 AD Quintilian set out a foundational system for gesture, called Institutes of Oratory, suggesting that shrugs, nods, pointing, furrows, pursing and flares (expressed by shoulders, head, hand, eyebrows, lips and nostrils respectively) might ‘be a language common to all’.²
By the 18th century, everything had been thrown into great doubt; we weren’t simply recording what gestures the great orators were making, but asking more fundamentally what is gesture, and why do we gesture? With the dawn of industrialisation, the metaphysical why turned into a technical how. How do new environments create new gestures? The production line was a shining example of how gesture can be broken down into goal-oriented parts, then standardised and forced to repeat indefinitely. Gestures can be mistaken for machines. Machines can also malfunction.
In one of the most frequently quoted essays on gesture – titled Notes on Gesture (1992) no less – Giorgio Agamben claimed: ‘By the end of the nineteenth century, the Western bourgeoisie had definitely lost its gestures.’³
In Agamben’s account, gesture isn’t lost definitely and entirely into the ether, it remains embodied, we just lost control of it. He begins with an example of measure and mastery, introducing Gilles de la Tourette’s 1886 treatise on ‘gait’, the first ‘strictly scientific analysis’ of human movement.⁴ With a forensic eye, prophetic of unflinching machine vision, Tourette detailed the weight distributions, stride lengths and joint rotations involved in walking. The year before, Tourette had published Study on a Nervous Condition characterised by lack of Motor Coordination accompanied by Echolalia and Coprolalia (what we now call ‘Tourette’s syndrome’). Unlike the dependable pedestrian gait, these gestures were arrhythmic and proliferating.
In his patients, Tourette observed muscle spasms and tics without recognisable intent or interpretable justification. For Agamben, these incomplete and partial gestures evidenced ‘a generalised catastrophe [of the sphere of gesture].’⁵ Then, in the second half of the 20th century, reports of gestural glitches ceased. Perhaps, Agamben suggested, they had become the norm. This hypothesis could well be supported by Charlie Chaplin’s jittery skits and the modern hops and convulsions of dancer Isadora Duncan. And so, to Agamben’s next pronouncement: ‘In the cinema, a society that has lost its gestures tries at once to reclaim what it has lost and to record its loss.’⁶
Contemporary artist Martine Syms’ video piece, Notes on Gesture (2015), took its title from Agamben's 1992 essay. It was first shown in ‘Vertical Elevated Oblique’, an exhibition whose title referenced earlier texts on gesture, like John Bulwer’s Chirologia: Or the Natural Language of the Hand and Chironomia: Or the Art of Manual Rhetoric (1644). Bulwer’s illustrated compendium set out a ‘universal’ vocabulary of gestures (the ‘universal’ was, for Bulmer, the Anglo-Saxon white male). Syms’ work creates an alternate inventory, interrogating black identity, media representation and the hand’s ‘natural’ language. Syms says that through ‘modernity, migration to cities and away from our kin, family, familiar networks, we lost our movement or embodiment and we put it into cinema.’⁷ Body, gesture and video are innately linked, and innately political.
In the film, Syms’ collaborator Diamond Stingily reacts to title cards (WHEN DEY GOT YOU FUCKED) and makes hand gestures accompanied by phrases (‘Real talk,’ ‘Check yourself,’ ‘Point blank, period’). Through stutters and loops (reminiscent of Vines) these sounds and gestures glitch between authentic and dramatic. Syms has said the work was inspired by a riff on the joke “Everybody wanna be a black woman but nobody wanna be a black woman,” referencing the media appropriation of black culture (of which gestures are integral) that drains politics and ethics from the aesthetics of blackness. Further, Syms has written, ‘mass media allows for narratives – and subsequently, ideologies and typologies – to be industrialised.’⁸ Syms’ looping bitesize gestures anticipated the structure and style of TikTok and Instagram reels. If, in the 19th century, we lost our gestures and put them into cinema, then TikTok seems to cannibalise gestures at the same rate it produces and transmits them – an algorithmic factory of gestures consumed by users and fed back into the loop.
In 2021, during the pandemic, a medical report was published about an overwhelming global increase in tics in children and young people. Many of the patients had watched TikTok videos of young people with Tourette’s syndrome and adopted their gestures and utterances. A New York Times article published last year reported TikTok videos labelled #Tourettes have been viewed 7.7 billion times. These TikTok tics not only demonstrate that gesture is innately quotable, but also how that quotability can be hosted, networked and monetised.
Liz Magic Laser is a performance and video artist whose 2023 work, Convulsive States – an investigative report-cum-hallucination – explores the history of spasmodic gestural expressions of mental distress. Laser considers these gestures as both a symptom of trauma and its possible antidote. The artist visited Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, where Tourette's mentor Dr Jean-Martin Charcot studied the phenomena of hysteria (now called ‘psychogenic nonepileptic seizure’) by unconventional means: performance lectures and photography. His methods have been criticised for being exploitative and theatrical, something Laser finds dismissive. Laser notes, ‘at a time when underclass women were incarcerated and ignored, Charcot offered patients an opportunity to express their trauma, vocally and physically, which was probably healing for some and damaging for others…Charcot put them on stage and facilitated their erotic display of rage. Was it good or bad? Yes, both.’⁹
In her film, Laser also highlights the TikTok tic phenomenon. TikTok is a much bigger, more visible stage to display and work through existential changes. It is also a stage where performer and audience aren't separate and distinct, but merged (into what art historian Isobel Harbsion calls ‘the prosumer’).¹⁰ Gestures are not so much lost and reclaimed/recorded here, but trapped in an infinite, insatiable economy of exchange. Multimodal AI tools (like Open AI’s new text-to-video model, Sora, released in February), will alter and amplify this exchange by contributing ever more ‘realistic’ AI generated bodies into the short-form video landscape; their morphing synthetic gestures ripe for virality, but trained on what ‘universal’?
TikTok and Sora are experiments that ‘innovate first, regulate later’. Over two decades since the launch of social media, concrete causal patterns between a teen mental health crisis and social media use are becoming increasingly apparent (leading to a federal lawsuit against meta raised in late 2023).¹¹ We do not yet know all the virtualities inherent in TikTok and short-form social media, let alone spatial computing; TikTok is now available on the Apple Vision Pro (a virtual and augmented reality headset), and according to one tech news platform, ‘ready to eat up your gestures.’¹²
Since the release of Apple Vision Pro, there have been numerous videos shared online of wearers on the subway, crossing roads, making bizarre pinches and swipes through the air. Currently only a select few can afford the hardware, and when spotted in the wild their gesticulations appear absurd and anti-social. It seems we are in another crisis of gesture. As media theorist Vilém Flusser wrote, in my favourite collection of essays on gesture, ‘whenever gestures appear that have never been seen before, we have a key to decoding a new form of existence.’¹³ And so, in attending to the gestures of today, as well as those of the past, these signs – or symptoms – might inch us closer to decoding the strange phenomena of living and all that entails.
¹ Cicero, De Oratore [Book III], ed. A.S.Wilkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1902), 215
² Quintilian, “Institutio Oratoria” in The Loeb Classical Library [Edition Vol. IV] (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1920)
³ Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 2000) 50
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ Ibid.
⁶ Ibid., 52
⁷ Martine Syms quoted in Hannah Ongley “Martine Syms illuminates a space between secular and sacred at Prada Mode Los Angeles”, Document Journal, February 22, 2022
⁸ Martine Syms quoted in Colby Chamberlain “Review: Martine Syms, Bridget Donahue” Artforum
⁹ Liz Magic Laser quoted in Wendy Vogel “Liz Magic Laser on hysterical crisis and alternative healing” Artforum, October 5, 2023
¹⁰ See Isobel Harbison, Performing Image (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2019)
¹¹ Kari Paul “Meta sued by 33 states over claims youth mental health endangered by Instagram” The Guardian, October 24, 2023
¹² Rowan Davies, “TikTok is now on Apple Vision Pro, ready to take over your view and eat up your gestures” techradar, February 16, 2024
¹³ Vilém Flusser, Gestures, trans. by Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014)
Isabelle Bucklow is a London-based writer, researcher and editor. She is the co-founding editor of motor dance journal.
How To Call Yves Klein - A Pataphysical Sèance
Derek DelGaudio April 9, 2024
To combat the bulimia with which these times stain the symbolic world, follow the steps below:
Photo by Hal Schulman
Derek DelGaudio, April 9, 2024
To combat the bulimia with which these times stain the symbolic world*, follow the steps below:
1. Find a quiet space. Acquire the latitude and longitude of that location and measure its distance to The Void† . Now, convert that number of miles to inches, reducing it to a length you can hold.
2. Fashion a line that length from strips of torn canvas‡ , dyed blue with the anointed pigment § , all tied together by knots. Lay this line in your space for others to find at their seat.
3. You will also need a special variation of the Monotone-Silence Symphony**, specifically crafted to contact Klein††. Find it here for your convenience.
4. Play the tune‡‡ and hold the line.
5. Close your eyes. Become a silent and static witness to the messages you receive §§. DO NOT LET GO OF THE LINE.
Photo by Hal Schulman
*The crisis of the Symbolic World was first identified by the retired fortuneteller who can be found sitting at Le Bergamote, located at 169 9th Ave, New York City, NY.
†The Void is located at 48°47'13.3" N 2°17'32.3"E.
‡Buy raw cotton canvas from the garment district and tear it into long strips, each roughly two inches wide. Tie them together with knots, making one long cord. Measure and trim as needed.
§Go to Kremer Pigments located at 247 W 29th St, New York, NY 10001. Tell them you need enough International Klein Blue pigment to dye the distance between yourself and The Void.
**Variation on Monotone-Silence by Bon Iver x Derek DelGaudio © 2024. To truly be felt, the numinous requires a physical manifestation. We recommend pressing this piece on vinyl.
††Born in the nice part of Nice, in 1928, Yves Klein, the Judoka/Artist/Mystic, began drawing with milk from his baby bottle and went on to own the Sky. He established the Void in 1957 and later made headlines by leaping into it on November 27th, 1960.
‡‡In human time this piece lasts 40 minutes. In the void, it is eternal. We recommend playing it for at least one eternity.
§§ These are the messages from Klein.
Derek DelGaudio is a writer, director, and magician. DelGaudio created the award-winning theater show and film, In & Of Itself. He wrote the acclaimed book, AMORALMAN, served as the artist-in-residence for Walt Disney Imagineering, and co-founded the performance art collective A.Bandit. He is currently an Affiliate Scholar at Georgetown University and co-conspirator at Deceptive Practices, a creative firm known for designing illusions and providing "Arcane Knowledge on a Need-to-Know Basis.”
The Ten of Disks (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel April 5, 2024
The Ten of Disks is an earthly card, at the end of its fall from Heaven. Unlike Air and Fire, Earth is happier on the ground than up in the Heavens. When this card comes up in a reading, one thinks of a great investment or a great home. This card is about something stable but not stagnant.
Name: Wealth, the Ten of Disks
Number: 10
Astrology: Earth, Mercury in Virgo
Qabalah: Malkuth of He ה
Chris Gabriel April 6, 2024
The Ten of Disks is an earthly card, at the end of its fall from Heaven. Unlike Air and Fire, Earth is happier on the ground than up in the Heavens. When this card comes up in a reading, one thinks of a great investment or a great home. This card is about something stable, but not stagnant.
Mercury is domiciled in Virgo, a sign that it rules. Thus Mercury, God of money, is intelligently utilizing the wealth accumulated over the past 9 cards. Mercury is in fact the root of words like “Merchant” or “Commerce”
This is a card of accumulated resources, and their correct usage.
In Thoth, we are given an image of ten coins in the form of the Tree of Life. Each bears a Mercurial sign with Mercury atop and Virgo below. All about these ten golden coins are the purples of royalty.
In Rider, we see the Pentacles forming the Tree of Life, as in Thoth. Behind this superimposed tree, we see a beautiful scene. It is a kingdom at peace: lovers talking, a child playing with two dogs, and an old man sitting. Rather than the literal wealth depicted in Thoth, this is the wealth of security -all are well dressed and even pets can be fed. A far cry from the Five of Pentacles earlier in this suit.
In Marseille, we see a more mundane layout of the ten coins, more like the fives that appear on a pair of dice. Through Qabalah, we can understand this card as Malkuth, The Kingdom, at the very bottom of the tree of life, which corresponds to planetary Earth. Being a disk, it is of He ה, the Princess and as the final letter of the Tetragrammaton, represents elemental Earth. Thus the kingdom the card refers to is the Kingdom of the Princess.
In some ways, this is the final card in the deck. It is here we reach the end of a long descent down the Tree of Life, through the paths along it, and through the Tetragrammaton. This is a joyous ending. As opposed to the great rises and falls, joys and sorrows of the deck, here we find a very solid, very comfortable, material reality. At last, everything is in its place.
When we think of the Fall to Earth, we often think of fiery Satan, displeased with his crash landing, but our Earthy Princess is very happy here. This is the perfection of our world.
In the Bible, I’m brought to Revelation 21, when the Apocalypse has ceased, and God does away with how things were, and all are united. Yet even this sort of ending is not forever, this is the wisdom of the Aeon, that there are no ends, only ceaseless transformation, and so this happy earth is bound to change to some new form so soon as the deck is shuffled.
We can look to William Blake to help see the relation of the lofty Heavens of Kether with this most earthen Malkuth: “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”
This is the nature of the Ten of Disks, the lovely productions of time.
When dealt this card, we are asked to look upon our journey, what we have all been on: a long, colorful, rainbow path (ס) and here at last is the pot of gold (מַלְכוּת) !
A Story of Three Bones
Vestal Malone April 4, 2024
In a sacred moment, 3 friends begin an epic journey. Manifesting from the primordial ooze, they float together. Their innate destiny is a collaborative effort of strength, support and love. They protect and nurture the pulse of their own existence and grow into being.
Vestal Malone April 4, 2024
In a sacred moment, 3 friends begin an epic journey. Manifesting from the primordial ooze, they float together. Their innate destiny is a collaborative effort of strength, support and love. They protect and nurture the pulse of their own existence and grow into being.
Mandible, Sacrum and Sphenoid. Three bones together with the heart and the nervous system are the start and core of our physical being. More than 200 bones join the team as the body grows in a glorious journey to last a lifetime.
Mandible, the jaw bone, takes its duty seriously. It protects the heart with honor and has the strength and courage to do it well. When you try to avoid feeling a heartache, the jaw clenches and the tail tightens in an attempt to stop the 'flow 'of emotions. A newborn baby's lip quivers before the audible cry releases the tension. Adults tend to “keep a stiff upper lip” and not express their fear, anger or sadness. The heart does not forget how the mandible protected it, the two are connected from utero and for the rest of their lives together. Mandible has help in its task from Sacrum, the pelvis, and his little buddy Coccyx, the tailbone. They exist in a synchronistic dance and sway, the three together are the physical guardians encasing the developing heart, and then the emotional guardians as they grow solid and emerge into gravity. The sacrum looks after the cerebral spinal fluid, the flow of this nectar controlling our physical health and emotional well being. As our tail wags, it pumps this life juice up the spine to bathe our brain with nutrients. Remaining in lockdown in response to the travesties of life leads to physical duress. A relaxed body is truly a relaxed mind. Muscle tension and physical injury stop Sacrum from wagging, impeding the flow of our perfect divinely designed system.
Sphenoid, the bone of all bones, is fragile and shy. The keeper of the pituitary gland and the nervous system, it takes the brunt of our existence. Without the pulse of life moving through our body, all systems stagnate, especially little Sphenoid. Its shape resembles a butterfly, with bony wings just as delicate. It lives just behind the eyes and in front of our gray matter, hovering and swaying in harmony with the sacrum like a hammock to distribute “food” for the brain and body. Sacrum handles the cerebral spinal fluid while the Sphenoid handles the self regulating chemicals produced in house. It is a pharmacy with a remedy for each challenge, and a nutritionist chef to serve the perfect meals for growth and vitality. If Sphenoid can't dance and sway, the party's over.
“They exist in a synchronistic dance and sway, the three together are the physical guardians encasing the developing heart, and then the emotional guardians as they grow solid and emerge into gravity.”
After her University education (BA in English Literature and philosophy, minor in music), Vestal Malone followed the call to study her hobbies of yoga and therapeutic touch a the Pacific School of Healing Arts and continued in the Master's program of Transformational Bodywork with her mentors, Fred and Cheryl Mitouer, and assisting with their teaching. She went on to teach her own Therapeutic Touch workshops in Japan, hatha yoga in America, and study Cranial Sacral Therapy with Hugh Milne and John Upledger. She has had the honor of doing bodywork with professional athletes, laymen and nobility for over 25 years. Vestal is a mom, a backyard organic gardener, and sings soprano in her church choir on a little island in the middle Pacific ocean. She hails from Colorado and Wyoming and migrates every summer to her family ranch to ground in the dust of her roots.
Playing Games with Ludwig Wittgenstein
Nicko Mroczkowski April 2, 2024
What is the meaning of a word? When we talk about what words mean, we usually imagine something like a dictionary, which pairs up words with the things they stand for. So, somewhere in our heads, we’ve stored the sound corresponding to the word ‘apple’, and this entry is linked with our idea of the sweet fruit of certain trees. We are English speakers to the extent that we have a large repository of knowledge of this type, a dictionary in our minds that pairs sound to meaning.
Nicko Mroczkowski April 2nd, 2024
What is the meaning of a word? When we talk about what words mean, we usually imagine something like a dictionary, which pairs up words with the things they stand for. So, somewhere in our heads, we’ve stored the sound corresponding to the word ‘apple’, and this entry is linked with our idea of the sweet fruit of certain trees. We are English speakers to the extent that we have a large repository of knowledge of this type, a dictionary in our minds that pairs sound to meaning.
According to the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, this picture of the way language works is an illusion that has a sinister hold on us. It forms the basis of most theories in linguistics, it governs the way we navigate the law, it has come to define the architecture of AI language models, as well as our approaches to understanding literature, our common sense thinking about language itself, and how we learn and use it. Perhaps we don’t notice, then, that it rests on a principle of constant deciphering, or translation: it treats words as strings of code that must be translated into the concepts that we’re bringing to the listener’s attention. Just as a novice French learner will read une pomme and connect this with the English word ‘apple’, so will they hear the word ‘apple’ in their native language and ‘translate’ it into the image or concept of an apple.
The problem, as Wittgenstein points out, is that this ‘translation’ doesn’t actually seem to occur in real time; this notion is not faithful to the genuine experience of using language. If I’m at the shop, and I ask the attendant for three red apples, do they first count up to three, retrieve the colour red in their minds, and call up an image of an apple? Surely not – they just grab the things! Maybe, you could say, these processes do occur, but so quickly, due to training and habit, that it is imperceptible. Suppose, then, that I ask the attendant to work faster – do they think up an abstract representation of speed, and communicate it to their body? And should they, unimpressed with this request, utter a single expletive – how should I translate it? What ‘concepts’ do swear words used in this way, or other expressions like ‘ouch’, correspond to? In a living context, believing that meaning is all about translation leads to some absurd consequences.
In fact, in this regard, living contexts tend to be stranger than we initially realise. When among very close friends, we use words and names in ways that might be unintelligible to other listeners, even though we’re still using plain English. Our shared history, memories, and inside jokes imbue our conversations with meanings that go far beyond the dictionary definitions of the words we’re using. Or, to take a more famous case: if I were to ask you, reader, what colour Wednesday is, you would most likely have an answer that we could discuss, and agree or disagree upon. Where, in the normal concept of ‘Wednesday’, is there anything to do with its colour? Is there a separate mental dictionary for cases like this?
The fact is, when it comes to language, context is everything; it accounts for much more than whatever could be written down in a dictionary. This is the core of Wittgenstein’s argument. Language, he observes, is like a box of tools, each with different uses that can be adapted to any purpose. There is no one theme that unites each of these things as tools – the hammer is for striking, the tape for measuring, the nails for fastening – except that they are there, at the ready, in the same place. If it has a use, it could find its way in there, and there is no principle that determines what belongs. In just the same way, there is no general theory of language or what we can do with it.
Le Centre de l’Amour (ca. 1687), Peter Rollos
Instead, we can speak of what Wittgenstein calls ‘language-games’: distinct but loosely defined activities that make use of the spoken or written word. Requesting and retrieving items at a shop is one example. Wittgenstein himself offers some other notable ones – telling a joke, reporting an event, asking, thanking – but really, there are as many language-games as there are things that human beings do with each other. This is the point: language is not separate from action, but belongs to it, and develops alongside it. ‘In the beginning was the deed,’ writes Wittgenstein, citing Goethe’s Faust; in other words, human activity exists before language, which forms just a part of it. We don’t speak first and act after.
Our modern scientific disposition, it seems, has made us believe that the main function of language is to sit outside the world, describe it, and state facts – to communicate knowledge. But this is just one of the things we do with it, and we don’t even do it that often. We do so many other things with each other; we eat, love, play, build, teach, inspire. These are real grounds of language. Wittgenstein calls them ‘forms of life’; what he means by this, in an intentionally loose way, is whatever a community of language-users does as part of its way of living. Forms of life are the smaller elements that make up a way of life; for example, a fishing community has customs and practices relating to different ways of catching fish, cleaning and preparing them, building and maintaining boats, trading, et cetera, each with their corresponding language-games. These things are ultimately cultural. So asking about the language of a community is like asking about its cuisine – what’s available, and what do they do with it?
When we think about the meaning of a word, then, this is the real question – what do we do with it? After all, recalling our shop attendant from earlier, just having a mental picture of three red apples is not enough to do their job; they need to know where the apples are, what to do with them, and how much to charge. If they stand there thinking about apples, they haven’t understood me; translation is not enough for meaning. And meaning counts for more than the ability to translate – it goes the other way, too. Learning what a word means is also learning about the form of life it belongs to. If I tell you that ‘deglazing’ means using liquid to dissolve the caramelised bits left over from frying something in a pan, I haven’t just told you the name of a technique – I’ve also taught you how to do a little bit of cooking, and how to follow a recipe that calls for it.
Like his predecessor Kant, Wittgenstein sought to shift our philosophical priorities away from the single-minded pursuit of total knowledge, towards an appreciation of the humble beauty of everyday life and thinking. He recognised that a perfect theory of language would get us no closer to illuminating the other mysteries of human experience; each of these things is ‘just there, like our lives’. The point is to live.
Nicko Mroczkowski
The Five of Wands (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel March 26, 2024
The Five of Wands is the very middle of Fire’s descent from Heaven to Earth, a place Fire does not want to go. It’s becoming heavy, and what was once pleasantly organized is starting to fracture. It is a card of conflict and annoyance, of too much weight on an already fragile situation.
Name: Strife, the Five of Wands
Number: 5
Astrology: Fire, Saturn in Leo
Qabalah: Gevurah of Yod י
Chris Gabriel March 30, 2024
The Five of Wands is the very middle of Fire’s descent from Heaven to Earth, a place Fire does not want to go. It’s becoming heavy, and what was once pleasantly organized is starting to fracture. It is a card of conflict and annoyance, of too much weight on an already fragile situation.
When this card appears in a reading one can expect a situation will be brought to breaking point. Annoyances will reach “critical mass”, and the conflict that results from this will bring new weight.
In Thoth, we find four wands beneath one great leaden wand. The “Completion” of the four wands is being crushed by the fifth. Atop is Saturn, and beneath is Leo, Saturn is the lead wand, which forces too much weight on the four beneath it creating Strife. Two of the wands bear the head of a Phoenix, the other two Lotuses. We see the sunny yellow of Leo, and the indigo of Saturn clash.
In Rider, we find a depiction of five young men fighting one another with sticks. There are no apparent “sides”, no serious division along the lines of color. This is certainly not a life or death conflict, but a feud among family or friends, no one will die by the wand, but they may well take a beating.
In Marseille, we are given the same formation as Thoth, but lacking intentional esoteric symbolism. To grasp its symbolic significance we must look to the Qabalah.
As a five the card belongs to the fifth Sephiroth on the Tree of Life, Gevurah, which is severity or anger. Being Wands, or Fire, it belongs to Yod, the King. Thus it is “The Anger of the King”
We see this anger in Richard IV, for whom Shakespeare writes “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” which we oft paraphrase as heavy is the head. Great weight brings about unbearable internal pressure and conflict. Kingly anger puts so much force on what’s beneath it, it becomes volcanic and ready to blow up. Even in our best case, an absolute monarchy is fragile.
Kingly anger sinks down to those who serve the king, causing infighting and chaos where there was peace and order.
In our lives, we can see this as a source of pressure and strain, something that throws our insides into turmoil. Or outside ourselves in dysfunctional families, a parent who puts many demands on their children and spouse.
The Five of Wands is a card of conflict within structure, a “heavy heart”. When we are dealt this card we are asked to consider what is weighing heavy upon us and how we can get out from under it before we’re crushed.
Degree Astrology: An Introduction
John Sandbach March 6, 2024
The wheel of the zodiac breaks down into twelve signs; within each of those signs, there are thirty degrees. Degree astrology ascribes a verbal picture to each one of those degrees as a means of characterising the hidden essence of the forces that affect us. When we move in harmony with these evolutionary forces, we are more likely to achieve success…
John Sandbach March 28, 2024
The wheel of the zodiac breaks down into twelve signs; within each of those signs, there are thirty degrees. Degree astrology ascribes a verbal picture to each one of those degrees as a means of characterising the hidden essence of the forces that affect us. When we move in harmony with these evolutionary forces, we are more likely to achieve success.
The verbal pictures are received and interpreted by an individual astrologer; therefore, every set of degree symbols is highly subjective. Some sets feel weak or murky to me, or not quite on the mark. Others are clear, vivid depictions of the energy that each degree carries.
When I began practicing astrology in the 1960s, there were two available sets of degree symbols that had been channeled in the 19th century: the Sepharial and the Charubel Symbols. To me, neither set is helpful for astrological interpretation. I know of no astrologers who use them. These sets lack charisma; they don’t speak to me. They aren’t vivid, so they don’t spark my imagination, and imagination is essential to the highly subjective work of degree symbol interpretation.
In the 1920s, a set of degree symbols was channeled by the psychic Elsie Wheeler under the direction of the illustrious astrologer Marc Jones. This set became known as the Sabian Symbols and is the most widely used set to this day. There are several books you can buy which interpret these symbols, the most famous being Dane Rudhyar’s An Astrological Mandala.
On April 4th, 1984, at 8:04 AM, in Kansas City, Missouri, I channeled a set of degree symbols now known as The Chandra Symbols, with my friend, the astrologer Lisa Leopold. We began by labeling 360 index cards with the numbers one to thirty for each sign, then mixed them up and placed them face down on a table. Lisa would then pick up a card, and I would tell her what I saw; she would write that on the card then select the next. The process had an intense psychedelic momentum, and each image passed through my mind with great vividness.
Channeling the symbols felt like tuning a radio, and when I found the wavelength where reception was clear, I stayed there, listening to the information that came to me, and repeating it to Lisa.
One image I saw was a bull stung by a scorpion. This is the image for the 20th degree of Gemini. I had seen a sculpture at the Vatican Museum, depicting this very thing, and felt suspicious that I was simply recalling a memory (as opposed to finding the correct image for this degree). Then I heard a voice that squashed my suspicions: a consortium of spirits had been showing me, for many years, a catalogue of images that I could draw upon, that would eventually become these degree symbols.
I channeled the Chandra Symbols to achieve new insights into the degrees of the Zodiac. When astrologers compare different symbols from different sets, it can reveal new layers of information to us. The pictures from different sets often amplify, extend, and explain one another.
An example: The Chandra symbol for the 6th degree of Taurus is “a pink diamond”. When I read this symbol, I think of the hardness and brightness of the diamond as signifying power and potency, and the color pink as a sign of spiritual love. Together, the diamond and its pinkness can mean the power to repel discord and negativity, and to imbue people, or situations, with gentleness and love.
The Sabian symbol for the 6th degree of Taurus is “a bridge being built across a gorge”. As I see it, the bridge connects land that is kept apart. Love—signified by the pink in the Chandra symbol for this same degree—also has great power to connect. A good bridge needs strength and durability, inherent qualities of the Chandra diamond.
My reading of the symbols together is that although the building of a bridge may be difficult, by approaching the task with diamond-like strength and willpower, one can accomplish the great work of bringing harmony into the world—with the power of love. This, of course, is not the only possible reading. The verbal pictures found in degree astrology are meant to stimulate an astrologer’s intuition, so their meaning is not necessarily the same in all contexts. “Diamond” and “pink” could be interpreted in many other ways—like images in poetry, they can have a host of different layers of meaning and implication.
“I think of the use of degree symbols in reading a chart as astrological poetry.”
This is the very reason that a group of astrologers oppose degree astrology: for having no limits or clear definitions. Some consider it a kind of astrological free-for-all in which astrologers might read anything and everything into any symbol anyone can come up with. The manner in which some astrologers approach degree astrology can indeed be confusing or misleading, but when degree interpretation is done by an astrologer with clear intuition (ample experience helps), new forces that might otherwise remain hidden within a chart can be brought to light. Degree astrology is an immensely powerful tool; it can be wielded with adeptness and creativity, but it can also be misused.
I have great respect for an organized, logical approach to astrology. I have spent many years learning this approach to chart analysis and use it still when I read for people. It’s a more masculine approach, while Degree astrology feels more feminine to me; together, the two have the power to potently enrich and inform each other.
I think of the use of degree symbols in reading a chart as astrological poetry. I have found that when individuals are told of the degree symbols in their chart, they are touched in inexplicable ways. Often, they feel a deep relationship to the images, and over time these images can work on them therapeutically, bringing a clearer understanding of who they are.
Years after channeling the Chandra Symbols, I channeled three other sets of degree symbols. When we look through a telescope at the degrees, we see that each one is filled with billions of galaxies, and that each one of these galaxies is filled with many millions of stars. With each set of symbols channeled, I am reminded that we have not even begun to scratch the surface of what is here: both in the sky and in ourselves.
John Sandbach is an astrology and Tarot researcher who has been working professionally in these fields for more than 50 years. He is the visionary behind the Chandra Symbols of the 360 degrees of the zodiac system, and he offers private astrology and Tarot readings online. The author of several books, including The Circular Temple and Astrology, Alchemy, and the Tarot, he lives in Kansas City, Missouri.
Maeshowe, Sound, and Viking Runes (Artefact II)
Ben Timberlake March 27, 2024
Maeshowe is a Neolithic chambered burial complex on the Orkney Islands, an archipelago to the north of Scotland that is a floating world of midnight suns and brutal, dark winters. The tomb overlooks the Lochs of Harry and Stenness. On the narrow spit of land that separates the two lochs is The Ring of Brodgar, an ancient stone circle. It is nothing to look at from the outside - bored sheep munching salty grass on a small mound — but inside is one of the finest prehistoric monuments in the world…
WUNDERKAMMER #2
Artefact No: 2
Location: Maeshow, Orkney Islands, Scotland
Age: 5,000 years
Ben Timberlake March 27, 2024
Maeshowe is a Neolithic chambered burial complex on the Orkney Islands, an archipelago to the north of Scotland that is a floating world of midnight suns and brutal, dark winters. The tomb overlooks the Lochs of Harry and Stenness. On the narrow spit of land that separates the two lochs is The Ring of Brodgar, an ancient stone circle. It is nothing to look at from the outside - bored sheep munching salty grass on a small mound — but inside is one of the finest prehistoric monuments in the world.
The tomb’s structure is cruciform: a long passageway some 15m long, a central chamber, with three side-chambers. The main passageway is orientated to the southwest. Building began on the site around 2800BC. It is a work of monumental perfection: each wall of the long passageway is formed of single slabs up to three tons in weight; each corner of the main chamber has four vast standing stones; and the floors, walls and ceilings of the side-chambers are made from single stones. Smaller, long, thin slabs make up the rest of the masonry. They are fitted with unfussy but masterful precision in the local sandstone. It is even more impressive when you realize that these stones were cut and shaped thousands of years before the invention of metal tools. It is estimated to have taken 100,000 hours of labor to construct.
The interior chamber of Maeshowe, illuminated by the sun of the Winter Solstice.
Maeshowe sits within one of the richest prehistoric landscapes in Europe. The four principal sites are two stone circles - the Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness - Maeshowe and the perfectly preserved Neolithic village of Skara Brae. These sites are within a further constellation of a dozen Neolithic and Bronze Age mounds, and other solitary standing stones.
Aligned within this landscape like a vast sundial, Maeshowe is sighted so as to tell the time just once a year, at midwinter. For a couple of weeks at either side of the winter solstice the sun sets to the southwest and the rays of the run enter down the long passage and illuminate the wall at the back of the end chamber. And this midwinter sun, at the zenith of its year, sets perfectly above the Barnhouse Stone some 700m away. The spectacle can be viewed live online every year.
Maeshowe and its sister sites are open to the public and well worth a visit. Because of their remote location they get a fraction of the visitor numbers similar sites receive. There is something deeply penitential about a visit there. The long passage is only a meter and a half tall and archaeologists believe it was designed this way to force people to bow and submit as they walked towards the center of the complex.
The Barnhouse Stone, on the left, aligns perfectly with the entrance to Maeshow, the mound on the right, so that on the day of midwinter, the sun sets above the stone and into the entrance to Maestowe.
“The frequency for Maeshowe was a drum being beaten at 2hz creating an infrasonic frequency that, although inaudible to us, could be felt as a physical or psychological sensations such as dizziness, raised heartbeat, and flying sensations. And that’s before we factor in the drugs.”
As much as Maeshowe is a place of the dead, it is also a temple to sound. Dr Aaron Watson, an honorary fellow from Exeter University, spent a number of years researching the effects of sound at different prehistoric sites. He found that specific pitches of vocal chants and different types of drumming could produce strange, amplified sound effects known as ‘standing waves’. These are very distinct areas of high and low intensity which seem to bear no relation to the source of the sound. In the case of Maeshowe, a drummer in the central chamber could be muted to those standing nearby but the sound would be vastly magnified in the side chambers. The acoustics are so powerful that the Neolithic builders must have known what they were doing when they built the structure. A recessed niche in one of the tunnel walls allowed a large stone to be dragged into the passageway blocking the passage and amplifying the sound.
Even more impressively was the possibility that Maeshowe displayed elements of the Helmholtz Effect - a phenomenon of air resonance in a cavity - but on a much larger scale. The frequency for Maeshowe was a drum being beaten at 2hz creating an infrasonic frequency that, although inaudible to us, could be felt as a physical or psychological sensations such as dizziness, raised heartbeat, and flying sensations. And that’s before we factor in the drugs. These European prehistoric societies made ample use of regular magic mushrooms and the red-and-white spotted Fly Agaric. To the Neolithic visitors the acoustics effects of Maeshowe alone must have been powerful but to combined with hallucinations it must have been one of the most profound and life changing experiences of their lives.
The tomb was rediscovered in 1861. I write ‘rediscovered’ because when the Victorian antiquarians began to clear soil and debris from the inner chambers, they came across evidence that they were not the first ones there since prehistoric times: the walls were adorned with Viking runes.
We have a very good idea who these Vikings were thanks to the Orkneyinga Saga, a medieval narrative history document woven through and embellished with myths. There appear to be two sets of culprits. Firstly, in 1151, a group of Viking Crusaders led by Earl Rognvald on their way to the Holy Land. Then, a couple years later - Christmas 1153 to be precise - a band of Viking looters on a raid led by Earl Harald.
The Norse traditionally held such ancient places with dread and it is not known what drove them to risk their mortal souls and enter the mound: a terrible storm is mentioned, but it may have been the legends of treasure too. The saga records that two of the Earl Rognvald’s men went mad with fear of the mythical Hogboon, from Old Norse hiagbui, or mound-dweller.
There are some 30 runes in Maeshowe, the largest collection outside Scandinavia. Here is a sample:
Crusaders broke into Maeshowe. Lif the earl's cook carved these runes. To the north-west is a great treasure hidden. It was long ago that a great treasure was hidden here. Happy is he that might find that great treasure.
Ofram, the son of Sigurd carved these runes.
Haermund Hardaxe carved these runes.
Thatir the weary Viking came here.
Ingigerth is the most beautiful of all women (carved beside a picture of a slavering dog).
Thorni fucked. Helgi carved.
All too often historians and archaeologists concern themselves with official inscriptions left by kings and emperors and other fevered egos but I don’t think that anything quite says ‘Look on my works ye mighty and despair’ than a Viking warrior getting laid and then recording it on the rock of ages with his axe.
Ben Timberlake is an archaeologist who works in Iraq and Syria. His writing has appeared in Esquire, the Financial Times and the Economist. He is the author of 'High Risk: A True Story of the SAS, Drugs and other Bad Behaviour'.
The Three of Wands (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel March 23, 2024
The Three of Wands is a fiery card, but being a low number, it is still close to its divine source. It is a card of daily activity. When this card comes up in a reading, one thinks of the daily routine, of positive actions that one can undertake…
Name: The Three of Wands
Number: 3
Astrology: Fire, the Sun in Aries
Qabalah: Binah of Yod י
Chris Gabriel March 6, 2024
The Three of Wands is a fiery card, but being a low number, it is still close to its divine source. It is a card of daily activity. When this card comes up in a reading, one thinks of the daily routine, of positive actions that one can undertake.
In Thoth, we are given a very simple image of three flowery wands. Two of them cross the central wand, and flames emanate from the center. Atop is the Sun, and beneath is Aries, the astrological placement of this card, and the second decan of Aries.
The Sun in Aries is a joyous placement, as it is the first in the zodiac. It is the bright beginning of a new astrological year. It is a daily cycle, and the bright morning of a new day. The title of “Virtue” puts one to mind of Benjamin Franklin’s morningly question of “What good shall I do this day?” This is the card of Daily Virtue.
In Rider, we are given the image of Franklin’s question. A man holding a wand, beside two wands. He looks upon the rising Sun. He is preparing himself for the day. He has a brilliant view, overlooking a bay, the ships within it, and the mountains. He can foresee the actions he must undertake.
In Marseille, as it is not an esoteric deck, but one that was used to gamble and play, we are given no esoteric imagery, simply three wands. It is the same formation as Thoth, but without distinct coloring. Here we must utilize the Qabalah to decipher the message.
Being a three, it belongs to the Sephirothic sphere of Binah, or Understanding. Being Wands, or Fire, it is of Yod, the King, and the first letter of the Tetragrammaton. Thus it is “the Understanding of the King”.
And just what is that understanding?
Let us look to poetry, and the I Ching. In Ezra Pound’s Cantos, he famously wrote “Day by day make it new”, which is an ideogrammic translation of the Chinese characters featured in the poem.
新日日新
New Sun Sun New
Sun doubles as “Day” , a deeply poetic character!
In Richard Wilhelm’s I Ching we find Tching’s wisdom mirrored perfectly in the commentary on Hexagram 26. “Only through such daily self-renewal can a man continue at the height of his powers.”
It makes sense as Tching, first emperor of the Shang dynasty, and “Tang the Perfect” was thought to have written much of the I Ching’s text. His wisdom is the very nature of the Three of Wands, daily virtue, daily self renewal.
“Day by day make it new.”
Grappling
Ale Nodarse March 21, 2024
How can we picture the unrepresentable?
In the fourteenth-century, Nicephorus Callistus staged a similar question in different terms. Speaking before a painting of the Archangel Michael, he wondered: “How is it that matter can drag the spirit down and encompass the immaterial by means of colors?”
Pietro Cavallini, The Last Judgement, 1300
Ale Nodarse March 5, 2024
How can we picture the unrepresentable?
In the fourteenth-century, Nicephorus Callistus staged a similar question in different terms. Speaking before a painting of the Archangel Michael, he wondered: “How is it that matter can drag the spirit down and encompass the immaterial by means of colors?”¹
Artists had been grappling with the question for quite some time. And — whether that “immaterial” is first or final love, sudden violence or unexpected salvation, birth, death, or the single night of the year when the cereus flower blossoms; or, whether, as for Callistus, it really is an angel — many of us, artists and viewers, continue to grapple.
Pietro Cavallini’s Last Judgment, completed in 1300 and preserved in Rome’s Basilica di Santa Cecilia in Trastevere — where it stretches across an expanse of wall opposite the nave and where it may still be seen today — raises the question of the unrepresentable in pictorial form. One of the first artists for whom it is possible to provide a bibliography, Cavallini was known for his skill in fresco (a form of wall painting) and mosaic.² He was born, lived, worked, and died in Rome (excluding a decade of patronage in Naples), and he lived a remarkably long life, from (c.) 1240 to 1340, his nearly one hundred years a small miracle at the time.³
Cavallini garnered textual praise as early as the fifteenth century, within the Commentaries of the Florentine sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti: “[He] was more learned than all the other masters,” Ghiberti writes.⁴ Ghiberti singled out Cavallini’s Last Judgment for admiration, suggesting that the artist painted its entirety with his own hand. Nearly all evidence of this claim, however, had evaporated in a series of changes made to the church in the sixteenth century. Renovations began in 1527—when the monastery adjoining the church was occupied by an enclosed order of Benedictine nuns—and continued through the interventions of various cardinals.⁵ The placement of choir-stalls against the basilica’s western wall concealed and, by a miraculous twist of fate, preserved Cavallini’s masterpiece. In 1900, the stalls were removed and the Last Judgement emerged, as if from underground.⁶
Twelve apostles appear holding various attributes. Upon their perspectival bench—the primary architectural element—the apostles look to Christ in his almond-shaped frame. The Virgin Mary and John the Baptist amplify the apostle's gazes, reflected by the row of angels. Below this upper register, Judgement unfolds, with angels as redeemers and executioners. Their bodies vary greatly, with near-human postures assuming greater energy and violence towards the most damned members of the scene.
Certain aspects of the image are to be expected. Comparative analysis points to several Roman precedents with the same archetypal arrangement: six apostles seated on either side of an enthroned Christ, surrounded by angels, the Virgin, and John the Baptist. Other elements derive from more remote sources. The apostolic attributes have been equated to French sculptural precedents, while the downward posturing of Christ’s hands and the careful separation of the scene’s participants speak of Byzantium.⁷ (I picture nuns sitting in front of the angels on mahogany chairs.)
Few tourists know of the fresco today, and visitation remains sparse. On the day of my visit, a young, black-haired woman enters the choir. An elevator’s ding promises the arrival of this only other guest. We look for several minutes, staring silently at our mutual subject. Could Cavallini have anticipated this kind of communion?
I return often to this Almandine Christ, to Cavallini’s Angels. Standing level to figures raised above human scale remains uncanny. The most recent renovation of the space has left an open void of a meter or so between the viewer’s ground and the visionary’s wall. Signs warn one not to step too closely and red ropes provide a peremptory border. This distance seems fitting – the angels too “other,” too ethereal to approach. It is their wings which offer themselves again and again and which continue to catch me, in their shimmering gradation of tones.
In the choir, you can hear them: birds. But Cavallini’s wings do not belong to them. The wings of these painted angels glisten and elude. Their fields of color radiate. Beginning with the brilliant tufts of the upper white wing, each color—red, blue, and yellow—differs in value with every descendent feather. The tendency is to count: moving down, feather by feather, color by color, in equal steps. Nine: the number of distinct tones gracing the upper wings. Nine: the number of cosmic divisions and the number, according to medieval thought, of the angelic orders. In the thirteenth-century, the philosopher and theologian Robert Grosseteste formulated a color axis based on the manipulation of hue: degrees of brightness beginning in darkness and reaching the intensification of a “burning glass.”⁸ Fittingly, within Cavallini’s Judgement, the greatest intensity—the greatest measurable brightness—emerges from the wings of the Seraphim, the “burning ones.” Their color, in all its exactitude, claims celestial status.
Staring forth, Cavallini’s angels seem indifferent to nature itself, an abstraction. Their alien wings divulge no source beyond the material, the pigments, from which they now emerge. Theirs is a dissimulating suggestion, an image moving away from earthly referents, from birds on this side of sky, to those which lift, gradually, to other heights.
*
Callistus didn’t answer his own question, at least not directly. But he did feel something as he grappled with his painting. “This is [a work] of ardent love,” he writes, “and it kindles the heart.”⁹ Grappling was, and still is, an act of love.
¹Cyril A. Mango. The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312-1453: Sources and Documents
²Paul Hetherington, Pietro Cavallini: A Study in the Art of Late Medieval Rome
³On his time in Naples, see Cathleen Fleck, “The Rise of the Court Artist: Cavallini and Giotto in Fourteenth-Century Naples,” Art History 31 no. 4 (September 2008): 460-483. While dates remain imprecise, several art historians have advanced a birth date in the late 1240s, and suggest—from textual evidence—that Cavallini lived for nearly a century, well into the 1330s.
⁴Lorenzo Ghiberti, I commentari (The Commentaries)
⁵Cardinals Sfondrato and Acquaviva, in 1599 and 1725, respectively.
⁶Hetherington’s analysis (note 2) provides extensive details of the restoration phases.
⁷Ibid.
⁸Hannah E. Smithson, et al. “A Color Coordinate System from a 13th Century Account of Rainbows,” Journal of the Optical Society of America.
⁹Mango, 231.
Alejandro (Ale) Nodarse Jammal is an artist and art historian. They are a Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art & Architecture at Harvard University and are completing an MFA at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art. They think often about art — its history and its practice — in relationship to observation, memory, language, and ethics.
Nonviolent Communication - An Introduction
Wayland Myers March 19, 2024
Of the millions of species that have come, gone, and are alive today, why are we the ones that are the most successful, capable, and dominant? It's a question that may or may not ever find its answer but one track of our evolutionary development is quite different from any other species…
Wayland Myers March 5, 2024
Of the millions of species that have come, gone, and are alive today, why are we the ones that are the most successful, capable, and dominant? It's a question that may or may not ever find its answer but one track of our evolutionary development is quite different from any other species.
Throughout our history, the traits, mutations, inclinations, and cultural practices that improved our abilities to get along and helped sustain group cohesion have been retained, improved, and passed onto future generations - over, and over, and over. Our species has become successful at living in groups of ever-increasing size, complexity, and composition, and we are enjoying the tremendous benefits this makes possible. We are not alone in these skills nor in their benefits, just ask the ants, bees, and termites.
Alfabeto in sogno (1683), Giuseppe Maria Mitelli
So, if the human tree has been growing and evolving for a very long time, and over those millennia, our abilities to get along have passed along and improved, then why are we experiencing such serious divides today? My thoughts are that although our bodies might be done evolving the neurological and sensory capacities needed to help us coexist with each other, the evolution of the emotional, intellectual, and sociological wisdom and skills still has a ways to go. The practice and approach to interpersonal communication known as Nonviolent Communication is offered here as a contribution to that tract of our evolution.
In the 1960s and 70s, Marshall Rosenberg, a psychologist, developed a communication methodology called Nonviolent Communication (NVC). NVC is a set of concepts and recommendations designed to help us think, speak, and listen in ways that awaken compassion within ourselves and between us. It is concerned with increasing mutual understanding and respect for differences, and inspiring people to cooperate for the betterment of each. Its goal is to leave us feeling whole and connected, and to ensure our motivations for helping ourselves and each other are not borne of fear, obligation, or guilt, but because helping has become the most fulfilling activity we can imagine. From experience, it can be truly life changing.
Marshall dedicated his life to traveling the world, helping countless individuals and groups resolve conflicts, and teaching NVC to tens of thousands of people. His gentle, profoundly insightful, and healing soul is missed by many.
“Its goal is to leave us feeling whole and connected, and to ensure our motivations for helping ourselves and each other are not borne of fear, obligation, or guilt, but because helping has become the most fulfilling activity we can imagine.”
Intimacy
There is an old saying that intimacy means “into me see.” I think it describes precisely how humans go about creating a sense of connection with each other. It's been well documented, and it is clear from experience, that the most powerful thing we can do to create bonds with others is to reveal something we feel vulnerable about. To tell people how we truly feel about someone, something we're embarrassed about, what we dearly desire, the dreams we hope to fulfill, or the ones we criticize ourselves for having is how we can become closer to others. This is exactly what Nonviolent Communication tries to accomplish.
Nonviolent Communication goes about this by helping us maintain the focus of our conversation on life-enhancing issues. It grounds us specifically in people's well-being and how to improve it, rather than the evaluative issues of right, wrong, who's to blame, or what people should do. Its concepts and recommendations help us remember the important points and critical tasks that can inspire compassion, connection, and generosity in our relationships, and it helps us regain these when they are temporarily lost.
One of the most beautiful things about NVC is that its successful use doesn't require that both people use it. I've used it successfully with many people who know nothing of NVC. Working to avoid thinking and speaking in ways that can create trouble also helps me minimize being triggered when the other person engages in them, and together, that makes a huge difference.
Here is NVC’s first recommendation.
The Practice of Nonviolent Communication
Try to avoid using forms of expression that generate pain in the listener, as this decreases the likelihood of a constructive and mutually beneficial connection being made. Two categories of behaviors are well-known to have this effect.
The first is the moralistic appraising of another’s behavior, feelings, values, ideas, or choices as right/wrong, good/bad, reasonable/unreasonable, or fair/unfair and then sharing our appraisal with them! Moralistic judgments are not only liable to generate emotional pain but also serve as invitations to engage in stressful, often dead-ended debates.
The second category of connection-inhibiting behavior is when we try to get people to do what we want by asking for it in ways that deny them a choice; for example, telling them what they should or are supposed to do, that we have a right to it, or trying to manipulate them via threats or guilt trips.
Sadly, we encounter these forms of speech and methods of behavioral coercion often, and equally sadly, we use them ourselves. How could we not because these methods are what we have been taught and are the norms in many cultures. NVC provides us with an alternative way to achieve even better results.
In the next installment, I’ll detail the concepts and recommendations that constitute the practice of Nonviolent Communication.
Wayland Myers, Ph.D. is a psychologist who writes books and articles on Nonviolent Communication and other applications of compassion. He was introduced to the Nonviolent Communication process in 1986 by its creator Dr. Marshall Rosenberg, and has since used it extensively in his personal and professional lives with profound and deeply valued results.
The Poetic Diary of Ramuntcho Matta (Excerpt I)
Ramuntcho Matta March 14, 2024
How to become a better me?
But first, what do you call me? How do you call me? There are no special lines, no direct lines. There are only paths mades of confusions, pains and distraught. Paths mades of encounters, dances and sleeps…
Ramuntcho Matta March 14, 2024
Here I stand. I am invited to do a tribute to my friend Lou Reed. He was a great influence on my desires for a higher life. He helped me understand what music is. That a record is a room full of doors. I met Lou Reed when I was 12 years old, and from that moment, he became a brother of soul. A presence. It's not easy to put into words, that thing beyond a thing.
The song that I sing here is the first collaboration I made with Brion Gysin. Brion wrote the lyrics and I called chords as they came to me.
I
I want somebody
somebody special
somebody special to live with
somebody special to look after me
I am looking for somebody
somebody special
and if that somebody special looks after me ?
I got the hands and the heart to give with
I am not all that hard
hard to live with
who can this somebody
somebody special
possibly be ?
maybe
this somebody
somebody special
can only be
me
me
me
I was 15 when I met Brion and a disaster. After three days in a new school, the principal called me into his office:
“I understand that your preference is to be on the street and you’re right, you can learn a lot of precious things out there, but my function here is to educate you. I will offer you a deal: if you come to poetry and philosophy lessons and you help a friend a mine, a dying old man, by cooking for him, helping him to clean himself and just being there, then I won’t tell your parents that you’re not going to school and every year I will put you on the next level”. That old man was Brion Gysin.
It is better to have a body than not, but worst of all is to not be prepared for the loss of it. We started by studying the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Egyptian Book of Breathing. It took Brion ten years to die so we had time to study this and other things. He had spent 23 years of his life in Morocco, initiating himself to the keys of invisibility, and to the keys of time.
I was 16 when we made that song. Brion had been writing songs since the 1940s but he never had the courage to sing them. So I wrote the music to try and put him on the track he had feared.
Music is, for me, one of the keys, but the key to what door?
The song starts with an "I" and ends with “me, me, me". Is there one I and three mes? Sometimes we need a substitute personality to handle confusions and another me can come in, and then another one, and a third and so on. But when we have too many, how can we get rid of them?
You have to ride on
And fly in
Every morning I do a little drawing and I put some lyrics on them, like a song. Drawing is music, it is vibrations and frequencies, colors and feelings. Words arrive and then something else entirely joins them.
I
I want something
something special
something special to live with
something special to look after me
What is ‘me’ is a good question. How is ‘me’ is a better one. How do I become a better me is better yet.
Ramuntcho Matta is a producer, sound designer and visual artist.
The Magician (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel March 12, 2024
Watch his hands! The Magician is putting on a show, whether he’s holding a wand or juggling all of his tools. The Magician has before him each of the magical weapons that form the suits of the Tarot: a wand, a cup, a blade, and a coin. I am always brought to the phrase “Play with a full deck”. The Magician is doing just that…
Name: The Magician
Number: 1
Astrology: Mercury
Qabalah: Beth ב
Chris Gabriel March 12, 2024
Watch his hands - The Magician is putting on a show. Whether he’s holding a wand or juggling all of his tools, he has before him each of the magical weapons that form the suits of the Tarot: a wand, a cup, a blade, and a coin. I am always brought to the phrase “Play with a full deck”. The Magician is doing just that.
In Thoth, he is the Magus. The God Mercury, or Hermes. He has a big smile, and long winged heels. He shines radiant gold. In addition to the four tools of the suits, there is a Phoenix wand and a winged egg, for he is going between all opposites. Behind him is his Caduceus, the serpentine wand, and beneath him is his monkey form and shadow, Thoth Cynocephalus. Mercury effortlessly plays with his tools.
In Rider, we see him noble, robed and handsome. He has an Ourboros, the snake eating its tail for his belt, a magic wand in his hand, and infinity above him. He points to above with his wand, and to below with his left hand. Atop the table are his weapons and a great many flowers fill the bottom of the card.
In Marseille, we are given le Bateleur, a street performer. A mundane character compared to a grandiose Ceremonial Magician or Mercury . Here is a trickster hustling fools with his trade. A figure in a bar or at a fair. This is not a Magician who is going to commune with angels and demons, but a hokey fortune teller with a tacky neon sign.
The Tarot is considered by many occultists to be the first book, one written by Hermes, or under his Egyptian name, Thoth. The God who created writing and magic. So in some ways, this card is a self portrait.
Mercury is androgynous, all the more so when placed in its alchemical trinity with the Emperor and the Empress - Mercury between Sulphur and Salt.
Mercury is the spectrum between all dualities, and effortlessly flies between them. The Tarot itself is structured by these symbolic dualities, between Fire and Water, Earth and Air, the World and the Heavens. Yet in this card, they are tools or toys to the Magician.
Just as at the beginning of our studies, we are the Fool, as we master our understanding of the Tarot, we become like the Magician. Through understanding, we develop a “full deck” with which we can play.
Qabalistically, this card represents the 2nd path on the Tree of Life, that going between God and Understanding, Beth. Beth is an ideogram of a House. Consider how when playing with a deck one can build a “House of Cards”. This is the realm of the Magician.
When dealt the Magician in a reading, think upon your skills, your abilities, and how you can put them into use. This is a call to use our abilities to shape the world around us, to not be stuck in one place, but to apply our understanding!
The Tarot itself is structured by these symbolic dualities, between Fire and Water, Earth and Air, the World and the Heavens.