Pay Attention: Simone Weil (1909-1943) and the Art of Selflessness
Nicko Mroczkowski July 30, 2024
How do you live a good life? This deceptively simple question is the source of the entire Western philosophical tradition. A certain path was laid by Socrates and we’ve walked it since, yet all of its detours eventually take us back to the original mystery…
“She was the patron saint of all outsiders.” – André Gide
Nicko Mroczkowski July 30, 2024
How do you live a good life? This deceptively simple question is the source of the entire Western philosophical tradition. A certain path was laid by Socrates and we’ve walked it since, yet all of its detours eventually take us back to the original mystery.
Philosophy, of course, is also about knowledge and truth, but these things are worth little without a purpose in sight. It’s hard to admit, but not all knowledge is valuable. Consider ‘Information’, an iconic prose poem by American writer David Ignatow, which makes this point perhaps more clearly than any piece of nonfiction could. Its unnamed narrator describes the pleasure they’ve taken in counting out each of the two-million-something leaves of a particular tree. Knowledge is gained, it’s close enough to the truth, but it offers nothing.
Generous in Pardoning the Offenders, Francesco I d’Este. 1659.
The proper task of the philosopher has always been using knowledge to teach us how things should be; while the question of how they are is best left to the scientists. Simone Weil, a real philosopher’s philosopher, understood this prompt, but took things further. For her, to be a philosopher is not just to contemplate and tell us about ‘the good’, but to strive to actually be good. As she writes in her notebooks, ‘philosophy (including problems of cognition, etc.) is exclusively an affair of action and practice’.
Her unusual and tragically brief life is testament to this conviction. Born into a fairly wealthy family of professionals in Paris, she began her philosophical education at the prestigious École normale supérieure, which produced such celebrity intellectuals as Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and Henri Bergson. Yet from a young age, she was notorious for refusing the comforts of her privilege and campaigning for the less fortunate. When granted a year’s sabbatical from the comfortable secondary-school teaching post that she secured after her graduation, she opted to build cars as an unskilled female (and therefore especially exploited) labourer in factories across Paris.
These episodes and tendencies are as much a part of her philosophical legacy as her ideas. When it comes to Weil, we need to look not only at what she wrote, but also what she did. Though she never actually published a full-length book, probably she was both too modest and too busy, there is no shortage of writing from Weil. Each of her texts is really the product of her experiences and the different phases that scholars sort them into – Marxism, Platonism, Christian mysticism – are also descriptions of the different periods of her personal life.
This is all pretty weird for a philosopher in the Western tradition. Many of us have discussed the relationship between theory and practice – the distinction originates in the work of Plato, the very first of the greats – but few have practised their theories to the extent that Weil does. She herself speaks of the ‘pettiness’ of the philosophers in their personal lives. Not necessarily to their discredit, but the great philosophers of the West have largely been armchair contemplators, favouring intellectual philosophical labours over manual ones.
“The best thing the individual can do is make themselves as small as possible; but also as large as all of creation.”
Not so with Weil, clearly. She believed that if, like any deep thinker, you really pay attention to something, really, you’re also already involving yourself in it. For her, to truly pay attention is to bring about a modification of one’s very being: namely, its disappearance. To be absorbed in something enough that the self fades from view. We typically associate paying attention with an active mental strain, as if our brains were squinting, as they might be in a boring lecture. Weil argues that this has it the wrong way around. It’s not so much that we’re training our focus on something, but more that we’re keeping everything else back – our desires, hang-ups, interests, and momentary emotions – in order to make space for the thing we’re attending to. And the strain we feel is the impatience to get back to our own matters. This is why she refers to attention as a ‘negative effort’, or as essentially passive. The wordplay is clearer in French: attention is attente (waiting), and paying it means anticipating, in large and small ways, the delivery of something bigger than us. When we listen carefully to a close friend, for example, are we not really setting aside our own cares and hanging out for whatever it is they want to confide in us, on their terms, which have become ours?
The Eye of God, Georgiana Houghton. 1862.
This way of thinking about attention has some consequences that are, once again, pretty strange. If attention is an emptying-out of the self, then a morality based upon it is one of radical selflessness. In contrast, Western philosophy has almost always held the individual and their freedom as the basis for any code of conduct. There are three traditional ways of establishing this foundation: thinking about how one could make oneself an outstanding person (Aristotle); thinking about the responsibilities that come with being a free individual (Kant); and thinking about how one’s actions impact the world outside them (utilitarianism).
Weil’s ethics of attention sidesteps these problems altogether. The best thing the individual can do, for her, is make themselves as small as possible; but also as large as all of creation. To live for others is her ultimate maxim. It makes sense, I think, why Weil’s life went the way it did. She saw the temptations of comfort as things that would ground her in herself. They were obstacles to, rather than opportunities for, the diversity of experiences that belongs to goodness. And she sought out this latter diversity by practising solidarity with the oppressed in every available context.
She certainly took this moral project to the extremes. She died of a heart attack at age 34. According to her biographers, she felt that she had to subject herself to the same conditions that her comrades were suffering in occupied France, having herself left for London to protect her family, and so she effectively starved herself to death. It’s difficult to say exactly whether this is an example to follow, but her compassion for others borders on the saintly. And her lesson is equally difficult to ignore: the right kind of knowledge is knowledge of others, and the right kind of life uses this knowledge to make things better for everyone.
A good life begins with paying attention to the things outside us, without cynicism, bitterness, or fear. We can’t understand who we are in the world just by thinking about ourselves. It all seems so obvious when put like this: how could we know what being good is without meeting the world we’re being good to? Like Buddha himself, we need to go out there and see for ourselves. Ironically, this kind of openness to others only strengthens our sense of the uniqueness of each individual.
This, then, is Weil’s advice. Be good: listen, lose yourself in the world, and in doing so, belong to it.
Nicko Mroczkowski
The Ace of Wands (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel July 27, 2024
The Ace of Wands is the seed, the catalyst, and the Promethean spark that sets the suit of Wands aflame. It is the very idea of fire. Across the three decks, we have the image of a gnarled stick emanating energy…
Name: Ace of Wands
Number: 1
Astrology: Fire
Qabalah: Kether of Yod
Chris Gabriel July 27, 2024
The Ace of Wands is the seed, the catalyst, and the Promethean spark that sets the suit of Wands aflame. It is the very idea of fire. Across the three decks, we have the image of a gnarled stick emanating energy.
In Marseille, a hand comes through a ruffled portal, holding a large stick, one can see it came from a tree for twigs have been cut, and rays of energy surround it.
In Rider, a gleaming hand comes forth from a cloud, above a mountain and stream, it holds a stick still covered in leaves.
In Thoth, we have a far more vibrant image, deep reds and oranges make up this stick, with flaming Yods forming the Tree of Life. This is essentially an image of the formation of the Suit of Wands, a singular fire and its tenfold manifestations.
The Ace of Wands is a brilliant card and the first of the Minor Arcana. Fire is both the first element of the Tetragrammaton and the first divine energy. When we see this card, we should think both of a robed wizard with his magic wand, and of a matchstick, a miniature mundane wand. With a simple matchstick, one can set fire to the world.
Prometheus was a Titan in Greek mythology, his name means “Foresight”. As he foresaw the Olympian victory over the Titans, he changed sides. Though a friend to Zeus, Prometheus liked mankind. After Zeus took fire away from man as a punishment, Prometheus returned the gift of Fire by way of a stick, a hollow fennel stalk that hid the fire within it.
Man was given not simple material fire, but the very idea of conjuring it. Each stick holds the secret of fire, but only when the art of friction is applied. When we light a match, we utilize that divine gift - with wood and friction we once again create fire.
The Ace of Wands is more than a matchstick. To expand the idea more fully, we need only look down to the material body. The Wand can also be understood as the creative Phallus. Myth assures us that the divine mirrors the human, even our vulgarity: the Egyptians imagined their world had been formed by the masturbation of a lonely God, Atum.
God uses tools for the sake of creation, or at least, God is understood through symbols we are able to comprehend, and thus the body of man reflects the creative ability of the divine.
Whether the Wand in question is a phallus, an engraved ceremonial staff, or a matchstick, its goal is to manifest Fire. As the story of Prometheus shows, fire is the only element man could not conjure on his own. We are made of earth, and we shape the Earth, made of water, and our mouths bring forth spit, made of air, and we breathe it. Fire, the electric energy that gives us life, was entirely out of our control until we were given it. Fire is the vital energy.
When you pull the Ace of Wands, you are given the Promethean flame. With the tiniest spark of Will, you may manifest a brilliant fire.
Monuments to Gesture
Isabelle Bucklow July 25, 2024
Writing is one of those traces left behind when a hand, an instrument, and a thought meet upon, and move across, a surface. For that writing to be ‘comprehensible’ there must also converge a whole cultural system of rules and conventions which the writer and reader share – the ‘language’…
Letter (page 1), from the portfolio "Letter and Indices to 24 Songs", 1974. Hanne Darbovan.
Isabelle Bucklow July 25, 2024
“To write is to produce a mark that will constitute a sort of machine which is productive in turn, and which my future disappearance will not, in principle, hinder in its functioning”¹
Last month we looked at the gesture of grasping (a tool), and how the chaine operatoire (an anthropological tool) sought to grasp the sequence of gestures that bring something into being. Yet, gesture still slipped between our fingers, evading language and method.The gesture ‘is always a gesture of not being able to figure something out in language’, so said Agamben.² But this ‘not being able to figure out’ simultaneously contains the gesture of trying to figure out. And so if a gesture is always about figuring out, then attempts at definition and completion are futile, because gestures operate in the sphere of potentiality. If we are to inch closer to the nature of being-in-gesture, we must turn to its traces – those figurations of a once-present gesture.
Two Figures from Emersons Nature, c.1938. C.P. Cranch.
Writing is one of those traces left behind when a hand, an instrument, and a thought meet upon, and move across, a surface. For that writing to be ‘comprehensible’ there must also converge a whole cultural system of rules and conventions which the writer and reader share – the ‘language’ Agamben refers to. But even before that, before the lightness of the thought-just-thought hardens into meaning, think of Brian Eno and John Cale singing ‘up on a hill, as the day dissolves’, his ‘pencil turning moments into line.’³ These ‘lines’ could be a drawing or a song verse in cursive script, but just because those moments and thoughts have turned into line, that is not to say they have arrived at a stabilised signification: prior to being connected up to make identifiable characters and made ‘meaningful’ (by way of rules and conventions) , a line is quintessentially visual, an abstract, pure form.
Hanne Darboven (1941-2009) was a conceptual artist who, for most of her life, lived and worked in her family home in a suburb of Hamburg. Between 1966-68 she visited New York where she became good friends with Sol LeWitt and Lucy Lippard, pioneering conceptual artists and thinkers of the day. New York was where Hanne ‘tried to find something that [she] could work on for [her] whole life, it was where [she] built [her] work.’⁴ That work consisted of handwritten grids and columns of dates, equations, scripts, and transcripts; looping ‘u’s repeated then crossed out resembling lacework woven into graph paper; images and pages collected and collaged. Despite the incomprehensibility of her lines and cryptic mathematical prose, and the self-admitted fact that ‘the writing fills the space as a drawing would [and] turns out to be aesthetic’, Darboven insisted she was ‘a writer first and a visual artist second.’⁵ Her work was obsessive, ascetic, encyclopedic, machinic, and mesmeric. It is pure structure, pure gesture.
In a letter to Sol LeWitt, Hanne said of her work ‘I write but I describe nothing’. Seemingly a paradoxical endeavour, there is logic to this illogic. Writing is the act (and actualisation) of thinking, while language is the description of it. Writing need not entail expressive language, instead writing can simply reproduce writing. Clarice Lispector wrote, in her Discovering the World, ‘In order to write the only study required is the act of writing itself.’⁶ And Darboven did study the act: in the monastic tradition of the biblical scribe, she would copy passages from Goethe, Brecht, Diderot, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Gertrude Stein, Rilke, Sartre – retracing their studious concentration and hand movements line by line. As art-historian Briony Fer has observed, what Darboven embarked on was ‘a ritual re-enactment [...] of writing.’⁷ Driven to access the gesture, the activity, of writing itself..
“The act of writing is the inevitable result of my being alive”
Darboven’s Studenbuch (Book of Hours, 1991) is, as critic Donald Kusptit wrote, ‘a diary of gestures that unfurled [...] around the exhibition space.’⁸ In this sprawling work of yellow A4 pages filled with undulating ‘u’s, time – centuries of it – is experienced as monumental, and gestural, duration. Flusser reminds us ‘[the gesture of] writing is one of the ways thought becomes phenomenal’ but writing too makes time phenomenal. The ‘u’s used are the German equivalent of English ampersands: ‘and-and-and’, ad infinitum. Time and gesture flow, undifferentiated, through waves of this interconnected symbol. I summon Clarice Lispector again who wrote ‘I don’t make literature: I simply live in the passing of time.’⁹ Darboven’s ongoing ‘and-and-and’ seeks not to represent time, but mark time spent, time lived and exhaustively worked through, on and on.
R.M. Rilke - Das Studenbuch Leo Castelli, 1987. Hanne Darboven.
Marks in space and on surfaces indeed ‘mark time’, like the prophetic prisoner who inscribes tallies on the wall,or like I, in my teenage diary, who would log looks from crushes and endless days until summer holidays. The original Book of Hours similarly inscribed time onto surface, the liturgical text designating a temporal cycle of devotions and recitals across the eight canonical hours of the day. If, as Sam Lewitt surmised, ‘Darboven’s life project was to record and reconfigure the possibilities for expressing the movement of time as writing’, I’d add that her project recorded the movement of gesture in time through writing.¹⁰
Darboven’s proclivity toward copying, transcribing and repetition were not, as many have seen them, self-effacing acts of estrangement. In spending her time writing, Darboven was simultaneously writing herself into the work. In a 1989 interview with writer Isabelle Graw, Darboven explained she was ‘rewriting things by hand in order to convey [herself] through the mediation of the experience.’¹¹ The resulting work is entirely subjective, her identity being both invented and inscribed through the act of writing. ‘The act of writing’, Lispector said, ‘is the inevitable result of my being alive.’¹²
Writing is the trace of a once present gesture, a mark in space – announcing presence, thought, time – created by an action in space. The gesture of writing, a monument to moments of living.
¹ Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 8
² Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 2000) 59
³ Brian Eno and John Cale, “Spinning Away”, Wrong Way Up (Opal/Warner Bros, 1990)
⁴ Darboven quoted in Miriam Schoofs, “Hanne Darboven”, Flash Art (Online, 14th November, 2014)
⁵ Hanne Darboven and Coosje Van Bruggen, “TODAY CROSSED OUT, A PROJECT FOR ARTFORUM”, Artforum, vol. 25, no.5 (1988)
⁶ Clarice Lispector, Discovering the World, trans. by Giovanni Ponteiro (Manchester: Carcanet, 1992) 135
⁷ Briony Fer, The Infinite Line: Re-Making Art after Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) 205
⁸ Donald Kuspit, “Hanne Darboven”, Artforum, vol.32, no.2 (1993)
⁹ Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life, trans. by Johnny Lorenz (New York: New Directions, 2012) 7
¹⁰ Sam Lewitt in Stephen Hoban, Kelly Kivland, Katherine Atkins (eds.) Artists on Hanne Darboven (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2016) 62
¹¹ See Graw in Miriam Schoofs, Joâo Fernandes (eds.),The Order of Time and Things: The Home-Studio of Hanne Darboven (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2014) 23
¹² Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life, 7
Isabelle Bucklow is a London-based writer, researcher and editor. She is the co-founding editor of motor dance journal.
Geometry in the Garden Pt. 3
Peter Newman July 23, 2024
A pathway is the opposite of a grid. In culture, the path is one of the most prevailing life metaphors. It is the spatialization of a story, as we move from one event to the next. Walking a path in a garden is like living in a frame within a frame, a fractal of time on a much larger journey. Like most rock gardens, time moves slower here. The sense of everything in its right place feels generous and liberating. All has been taken care of — you are free to wander…
Hanbe Garden, Mirei Shigemori 1970.
Peter Newman July 23, 2024
In the west of Japan, the Hanbe Garden is one of Shigemori’s less-known works and was completed in 1970 when he was seventy-four years old. It contains an intricately structured pathway that loops through the garden. Along the way are monoliths, inclines, vantage points, bridges, fish ponds, stepping stones, islands and a waterfall. On a plateau, some checkered paving from which a line of diagonal squares leads further.
A pathway is the opposite of a grid. In culture, the path is one of the most prevailing life metaphors. The spatialization of a story, as we move from one event to the next. Walking a path in a garden is living in a frame within a frame, a fractal of time on a much larger journey. Like most rock gardens, time moves slower here. The sense of everything in its right place feels generous and liberating. All has been taken care of — you are free to wander.
Mitaki Temple. Mirei Shigemori 1965
Shigemori created another garden a few years earlier in 1965 at the Mitaki Temple, built on a hillside on the other side of the city, not far from the centre. Among dense foliage, a two-tiered waterfall cascades down to a glade and into a pond, across which substantial stone bridges are placed. Rising from the water is a symmetrical rock triangle. Watching over the garden is a group of standing stones, like prehistoric elders. The garden is completely timeless, it feels like it could have been sleeping for a thousand years, or much longer. That it seems so is magical.
Between the Hakone Mountains and overlooking Sagami Bay, is the Enoura Observatory created by Hiroshi Sugimoto, which opened in 2017. Founded on the principle that Japanese culture is rooted in the art of living in harmony with nature, it aims to reconnect visually and mentally with the oldest of human memories. Enoura features a range of architectural styles from medieval to contemporary, much of it aligned with the movement of the sun.
There is a recreation of a ruined Roman amphitheatre, encircling a stage with the sea as a backdrop. The stage is made from optical glass supported by a wooden lattice, appearing to the audience as to be floating on water. Once a year it will be naturally illuminated from beneath, as the sun enters the glass planks which point out to sea. Close by, a narrow walkway juts out from the landscape towards the horizon, as if a springboard into the void.
Bamboo Grove. Enora Observatory. Hiroshi Sugimoto 2017
The gallery is built with Oya stone, the same textured volcanic rock used by Frank Lloyd Wright for the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. The space is 100 metres long and 100 metres above the sea. Built in line with the axis of the sun, on the summer solstice light will travel gradually across the space from one end to the other, as the day begins.
There are many wonders here. A strolling garden through the landscape, in which a bamboo grove stands in perfect contrast to the horizontal seascapes, for which the artist is famous. A cabin filled with fossils from under the sea. A tea pavilion, with an optical glass rock on which to step through the square nijiriguchi door, a feature of traditional teahouses that require visitors to crawl childlike in humility if they wish to enter. At dawn on the spring and autumn equinoxes, light shines through this door and the glass step glints in the sun.
Winter Solstice Light-Worship Tunnel. Enora Observatory. Hiroshi Sugimoto 2017
One of the most dramatic features of Enoura is the 70-metre tunnel pathway, which cuts through the ground beneath the gallery, emerging on the other side. On the winter solstice, light passes through the tunnel to illuminate a circular stone, in a ring of seating rocks. The solstice is an event celebrated by ancient cultures around the world, as a turning point in the cycle of death and rebirth. The tunnel is dark and made of steel, with a resting space lit by a light well halfway through. As you reach the other side, you come to a rectangular portal framing a view of the ocean and sky. ‘The sea, as people in ancient times would have seen it’, according to the artist. A perspective of time that naturally lends itself to reflections on mortality and the brevity of any single lifetime. ‘Yes, we disappear, but we don’t disappear into a world where there is nothing. My feeling is we return to a place where our life force is kept in storage for a while.’ says Sugimoto.
‘…she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains…’¹
All photography by Peter Newman.
¹ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. 1865 Lewis Caroll.
Peter Newman is an artist. There are two permanent installations of his Skystation works in London, at Nine Elms and Canary Wharf.
The Two of Cups (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel July 20, 2024
The Two of Cups is a card of love and the energetic union between two beings. It pertains to all matters of shared pleasure, mutual growth, and emotional experience - a human alchemy…
Name: Love, the Two of Cups
Number: 2
Astrology: Venus in Cancer
Qabalah: Chokmah of He
Chris Gabriel July 20, 2024
The Two of Cups is a card of love and the energetic union between two beings. It pertains to all matters of shared pleasure, mutual growth, and emotional experience - a human alchemy.
In Rider, we have two lovers holding their cups. Between them there is a surreal caduceus, spiralling snakes culminating in a winged lion head. The lovers are well dressed and crowned with laurels and flowers, standing in front of a pastoral scene.
In Thoth, we have two cups overflowing with water received from a lotus fountain, around which two fish are entwined. This card is Venus in Cancer, a personal, deeply intimate love. We have the greens of Venus, and the blues and amber of Cancer.
In Marseille, we have a uniquely symbolic major arcana. Here the two cups are secondary to the brilliant, alchemical scene. Underground, two angels work at an alembic containing a phoenix. Rising from this alembic, a flower sprouts another flower with fish heads as its leaves. Quite the scene! Through Qabalah, we are given the key to its name: the Queen’s Wisdom. The Queen’s Wisdom is Love.
We have many shared motifs between these cards, all of which point to the joy of love, and the energies at play within. This is when a relationship is ‘in its element’, like a fish in water.
As for the alchemical motifs, all alchemical philosophies are centered on human love as a vessel and metaphor for divine transformation. Alchemy is the Chemical Wedding, a motif we will see depicted in the Thoth deck when the Lovers VI are transmuted into one being in Art XIV.
We can see the cosmic spiralling of love directly in the work of a modern alchemist, Wilhelm Reich. A student of Sigmund Freud, Reich became increasingly far out in his vision of sexuality, moving from psychology and scientific study into mystical visions that perfectly mirror the esoteric traditions.
To Reich the sexual relationship is a product of literal spiraling cosmic energies. A motif which is clearly present in the Two of Cups.
Let us turn to the fish, present in both Marseille and Thoth. The image of a fish as related to Love calls to mind one of my favorite Grimm’s fairy tales, the Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was.
The story follows the misadventures of a boy, cast out by his father for his idiocy, and told to learn how to shudder. He finds the task quite impossible, even when faced with corpses, phantasmagorias, demons and a haunted castle. After overcoming these trials, marrying the Princess, and becoming King, he is still sad, as he can not shudder. His wife, in her wisdom, hatches a plan. It goes as follows:
“At night when the young king was sleeping, his wife was to draw the
clothes off him and empty the bucketful of cold water with the
gudgeons in it over him, so that the little fishes would sprawl about
him. Then he woke up and cried
'oh, what makes me shudder so. - What makes me shudder so, dear wife.
Ah. Now I know what it is to shudder.'
The End”
This Queen’s Wisdom is clearly that of the Two of Cups. That shuddering, as Freud knew well, is not always what one does in fear, but in love and pleasure, which the fairy tale is alluding to.
When pulling this card, we are asked to consider the union of love, forming that union, or giving energy to one we are in. To take joy in our pleasure, and to let it grow, and spring into something divine!
Sacred Geometry and White Magic
Flora Knight July 18, 2024
Sacred geometry, the concept that divine mathematical patterns underpin the universe, has profoundly influenced various religious and mystical traditions. It is rooted in the idea that God is the ultimate mathematician and that the mathematical patterns observed in nature are signs of divinity…
A detail from Hirschvogel’s ‘Geometria’ (1543).
Flora Knight July 18, 2024
Sacred geometry, the concept that divine mathematical patterns underpin the universe, has profoundly influenced various religious and mystical traditions. It is rooted in the idea that God is the ultimate mathematician and that the mathematical patterns observed in nature are signs of divinity. These sacred patterns manifest in numerous ways, such as mandalas, religious architecture, and symbols across Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. Yet in witchcraft, it is the pentagram that has been most prevalent. Alongside its other interpretations, the pentagram embodies the principles of sacred geometry, a cohesive and balanced symbol, simple, repeatable and divine.
White Magic has long been fascinated with sacred geometry, particularly drawing inspiration from the Temple of Solomon’s design. This structure has significantly influenced the geometric architecture in witchcraft. The intricate designs and patterns seen in the Temple of Solomon have become a cornerstone for many later structures, reflecting the importance of geometry in magical practices and teachings. Various white magical institutions have adopted these geometric principles as a core part of their teachings, emphasizing the connection between spirituality and mathematics.
The caretaker at Newgrange, 1910.
One significant site that highlights the importance of sacred geometry is Bru’gh na Bo’inne, or New Grange, in Ireland. This ancient burial site, one of the oldest Western structures, dates back to ancient history and served as a burial place for Irish kings. New Grange incorporates sacred spirals in its design, which were later espoused by Fibonacci. The entrance of this structure features right-hand spirals, known as Deosil, which are used by priestesses when casting a holy circle. This counter-clockwise movement symbolizes holiness and positive energy. As one progresses through the corridors, the spirals shift to a clockwise direction, known as widdershins, which represents movement away from goodness and aligns with the sun's movement. Each chamber within New Grange symbolizes one of the three worlds of Celtic magic: the sky world, the middle world, and the underworld. This structure parallels the Temple of Solomon in its representation of the fourfold nature of the universe.
Beyond architectural marvels, sacred geometry finds its application in geomancy, a form of divination that became widespread in medieval Europe. Originating from Arabic and Persian traditions, geomancy involves interpreting patterns formed by tossing earth or stones onto the ground or making marks in the sand. By the medieval period, geomancers began using pen and ink to draw random lines of points, creating a Geomantic tableau. This method of divination became second in importance only to astrology during the Middle Ages.
Symbols of Geomancy.
In geomancy, the practitioner draws 16 lines of points while contemplating a question. These points form groups called the 'Mothers,' which generate the 'Daughters,' then the 'Nieces,' and finally the 'Witnesses and the Judge.' The Judge represents the answer to the question posed. Each figure in the Geomantic tableau is associated with a planet, zodiac sign, time of day, and element (earth, air, fire, or water). Figures that point downward are considered stable and arriving, while figures pointing upward are seen as departing and movable.
The question posed in geomancy is assigned to one of the 12 astrological houses, each governing a different aspect of life such as riches, health, marriage, and journeys. For instance, a question about marriage falls under the 'wife' house, while a query about a ship's safe passage falls under the 'journeys' house. The geomancer interprets the tableau by examining the figure in the relevant house and considering its properties to determine the outcome.
Sacred geometry's influence on witchcraft and divination is profound, reflecting the deep connection between the mystical and mathematical realms. It rejects the idea that the universe exists in chaos, and rather points to a truthful order, available for all those willing to look.
Flora Knight is an occultist and historian.
Geometry in the Garden Pt. 2
Peter Newman July 16, 2024
The Japanese archipelago consists of 14,125 islands and is home to 111 volcanoes, nearly a tenth of those active in the world. Most famous of all, Mount Fuji occupies the physical, cultural and spiritual landscape with a compelling symmetrical presence. For centuries pilgrims have climbed to the summit and performed a ritual walk around the crater…
Tofuku-ji Temple, Kyoto. Mirei Shigemori 1939. (East Garden)
Peter Newman July 16, 2024
The Japanese archipelago consists of 14,125 islands and is home to 111 volcanoes, nearly a tenth of those active in the world. Most famous of all, Mount Fuji occupies the physical, cultural and spiritual landscape with a compelling symmetrical presence. For centuries pilgrims have climbed to the summit and performed a ritual walk around the crater.
The rock garden is an alternative proposition to ideas of abundance. Instead, it offers a kind of rich austerity. A metaphorical abstraction of nature, at once playful and meaningful. More akin to atmospheres of the mind and conceptually seductive. Geological time is set against the seasons or a day. Providing a space for reflection, often to be viewed from a slightly elevated Engawa platform, but not walked into. Scholars’ rocks as objects for contemplation, originated in China and aligned with an earlier Shinto veneration of stone, and the belief in its ability to attract Kami, or mythological spirits. A form of geomancy is present in the asymmetric placement of rocks and their relationship to one another. Within the confines of the garden imaginative projection and interpretation abound.
Tofuku-ji Temple, Kyoto. Mirei Shigemori 1939 (South Garden)
Mirei Shigemori (1897-1975) made two hundred and forty gardens across Japan. Although working exclusively in his home country, he collaborated with his friend Isamu Noguchi in choosing rocks for the UNESCO Garden in Paris (1958). His most famous work and his first major commission is the Zen garden at Tofuku-ji Temple in Kyoto. A fire had destroyed the main building and he was tasked with renovating the gardens. The temple couldn’t afford to pay him for his work, but he agreed on the condition of total creative freedom. “If I were to make a garden here, my work would live forever,” he said.
The garden is composed of four parts, one for each face of the central hall. As you enter, on the right are seven cylindrical rocks. The foundation stones from an earlier building, rearranged in a seemingly abstract way. As you walk further, the pattern reveals itself as the stars in the Plough or Big Dipper asterism, one of the most useful in celestial navigation. A line through the first two stars locates Polaris, the North Star.
On the left, the South Garden is inhabited by four dramatic rock clusters, representing Horai, the islands of immortals. The tallest is a dark monolith of rugged volcanic rock. These are set in an expansive sea of gravel, from which a green landscape rises in the distance, symbolizing five sacred mountains. Walking clockwise around the hall are two further gardens, more abstract still. First, a checkered pattern, in the form of clipped azalea hedges. And again, in a sweep of alternating squares of stone and moss. The pattern surfaces from a fluid green earth, before dissolving back into the ground away from you.
Tofuku-ji Temple, Kyoto. Mirei Shigemori 1939. (North Garden)
A grid is a rational mapping of space, but also invokes an idea of the infinite. A fragment cropped from a larger fabric, it suggests a world beyond the frame. An alternating grid is an interweaving of opposites, the stage on which the ancient games of Go and Chess are enacted. Grids appear in traditional craftwork, like the Ichimatsu pattern of dark and light squares, which represents prosperity and expansion. The same pattern can be found in the floors of black and white marble of grand houses in Europe. They also feature in the Renaissance perspective studies of Uccello and Leonardo. Yet the grid remains inherently modern.
‘In the cultist space of modern art, the grid serves not only as emblem but also as myth. For like all myths, it deals with paradox or contradiction.’ For artists like Mondrian and Agnes Martin, the grid is ‘a staircase to the universal’¹. They exist outside of time. By expanding in all directions, a grid defies the linearity of a narrative. An abstraction of endless choice and possibilities. No direction home.
“It’s a great game of chess that’s being played—all over the world—if this is the world at all, you know.” ²
¹ Grids. Rosalind Krauss 1979. October magazine. MIT Press
² Though the Looking Glass 1871. Lewis Carroll
Peter Newman is an artist. There are two permanent installations of his Skystation works in London, at Nine Elms and Canary Wharf.
The Star (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel July 13, 2024
A woman is naked and we are the voyeur of her celestial act. She is pouring two vessels as she stands before a body of water. Above her are eight Stars. This card emphasizes the influence of the stars over our lives, and our own starry nature. This is the emblem of Astrology…
Name: The Star
Number: XVII
Astrology: Aquarius
Qabalah: He ה, the Window
Chris Gabriel July 13, 2024
A woman is naked and we are the voyeur of her celestial act. She is pouring two vessels as she stands before a body of water. Above her are eight Stars. This card emphasizes the influence of the stars over our lives, and our own starry nature. This is the emblem of Astrology.
In Marseille, we see a naked blonde woman pouring two vessels while she kneels in a stream. She is pleased, and her hair is flowing. Behind her, a bird stands in a tree. Above her, there are seven stars, led by a central star. Some of these stars are heptagrams, others octograms
In Rider, essentially the same image is shown but with some slight alterations. Here the naked woman is kneeling on the ground before a pool of water, one foot steps in while the other rests on the ground. She pours water from each vessel, one onto land and one into the lake. She has a more reserved look of calm. Here all eight stars are octograms, and they seem to be coming down to the ground.
In Thoth, as ever, there is a rather different image. Here our lady is looking away into the distant universe, she is in the midst of the cosmos, her vessels are flowing with geometric water as she stands in a crystalline structure. Behind her is a brilliant star, topped with a heptagram, and in the far left corner, an octogram which seems to be spiralling brings forth all the stars in the sky.
These three cards depict Aquarius, the water bearer. Aquarius is the sign of the strange far out processes, and here it represents Astrology. This is the image of the astrological theory underpinning much of the Tarot’s structure. A human being unknowingly influenced by distant heavenly bodies. This is, as the first nude card in Marseille and Rider, a literal “unveiling”, of the female form, and of the esoteric philosophy at play.
This card illustrates the Thelemic motto “Every man and woman is a star”. Stars are endless, yet each is unique, we are infinitely unique. This idea has trickled down into culture in the form of “Rock Stars” and “Movie Stars”. We see the bodily process of life, our movements, thoughts, and feelings as the invisible influence of the beyond.
This is also what Jung called Synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence. The idea that meaningful occurrences in our lives are mirrored in outside processes like the movement of the heavens, the random shuffling of cards, the throwing of coins, and that this mirroring is in fact an intimate connection.
Diagram of Synchronicity, Kristin Middleton and Chris Gabriel
As our lady pours out her vessels, and her water flows down, we need only look up to see the stars pouring forth their influence onto her. She is like the heavenly Star, giving and receiving flows.
We can shift it again, and see the Goddess Hera, and the forming of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. And how is it we see all of this? By way of the card’s Hebrew correspondence, He ה, the Window.
The tarot cards were formed through a process of compounding symbolism, where a card is not just a card, but an astrological form, a Qabalastic place, a myth, a philosophy, and a poem.
The Tarot is a framing device for our exploration of these distant esoteric ideals brought down into the palm of your hand, which is exactly where they belong!
Aesop warns us in his tale of the Astronomer, that someone who keeps his head in the clouds will fall down a hole. Our lady is looking upon her work.
When you pull the Star, you are being given the image of distance, of the far off and far out. This is something that’s a long way off, or something you find strange, an opportunity that falls out of the sky. Keep your feet on the ground and the stars will come down to you!
Boltzmann Brains — 2. Solipsism in a Lonely Cosmos
Irà Sheptûn July 11, 2024
‘Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think’. - The Dhammapada, Twin Verses
In Boltzmann Brains Part 1, we defined entropy as a measure of the number of ways you can arrange a system without changing its overall state. We discovered that if we were to have some low entropy state, we would have to assume it came from a higher entropy state by fluctuation and will return to high entropy over time, as the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us…
Les nouvelles idées sur la structure du système nerveux : chez l'homme et chez les vertébrés, 1894. Santiago Ramon y Cajal's.
Irà Sheptûn July 11, 2024
‘Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think’.
- The Dhammapada, Twin Verses
In Boltzmann Brains Part 1, we defined entropy as a measure of the number of ways you can arrange a system without changing its overall state. The more arrangements there are for a system, the higher the entropy, and by association the system is considered to be more disordered. We discovered that if we were to have some low entropy state, we would have to assume it came from a higher entropy state by fluctuation and will return to maximal entropy over time, as the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us. One might interpret from this that entropy has a kind of ‘direction’; what we call the Thermodynamic Arrow of Time. In his renowned lecture series, Physicist R. Feynman writes: “For some reason, the universe at one time had a very low entropy for its energy content, and since then the entropy has increased. So that is the way toward the future. That is the origin of all irreversibility, that is what makes the processes of growth and decay, that makes us remember the past and not the future, remember the things which are closer to that moment in history of the universe when the order was higher than now, and why we are not able to remember things where the disorder is higher than now, which we call the future.”
Władysław T. Benda, c.1918.
So what if this low entropy state was a whole world - a Boltzmann Universe, arising as a fluctuation from an ancient ‘dead cosmos’ of maximal entropy? What are the chances that we exist in such a world? Astronomer A. Eddington dismissed this possibility, positing that if random fluctuations from higher entropies are the sole driver of creation, then it’s statistically more probable that intelligent observers such as you or I will randomly fluctuate into existence than for an entire complex world to emerge with intelligent observers in it!
Going one step further, physicists Albrecht and Sorbo toyed with the irrationality of cosmological theories based solely on a statistical argument.They argued that if we accept that large ‘world-like’ fluctuations are exponentially more improbable than smaller fluctuations from maximal entropy, then these smaller fluctuations will occur much more frequently. Following Eddingtons ideas to their logical extremum, their theory predicts any intelligent observer, equipped with a consciousness to justify their own reality, is likely to be one such example of a smaller fluctuation. What constitutes an intelligent observer in this case? Well plausibly, such a being would only need only the very basic anatomies that are essential to cognition and conscious thought – disembodied brains suspended in a dead vacuum complete with a set of false memories of an artificial life. A Boltzmann Brain. All thoughts both complete and distant in these brains are a by-product of the same statistical improbabilities.
“Perhaps everything we understand about the laws of physics, and the cosmological model we have constructed that predicts we are Boltzmann Observers, are also random fluctuations in our minds. Indeed, there is no reason to trust that our own knowledge of present and past is accurate, or that we have even correctly deduced the nature of this cosmological model up to this point.”
The absurdity of a Boltzmann Brain does raise a very interesting cosmological conundrum – is it more probabilistically likely that all the particles that make up an infinite cosmos somehow converge to form new worlds, or a small local group of high energy particles collide in a vacuum spontaneously to create a sentient brain that begins to dream, if only for a brief time? This is an example of reductio ad absurdum, highlighted by Eddington, and often used in cosmology to test scientific theories. It serves to remind us that we cannot forsake the physics in favor of any other kind of argument, statistical or otherwise, no matter how appealing. It’s a little bit like the monkeys on typewriters scenario – it’s far more likely for a hardworking team of monkeys, bashing at random keys on their typewriters, to randomly type up The Hobbit in its entirety than all the complete works in the Library of Congress.
On a Distinct Form of Transient Hemiopsia, 1873. Hubert Airy.
In the same manner of speaking, it’s far more likely that you are a Boltzmann Brain, and not some happy by-product of an incredibly rare and convoluted aging universe full of unresolved energy in all its improbability! That everything held in your memory and construction of reality; from your first kiss to the French Revolution to the invention of radar, was weaved together by your isolated dreaming mind from the same statistical fluke that brought you into creation. Before you get too worried, one should note the high entropy universe that Boltzmann postulated from statistical thermodynamics looks very different from the relatively ordered cosmos that we actually do observe. Many examples of low-entropy states are seen to emerge naturally. Later theories in modern physics suggest a finite past; ordered states hold memory of conditions when things first started. However, the concept of Boltzmann Brains has continued to be compelling in cosmology, as it cannot be so easily ruled out.
While we might know in ourselves that we are not disembodied brains floating in a dead vacuum, we cannot claim that we and our environment haven’t fluctuated into existence from maximal entropy equilibrium, as an example of a more ordered state. Rather, we are Boltzmann Observers born from an ancient, randomly fluctuating chaotic universe. Perhaps everything we understand about the laws of physics, and the cosmological model we have constructed that predicts we are Boltzmann Observers, are also random fluctuations in our minds. Indeed, there is no reason to trust that our own knowledge of present and past is accurate, or that we have even correctly deduced the nature of this cosmological model up to this point. How do we move past this disturbing theory? How can we reconcile our entire lived experience as a fabricated one beyond the certainty of our own consciousness?
“If I am the only being in the cosmos, who I am is also you as the only being in the cosmos. Your thoughts are transient properties that hold no true essence in their universality – I too experience them.”
These ideas, initially inspired by Eddington’s deductions, ushered in one of the first practical examples of the anthropic principle in modern science. The anthropic principle roughly tells us that the laws of physics ‘are what they are’ in order for the constraint that is life to exist. If you remember in Part 1, I left you back in 2006, watching the DVD logo bounce around your TV screen. You must first exist in order to observe the rare chance the logo locks perfectly into a corner, otherwise who’s to say it even happened? With the anthropic comes a fair pinch of solipsism, that we should take center stage in this story of the universe, otherwise why else would we be here?
Subjective Image of the Milky Way, 1902. Pannekoek.
Huayan Buddhism teaches us that both “all phenomena are present in each phenomenon” and that “no phenomenon knows another phenomenon”. In other words, every possible phenomenon is alone in the cosmos, which seems to also paradoxically point to the idea that every other possible phenomenon is also alone in the cosmos. Put even simpler by the Tiantai Buddhists: If I am the only being in the cosmos, who I am is also you as the only being in the cosmos. Your thoughts are transient properties that hold no true essence in their universality – I too experience them. If we accept our minds are made of all the same processes, we can argue that the notion of being a Boltzmann Observer in a randomly fluctuating universe is what D.Z. Albert would call ‘cognitively unstable’. If you can reason with yourself to believe you are a product of such a cosmological system, you also must conclude you have no justification for accepting your own reasoning. There is no reference point for the lonely solipsist.
It does seem a bit self-defeating to grant substantial confidence to the prospect that we have no right to grant substantial confidence to anything. We must satisfy ourselves then with rejecting the cosmological models in which Boltzmann Brains occupy, as they serve us little purpose in our further understanding beyond a resigned cognitive instability. That is not to say that we discard the possibility that you might still be a Boltzmann Brain given the odds. Perhaps the distant memories of 2006 and old movies on the DVD Player are indeed false, after all – how well do you remember the past anyway?
Irà Sheptûn, @iradelune
A Whole New Relationship with the Air
Tuukka Toivonen July 9, 2024
The shifting clouds, the endless colors of dawn, rainbows and fog: All this is a form of everyday magic. This is the magic of the real, not the supernatural. But to really notice it, our own perception must shift a little…
Lectures on Ventilation (1869). Lewis W. Leeds.
Tuukka Toivonen July 8, 2024
“-The shifting clouds, the endless colors of dawn, rainbows and fog: All this is a form of everyday magic. This is the magic of the real, not the supernatural. But to really notice it, our own perception must shift a little.” Per Espen Stoknes
I vividly remember the day when my assumptions about the air became seriously disturbed.
One winter Monday a few years ago, air pollution indicators in London hit troubling levels. The city was left unusually dark and gloomy by a thick, impenetrable cloud of fog that tightly hugged its streets, schoolyards, office blocks and gardens. Residents were alerted to the dangers of the situation and asked to stay indoors where possible. For many, this was an abrupt induction to how it feels like when the air becomes hostile.
On the several smoggy days that followed, my initial reaction was to try to reclaim a modicum of control by firmly shutting all the windows and vents, staying at home when not lecturing at university and wearing a mask when I absolutely needed to go outdoors. Whatever sense of calm and relief this offered, the effects were at best temporary.
I still tasted the sinister flavor of heavy metal particles too often for comfort. Walking outdoors, it sometimes felt like a thousand tiny blades of steel were cutting their way through my airways with abandon. On the worst days, I was generally unwell and lethargic. This confrontation with hostile air triggered a cycle that blurred the line between what was ‘real’ and what was not, for I had only the news and my increasingly confused bodily signals to go on. I began to look for a way to restore my previous sense of normalcy, or the ability to once again take the air for granted without having to think about its movements, qualities, or problems.
Balloon-Prospect, Airopaidia (1786). Thomas Baldwin.
Soon after that dark Monday, I had the opportunity to meet the energetic founder of a new technology company that promised to offer a citizen-led approach to tackling anxieties about the air. They sought to empower people with the tools to track the shifting currents of air quality on a moment-by-moment basis, not only in their own cities or districts but their own neighborhoods. Using an app that made live air quality data highly accessible, citizens with smartphones could choose healthier behaviors and routes on smoggy days, removing unnecessary concerns when the air was verifiably safe. This was a creative company that had recently struck up an unlikely collaboration with an army of pigeons in East London, equipping them with tiny backpacks to transmit live air quality data from the skies above.
I became an avid user of the company’s app and found it a useful aide for planning my day-to-day urban existence. Yet, something still did not feel entirely right. Some of my concerns for the air lingered and remained a quiet source of anxiety. Implicitly, I continued to view the air not in benevolent terms, but as a threatening presence, a potential killer. The standard terminology of environmental science typically used to gain a grasp on problems of the air were of limited help when trying to resolve or at least process the anxieties I shared above. Having had my assumptions broken, I struggled to see how one might approach the air in some alternative way that was more whole, more resonant, and more healing.
Several years after the initial crumbling of my beliefs about the air, I was introduced to the work of Norwegian psychologist, economist and philosopher Per Espen Stoknes that happens to speak precisely to this question. Stoknes suggests that we start by approaching the air’s way of being in a much more holistic sense. To do this, we simply start by using our senses to connect with the air in the here and now. How does the movement of the air feel on your skin? How does the air smell? Does it carry the wonderful fragrance of flowers or fresh leaves outside your window or a cocktail of unpleasant odors from a road or a factory? What sounds does it make? Is there something the air is signaling to you, something it is trying to tell you? The key is to begin by reclaiming our embodied experience of the air, to help ground our new understandings and to see how, in a real sense, the air mediates everything we do.
“Air keeps us alive moment-to-moment. It allows us to breathe in the same ancient argon molecules once respired by the Buddha and many extinct species of animals.”
Building on sensory perceptions, it becomes easier to treat the air as something much more than a passive object, external to us and our human world. The air starts to reveal its character as something that is animate, intelligent, even imaginative – an entity that is much more alive than we normally recognize. As Stoknes provocatively suggests, much like the Navajo’s ‘Holy Wind’, we may even begin to perceive the possibility that the living air constitutes a kind of a mind that we get to participate in, and that if we listen, has volumes to teach us.
To cultivate a richer relationship with the air, one must go beyond a casual understanding of breathing to recognize how profoundly it connects us to the world. Our very existence is bound up with the air’s way of being:
“Yet the air isn’t just what we breathe into our lungs, briefly visiting us before we exhale it. It is also our primary link to the world. It fully envelops us, from the soles of our feet to each hair on the top of our head, from the day we draw our first breath to beyond our death. It holds us gently, with a benign embrace without which our bodies would fall apart. To be born is to enter the air. To be is to be in the air.”
(From Stoknes’ What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming: Toward a New Psychology of Climate Action, 2015).
Air (1580-1584). Adriaen Collaert after Maerten de Vos.
Air keeps us alive moment-to-moment. It allows us to breathe in the same ancient argon molecules once respired by the Buddha and many extinct species of animals. It protects us as an unthinkably thin layer of film woven around our delicate blue planet. As soon as we stop and think, suddenly the air appears (literally) filled with wonder. There is no longer a scarcity of material or a shortage of inspiration for reimagining our relationship with the air.
These fresh perspectives having enriched my imagination, one thing became painfully obvious: on that dark Monday in London several years ago, I only had a relationship with the air when it asserted itself as a problem. I was a living, breathing representative of the ways of thinking that positioned humans as fundamentally separate from the more-than-human world.
It was ultimately this deeper, insidious thought structure that began to fracture in the smog and that I struggled to find alternatives for thereafter. This produced a lingering sense of discomfort with and alienation in relation to the air that I had entered at birth and that had mediated everything I had done in my life.
Detail of a Wind Cherub, c.1650.
What cried out for more attention within me was this elementary disconnect. I now see that what I was yearning for, as a basis for a more satisfying approach to my concerns, was a fuller, more genuine relationship with the air. One that was appreciative of its aliveness, its quirks and its immeasurable blessings. What I needed was not a rosier worldview somehow magically cleansed of all serious and complex problems but rather a rinsing of the mind from artificial notions of a separation between humans and nature. In the end, I had to let go of the ingrained assumption that it was the air – or air pollution, narrowly defined – that was the problem.
Given just how intrinsically our entire existence is bound up with that of the air across all levels of life, it is astonishing how little attention we pay to it beyond the specific, externalized ‘slices’ that we label as problems (in a way that reinforces the assumed separation of humans from the rest of the living world). We have denied the reciprocal nature of our relationship with the air by refusing to approach it in a way that makes full use of all our perceptual instruments – scientific, sensuous, imaginative – and this has meant we have been unable to embrace the full brilliance of the living air.
By viewing the air and the more-than-human world as alive – and taking the time to perceive it as richly as we can – we can re-establish a symbiotic relationship that is whole and integrated, even in the face of troubling human-made particulates that permeate the air that permeates us. Although only having just started to take in the vast new possibilities stirred by this switch in perspective, I sense that the assumptions that caused my original anxieties have already vanished – seemingly into thin air.
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 Hanged Man (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel July 6, 2024
The Hanged Man is a card of self sacrifice. In each depiction, a man is hung by his foot, his legs crossed, as he looks ahead. As to the reward for this self sacrifice, each deck has a very different answer.
Name: The Hanged Man
Number: XII
Astrology: Water
Qabalah: Mem
Chris Gabriel July 6, 2024
The Hanged Man is a card of self sacrifice. In each depiction, a man is hung by his foot, his legs crossed, as he looks ahead. As to the reward for this self sacrifice, each deck has a very different answer.
In Marseille, we see a man in colorful clothes hung by his foot, his blonde hair hanging out. The card is framed by a simple wooden structure upon which he hangs.
In Rider, we have a similar image but, significantly, he is hung upon a tree. About his head a radiant nimbus has formed for he has achieved enlightenment through self sacrifice.
In Thoth, we have a violent departure from the other two. Here a corpse-like man is hung by an inverted ankh, one of his feet and both of his hands have been nailed. The other foot is surrounded by a serpent as he dreams of the serpent.
In many religions self sacrifice holds the highest regard. There are many gods who are hung, crucified, flayed, ripped limb from limb, burned, and so on. They are then resurrected, restored, and gain infinite power through their sacrificial offering of themselves.
These stories have inspired people to live lives of sacrifice. Each deck has a very different view of this means of enlightenment.
Rider is an absolute affirmation of martyrdom, the nimbus indicates his success. This is Christ on the cross and Odin on the tree. As it says in the Havamal:
“I know that I hung on that windy tree
Nine days and nights
Stabbed with a spear, and offered to Odin,
Myself to myself”
This self hanging brings Odin the divine knowledge of language and writing, the Runes.
Marseille makes no indication as to how effective the act is, the man is simply hanging. Waiting and hanging.
Thoth is vitriolic in its denunciation of self sacrifice. The hanged man is left a corpse, pained and dreaming venomous dreams. This is an undeniably Nietzschean view of Christianity. Thelema asserts that the past Aeon was typified by slain Gods like Osiris and Christ, and that having progressed into the New Aeon, we no longer need to sacrifice our bodies to attain.
The inverted Ankh is the ideogram of this, as the ankh is the ‘Sandal of the One who Goes’ the inverted ankh is not going, not doing. The divine faculties paralyzed.
When I draw this card in a reading, it often frightens people. It conjures death and pain when the truth tends to be much less severe. Consider the phrase “a hung jury”, a jury that cannot reach a verdict, Or when you reach out to some but you are “left hanging” - these are both expressed in the Hanged Man.
As for the spiritual role of the Hanged Man, we live in a time without public execution, thus the significance of a Hanged Man has been altered significantly.
I find the spiritual role embodied particularly well for modern times in car accidents.
This is an event with similar violence, mortality, and potential for life changing insight. One often hears of near death experiences where your “life flashes before your eyes” And many report drastic changes in their view of life after these.
When we pull the Hanged Man, we may be faced with long waits, a call to self sacrifice, and taking on risk for greater reward. It is up to us to decide whether we wish to put ourselves first or last, whether or not our risks are worth it.
Geometry in the Garden Pt. 1
Peter Newman July 4, 2024
There are not many straight lines in nature. Beams of sunlight, through a break in the clouds or a forest canopy. A redwood tree across a thousand years, or bamboo’s youthful defiance of gravity. The flight path of birds, or fish scattering in water. Columns of basalt rock. Things of inherent wonder. Often fleeting, and somehow related to the laws of physics. An invisible structure that defines the universe…
Nazca lines, Peru. NASA.
Peter Newman, July 4, 2024
Geometry, n. / dʒɪˈɒmɪtrɪ / jee-om-i-tree
[C14: < Latin < Greek geometria to measure the land]
There are not many straight lines in nature.
Beams of sunlight, through a break in the clouds or a forest canopy.
A redwood tree across a thousand years, or bamboo’s youthful defiance of gravity.
The flight path of birds, or fish scattering in water.
Columns of basalt rock.
Crystals.
The sea horizon.
A shooting star.
The apple falling from a tree.
Things of inherent wonder. Often fleeting, and somehow related to the laws of physics.
Invisible structures that define the universe.
Endless straight lines can be imagined. We connect the stars in the night sky, or see an ideal way forward. So, it’s perhaps inevitable humans derive satisfaction from an almost godlike formation of straight lines onto the domain around us. Here we are, they seem to say, aligned with creation. Our presence is easily identified by geometries in contrast to a wild organic landscape.
A sense of order in geometry is comforting in the face of an unpredictable world. Archaeology unearths walls and floors from earlier times. The modern sky is inscribed with vapour trails. Our existence can be seen from beyond our sphere, in the Nazca lines of Peru, the Pyramids in Egypt, or the circuit grid cityscapes in which the majority of the world’s population now live.
Fallingwater, 1938. Frank Lloyd Wright. Image by Peter Newman.
Yet a desire to get closer to nature often involves designs quite opposite to the nature they seek to be amongst. When the Kaufmanns asked Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) to design them a house, they imagined it with a view of a waterfall they loved, in the woods of Pennsylvania. Wright raised the bar by unifying the house and waterfall. In doing so, he made a home that is literally and symbolically at one with nature. Fallingwater sits in harmony materially, built from local stone. Inside it hugs the earth, the rock on which it rests becoming part of the floor. Yet outside, it hovers between river and trees, levitating, cantilevered, orthogonal. A set of crisp rectangles, stacked on top of each other.
A garden is a framing of nature. A composition in a given space. A place for discovery, memory and reflection. The passing seasons mark chapters in the progress of time. Past, present and future, are all implicitly there.
We’ve evolved to recognise symmetry. It’s useful for noticing other living things. All vertebrate creatures, and many invertebrates, possess a bilateral symmetry. The language of symmetry in the garden, either its presence or absence, is an intrinsic part of the experience.
Formal gardens are animated by reflectional symmetry. French Parterres or English Knot gardens, arranged close to a building and intended to be seen from above. Some possess a radial symmetry, like the gardens of the Taj Mahal. The fourfold symbolism invokes descriptions of paradise as a garden of abundance, through which run four rivers.
The association of a garden with ideas of paradise goes back a long way, and is present in many mythologies and beliefs. The word paradise derives from the Avestan pairiidaeza from ancient Persia, meaning enclosure or park. Mystical gardens frequently infer the attainment of worldly pleasures. Equally, paradise can mean freedom from a cycle of desires. But to be ‘in the garden’ ultimately describes an ideal state of being.
Peter Newman is an artist. There are two permanent installations of his Skystation works in London, at Nine Elms and Canary Wharf.
Glastonbury’s Temple of the Stars: A Magical History
Flora Knight July 2, 2024
Glastonbury, a town steeped in mysticism and legend, serves as a remarkable microcosm of the history of witchcraft. This enigmatic place bridges the gap between ancient practices of White Magic and modern Wicca, weaving a rich tapestry of magical heritage that has captivated the imagination for centuries…
King Arthur with the Isle of Avalon in the distance. Unkown artist, unkown date. Woodcut.
Flora Knight, July 2, 2024
Glastonbury, a town steeped in mysticism and legend, serves as a remarkable microcosm of the history of witchcraft. This enigmatic place bridges the gap between ancient practices of White Magic and modern Wicca, weaving a rich tapestry of magical heritage that has captivated the imagination for centuries.
At the heart of Glastonbury's magical history lies the Holy Grail. Integral to the Arthurian Legend, the Grail symbolizes the fusion of Christian spiritualism with contemporary magical thought. Central to this legend is Merlin, the wizard who conjures King Arthur into being, embodying the archetype of the magical practitioner. The Grail literature, steeped in mystical lore, enriches the tradition of magical dynamics, with the Grail itself often depicted as a powerful and elusive artifact.
Joseph of Arimathea Preaching to the Inhabitants of Britain, c.1796. William Blake.
The Grail's origins trace back to the Celtic Cauldron of Ceridwen, a mystical vessel believed to produce healing potions and the elixir of life. In Arthurian legend, the Grail is frequently associated with the cup used to collect the blood of Christ at the crucifixion, brought to Glastonbury by Joseph of Arimathea. According to legend, Joseph built the first church in the area, burying the Grail beneath it. King Arthur is said to have sought the Grail extensively and was brought to Glastonbury to die.
Another variation of the story suggests that Joseph of Arimathea brought the infant Jesus to Glastonbury, where they constructed a small church of mud and wattle. This humble structure evolved into the now-ruined Glastonbury Abbey, as it expanded over the centuries. The legendary Isle of Avalon, often identified with modern Glastonbury, is not only the resting place of Excalibur but also the Grail—two of the four most significant tools in modern witchcraft.
In addition to the Holy Grail, modern Wicca acknowledges another mystical vessel in Glastonbury: Cerridwen’s Cauldron of Wisdom. This cauldron, associated with dark knowledge and crucial to Welsh magical tradition, represents another facet of Glastonbury's deep connection to witchcraft and ancient magic.
Beyond its Arthurian connections, Glastonbury is renowned for its earth effigies—vast structures shaped like figures and believed to form a celestial temple. These giant effigies, visible only from the skies or the top of the Tor (the original Isle of Avalon), are thought to represent zodiac figures. Each zodiac figure holds deep symbolic meaning in both magic and the Grail legend.
The Glastonbury Zodiac is of a series of mounds, paths, streams, and rivers, coming together to form terrestrial representations of the 12 horoscope constellations. These earthly structures correspondent to the celestial zodiac, exerting spiritual power across the landscape and all who pass through and over it.
A map of Glastonbury with the Zodiac earth effigies superimposed above.
The Zodiac symbols found in this mystical temple and their Arthurian representations are as follows:
Taurus (Earth) – King Gurgalain
Aries (Fire) – Messire Gawain (The Sun in the second quarter)
Pisces (Water) – King Fisherman
Aquarius (Air) – King Pelles/Sir Perceval (The Sun in the first quarter, the Phoenix)
Capricornus (Earth) – King of Castle Moral
Sagittarius/Hercules (Fire) – King Arthur (Sun in the east, last quarter)
Scorpio/Libra (Water/Air) – Calixtus (The Scales of Death)
Virgo (Earth) – The Damsel, Sir Perceval's Sister
Leo/Cancer (Fire/Water) – Sir Lancelot (The Midday Sun, Third Quarter)
Gemini (Air) – Lohot, King Arthur’s Son (The Sun in the West, the setting sun, Orion in Effigy)
These celestial symbols, intricately linked to the Arthurian legend, guide the way to the resting place of the Holy Grail, weaving a profound narrative that merges the earth and the heavens. It is no coincidence that the world’s largest music festival, now in its fifty fourth year, is spread across this spiritual landscape. The ley lanes that cross the fields bring with them potent energy and each year, hundreds of thousands of revellers gather to walk through Glastonbury’s temple of the stars.
Flora Knight is an occultist and historian.
The Aeon (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel June 29, 2024
This card is the cleansing fire, the revelatory force that undoes what was. Each version features a large divine figure above three smaller ones. It depicts Apocalypse, literally unveiling, or revealing itself. This is both the Christian Revelation and in Thoth, the Thelemic Aeon.
Name: Judgment, the Aeon
Number: XX
Astrology: Fire (Pluto)
Qabalah: Shin
Chris Gabriel June 29, 2024
“The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell. For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite and corrupt.”
-William Blake
This card is the cleansing fire, the revelatory force that undoes what was. Each version features a large divine figure above three smaller ones. It depicts Apocalypse, literally unveiling, or revealing itself. This is both the Christian Revelation and in Thoth, the Thelemic Aeon.
In Marseille, we see an Angel coming through a halo, emitting great rays. He is winged, and blowing his trumpet, raising the dead from their graves. A man and woman are praying, as a corpse rises they are all naked. The Angel has a seal upon his head, and a nimbus over him. His trumpet bears a cross flag.
In Rider, the Angel is rising from clouds, his hair is fiery, he is blowing his trumpet, beneath we see the story of Revelation 20:13 play out… ‘“
And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.”
Here caskets rise above the water, and the many dead raise their arms to the angel. All are grey.
In Thoth, we have the most drastic departure in the whole deck. While Apocalyptic imagery has appeared in Lust, here the Apocalypse is undone. As in the Blake quote we began with, the end of the world is not an end, but a renewal, a clarification. The card depicts a fiery scene. Nuit, Goddess of the night sky and the cardinal directions, arches over a throne upon which the Elder Horus sits. Beneath the throne is the rising winged sun, and the Hebrew letter Shin, within which three babes reside. Superimposed over the whole scene is Harpocrates, or Horus the Child.
This is one of the most significant cards in the Thoth deck, certainly the most ‘religious’. For here we are given the telos of the Tarot, the end point of our journey, while the World or Universe will remain, the Judgment comes.
Marseille and Rider maintain the Christian view of Apocalypse, a nightmarish and literal end to the world, an end to the Universe in divine war, and subsequent Judgment according to God. Thoth concurs with William Blake, in that the end is not an end, and that Christianity misinterpreted the nature of Aeonic precession.
Christianity asserts a 6000 year age to the Earth, a set beginning, a few ages, from Judaism to Christianity, and an impending end. Thelema, however, finds the entirety of history and religion to be a cyclical movement. Thus the appearance of Harpocrates, the solar infant who despite being threatened by great beasts, snakes and scorpions, overcomes and continues.
I see this solar myth reflected perfectly in the fairy tales of Tom Thumb, a little boy constantly being eaten by creatures and coming out, a narrative known as a Swallow Cycle. This is the nature of the Sun, who is swallowed by each creature of the Zodiac, and keeps going.
When we pull this card, this is what we are tasked with. To see clearly what has swallowed us, be it an idea, job, or person, and to judge accordingly, to overcome what is by seeing it clearly. The Fire of this card will burn away those imperfections. Whether we are the risen dead being judged, or the solar child overcoming the past, we must see our situation clearly, and in doing so, see ourselves clearly.
“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
1 Corinthians 13:12
“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
-William Blake
Tree Sightings
Ale Nodarse June 27, 2024
When did you last look at a leaf? At a branch and the fruit set forth? At the stripped peel of a birch or the downward swoop of a willow?
Study of a Tree, Fra Bartolommeo della Porta (1472 – 1517). Black chalk on antique laid paper, Harvard Art Museums.
Ale Nodarse June 27, 2024
“Beauty: a fruit at which we look without trying to seize.” - Simone Weil.¹
When did you last look at a leaf? At a branch and the fruit set forth? At the stripped peel of a birch or the downward swoop of a willow?
Seldom are those senses which ground us used to their fullest. Writing on the limitations of sense, philosopher Luce Irigaray turns to trees. “Instead of lingering before a tree […] to contemplate its singularity and meet it in its reality, we pass it, at best thinking: it is an oak.”² Often, she continues, we “meet a tree only through a denomination, an idea, a use […].”³ We tend to name things before we see, really see, them. This haste entails a loss for vision. Since in rushing to name, we renounce “both a great part of our present sight and the energy that an encounter between living beings can procure.”⁴ Naming, in other words, reduces vision to categorization and, most often, to values measured by use alone. This entails a set of misconceptions. For the tree (even if we might use it) does not exist for our use. For this birch (which allows us to breathe) does not live for us. Not exactly.
Could we look then, really look, without naming? Drawing, I think, might come to our aid. “Drawing”, by its nature, is a process, the ‘ing’ always underway. Its origins speak to frictions. “To draw” comes from the Proto-Germanic dragan, a “dragging” movement through. It speaks to pulling and to pressing and to the force required to leave a mark. Picture, for instance, a pencil — whose graphite tip presses against paper and disintegrates into it. Or imagine stepping upon still-wet grass and bending a path through tender blades. Friction is always and essentially reciprocal. The paper against pencil, the grass against foot. To look through drawing is to let friction in, to be burdened by vision, to let sight affect us: to not name so quickly. Or to name, knowing this is not enough.
“ Rarely had it been glimpsed as a portrait, as something disposed to interiority — that is, as capable of a strange and other life.”
A drawing of a tree functions to remind us of the strangeness of that creature — living, standing — on the other side of our vision. In the late fifteenth-century, a Florentine monk set black chalk to paper and began to draw. The monk, Fra Bartolommeo della Porta, set his gaze upon trunk and branches, and allowed them to spill, with a slight shift of the hand, into clouds of leaves. Gaps, patches of page, make room for light which in turn seems to flow in as if momentarily accompanied by air. Chalk, when taken up more firmly, also signals the force of outward shoots, as if newly unfurled, while gentle curves augur future growth.
The field of vision is necessarily limited. We cannot know precisely what Bartolommeo saw, nor fathom the distance between his vision and that which still remains upon the page. Asserting his motivations would be more dubious still. Perhaps, in the friar’s case, a sense of divinity within the natural world, as increasingly asserted by mystics and saints, promised aesthetic compunction. Perhaps. We do know, however, that turning to the tree as such had rarely been done before. Far from the subject of vision’s focus, the tree had been presented as landscape. It had almost always stood in accompaniment. Rarely had it been glimpsed as a portrait, as something disposed to interiority — that is, as capable of a strange and other life.
Now Bartolommeo really looked. He saw through branch to chalk and back again. And what he saw seemed to be more than enough. The beauty of such a drawing remains, in part, with its partiality: not in the sense of a bias, but in its disposition as seemingly fragmentary and unfinished and thus alive in the present. (Its beauty serves to remind us that this tree, much like the paper upon which it is set, may well outlive its draftsman.) Drawing, as vision’s friction, acknowledges the tree as presence. The Study of a Tree opens up a new horizon, conditioning a space for reflection and raising questions. Might we permit ourselves, the drawing asks, “not to grasp but to be touched by the sight of a birch?”⁵
¹Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, 150.
²Luce Irigaray, Through Vegetable Being, 46.
³Ibid
⁴Ibid
⁵ Irigaray, 51
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.
Bright Moments (Gen Art)
Ian Rogers June 25, 2024
On April 22, 2024, a ten-city, three year voyage including one hundred fifty artists, ten thousand “Crypto Citizens”, and tens of thousands of visitors to a roving experiential art gallery came to a close. Despite starting without a plan and riding a roller-coaster digital art market, Bright Moments delivered exactly what they promised: ten exceptional in-person events between June 2021 and April 2023, each with hands-on celebrations of generative and AI art sustained by “you’ve gotta see this” word-of-mouth…
2021-2024 Complete Works, BRIGHT MOMENTS (EST. 2021)
Ian Rogers June 25, 2024
On April 22, 2024, a ten-city, three year voyage including one hundred fifty artists, ten thousand “Crypto Citizens”, and tens of thousands of visitors to a roving experiential art gallery came to a close. Despite starting without a plan and riding a roller-coaster digital art market, Bright Moments delivered exactly what they promised: ten exceptional in-person events between June 2021 and April 2024, each with hands-on celebrations of generative and AI art sustained by “you’ve gotta see this” word-of-mouth. In each production the tight-knit Bright Moments team were cast members in a stage-play of their own creation, smiling, excited and giving each visitor the feeling they were the single most important addition to the fledgling CryptoCitizen community. The momentum was palpable and they could have easily extended their run but the plan was always ten cities and ten thousand CryptoCitizens and with these in the past chapter one came to an emotional closing. The Finale in Venice, Italy, simultaneous with the Venice Biennale, was bittersweet, a gathering of the community of digital art pioneers for whom Bright Moments was an outpost where the bubble and its burst weren’t the headline. Some two decades ago, sci-fi writer William Gibson stated, “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” At Bright Moments the future was evenly distributed, with artists and collectors sharing a world of art created by code and artificial intelligence, digitally scarce on a blockchain, delivered by a company espousing “OpenSource Capitalism”: no investors, only token holders/DAO member owners. This is their story.
“The legacy of Bright Moments will certainly be the community of artists it built and the works they have collectively left behind. More than one hundred fifty artists participated in Bright Moments events over the past three years, and the body of work includes some of the finest work in generative and AI art created during this time period.”
CryptoVenetian #274, Bright Moments. Owned by higallery.
Using Covid lockdown as a catalyst, Bright Moments invented an event with elements of a music festival, experiential theater, and an art gallery. Instead of tickets, visitors would buy “mint passes” online, then generate their CryptoCitizen live in attendance at a spectacular and thematically-designed venue, often in the company of the artists themselves. The “minting process,” or process of receiving your CryptoCitzen, brought the buyer into Bright Moments as a member of the cast, including elements and references from the locale as well as the play acting of the Bright Moments team to make the visitor feel like they are part of the creation process. Visitors received an unforgettable in-person experience for what is at the end a digital collectible.
Bright Moments is not a traditional, VC-backed startup, instead these digital collectors are also the owners of Bright Moments. They have built the brand the past three years without debt or equity investment, using only the Ethereum collected from selling CryptoCitizens at each stop. It is structured as a Distributed Autonomous Organization, or DAO, whose members are the owners of the ten thousand CryptoCitizens. Ownership grants rights, access, and input (members voted on which city would be Bright Moments next stop, for example) and owners are free to sell their non-fungible membership tokens on the open market at any time. Venture capital firm Union Square Ventures has bought 6% of all Citizens and a couple other individuals have accumulated 5% each, but the membership is spread out among nearly three thousand owner-members and all ownership/membership is in the form of non-fungible tokens.
Finale, Bright Moments
Only one third of all CryptoCitizens were sold for ETH. In each city three hundred Citizens were given to existing citizen-members and another three hundred were gifted to the local community in an effort to both reward existing members and build a community with roots in each city they visited.
The legacy of Bright Moments will certainly be the community of artists it built and the works they have collectively left behind. More than one hundred fifty artists participated in Bright Moments events over the past three years, and the body of work includes some of the finest work in generative and AI art created during this time period. Tyler Hobbs’ Incomplete Control, Emily Xie’s Off-Script, and Bosque de Chapultepec by Daniel Calderon Arenas are all seminal works by celebrated digital artists first showcased and minted at Bright Moments’ events. Seattle-based Mpkoz contributed two of his most important series, Parnassus and Metropolis, at Bright Moments events. Artist, teacher, and co-founder of pioneering platform ArtBlocks gave a presentation at NFC Lisbon showcasing his Bright Moments contributions as fully one-third of his career in digital art. Bright Moments also innovated on the way art could be collected, such as with Ben Kovach’s 100 Print where collectors bid for tokens then were able to choose their piece from a physical print on a wall in an NYC gallery, highest bidder goes first.
The Venice, Italy Finale brought together sixty artists who had participated in Bright Moments since the first event in June, 2021 in Venice, California, for one final mint. Mint pass holders chose a walk-on song, danced up the stairs, then entered a grand hall in the Scuola Grande San Giovanni for a theatrical reveal of their CryptoVenizian. After, a contribution from one of the one hundred fifty artists to the Finale was revealed on a screen adorned to resemble an eighteenth century Venetian mirror, with the artist’s name and hand-drawn likeness displayed on accompanying iPads disguised in a similar style. The technology was a vehicle but the art was the main event. The traditional art world has taken notice – this week, Thursday June 27, 2024, Christie’s will auction ‘Bright Moments 2021-2024 Complete Works’ a collection of 216 unique generative and AI artworks.
Across the courtyard in the Chiesa de San Giovanni Evangelista Ganbrood’s AI-generated likeness of Jesus Christ appears to have been hanging in the church for hundreds of years and guests kneel, confess, and see artificial intelligence present their confessions in real-time via The Dream Cathedral by artist Huemin.
We left Team Bright Moments in Venice, Italy as they were cleaning up the Scuola and Chiesa, exhausted and headed for an adrenaline come-down from this three-year ultra-marathon performance. It was an unquestionable success. Regardless of your opinion on the cryptocurrency hype cycle of the past four years, there is no denying Bright Moments have transcended and created a community, a gallery brand that represents an entire movement, and beloved art. Additionally they pioneered the delivering digital products with a physical, in-person experience. Both the product and the experience feel like luxury for a future generation, substituting openness for exclusivity.
The question everyone politely poked for an answer to was, “What’s next?” Founder Seth Goldstein, “We have a community around the world that wants to come together, be together, and experience this new kind of art in magnificent, overwhelming, IRL experiences. Next we will do something different that still lives up to the Bright Moments name. The Citizens are done. Bright Moments lives on.”
Ian Rogers
FURTHER READING:
PRESS
2021:
2022:
FAZ: In The Powerhouse of New Art: Einstein on the NFT (English Translation)
2023:
Decrypt: Bright Moments Transports Live NFT Art Minting Experience to Tokyo
2024:
VIDEOS
Nov 2023: Deafbeef in Patagonia
Nov 2023: CryptoPatagonians in Buenos Aires
Feb 2024: CryptoParisians in Paris
April 2024: The Last Supper in Venice
POSTS
Aug 2021: USV Joints the Bright Moments DAO
Nov 2021: Crypto Cities & CryptoCitizens
March 2022: Introducing Bright Opportunities NFT Investment DAO
ADDITIONAL LINKS
Twitter: @brtmoments
IG: @brightmomentsgallery
Eight of Disks (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel June 22, 2024
The Eight of Disks is a card of establishment, regarding both the process of establishing and the well established. It is about “finishing touches” and maintenance. This is a card of material well being, and the investment it takes to keep it growing.
Name: Eight of Disks, Prudence
Number: 8
Astrology: Sun in Virgo
Qabalah: Hod of He ה
Chris Gabriel June 22, 2024
The Eight of Disks is a card of establishment, regarding both the process of establishing and the well established. It is about “finishing touches” and maintenance. This is a card of material well being, and the investment it takes to keep it growing.
In Rider, we see a wooden wall adorned with five pentacles, and a craftsman sitting on his bench, working on two more. He is engraving one of the pentacles with a hammer and chisel. In the distance we see a town.
In Thoth, we see a plant. Twisting and full of leaves, it has eight flowers as the eight disks. It is the Sun in Virgo, consciousness applied to growth. There is the golden sky of the Sun, and the earth tones of Virgo.
In Marseilles, we see two columns of four coins with flowers between them. Qabalah gives us the numerical key to its significance, eight is Hod, the intellect or Mind of God, and He ה is the Princess, or the Earth. Thus, we have the Mind of the Princess. Prudence is the Mind of the Princess.
This is the image of caring for one's belongings and maintaining things rather than letting them decay. We can look at this energy as Investment. This is the sort of investment we make by planting a seed, watering it, and giving it time to grow.
Many people who seek the wisdom of the tarot are curious about their financial situation, they want to know if they’ll come into money, lose money, find a new job, etc. Few cards indicate wealth, as wealth itself is a fickle concept that has drastically different meanings to just about everyone. Rather, this card indicates the process of growing wealth. It reminds me of a proverb, in which an old man plants seeds for trees which he will not live to see the fruit of.
The efforts that this card indicates are not swift, and may not pay off for years, but they are the very flow of the Earth. Slow, driven, and direct. This is the great vegetable intelligence.
This card offers a warning against our all too human desire for speed and effortless gain . “Get rich quick” schemes will not produce lasting wealth, and the nice things we have which we do not maintain will spoil.
Consider the idiom, a stitch in time saves nine stitches. This card is the stitch that saves.
This saying has fallen out of fashion in a society so fixated upon ease of consumption. We’d rather purchase something new than fix something old, piling up endless piles of trash rather than maintaining and developing what we possess.
When we pull this card, we are being asked to invest our time and energy into the development of our goal, whether it be as small as a stitch in our pants, polishing our boots, or as large as purchasing a house. We are meant to act with care for the things in our life. Be prudent!
Patricia Sun’s Spirit of Creativity
Patricia Sun June 20, 2024
Tetragrammaton is dedicated to the spirit of creativity available to all of us. “It is a way of being”…
William Kilburn, c.1790.
Patricia Sun June 20, 2024
Tetragrammaton is dedicated to the spirit of creativity available to all of us. "It is a way of being.", Rick Rubin tells us. This column is dedicated to that way of being.
This will be a space dedicated to actualizing our best selves. A space for healing our wounds and our fears and helping us to feel and understand how to release us into our highest self.
Here is a support for the evolutionary leap that is in process and happening to all of humanity. As we face our shadow with light, new reality comes into being.
There is a healing process that releases both logic and intuition together, to serve a high good – it is love released by human beings – by choice, It is, ultimately: "A creative Act"
Intellect and heart together is a harbinger, not only for wisdom but humanity matured, actualized, and freed.
"Truth and kindness together open a path that cannot be stopped --all we need is the courage to live it." And to remember it.
As Gandhi said, "Be truthful, gentle, and fearless."
It's time to live life. To end war. To heal ourselves. And it is time to transform fear. It is within our power to do this – it is quite possible to do so we might as well do it.
Hang out here in Tetragrammaton with me and you will see.
We see it. We will remind you and ourselves.
Thank you so very much for coming.
Till next time.
Blessings,
Patricia Sun
Patricia Sun is a philosopher, an ethicist, a leader, an innovator, a speaker, a teacher, a problem-solver, and a communication expert of a new way to live.
A Brief History of White Magic. III, Post Renaissance to the 20th Century.
Flora Knight June 18, 2024
And so we reach the end of our whistle-stop tour of White Magic. We have seen magic across time and society both revered and rejected but ever present. It has shaped our world quietly…
A ceremonial tablet of elemental symbols from an Order of the Golden Dawn splinter group. c.1900
Flora Knight June 18, 2024
And so we reach the end of our whistle-stop tour of White Magic. We have seen magic across time and society both revered and rejected but ever present. It has shaped our world quietly, offering answers beyond the reach of institutions and homes of controlled knowledge, and the history we have discussed still reverberates today, not just in magical practices but across everyday life. So much of the magic we think about in the 21st century happened in the brief period between the end of the renaissance and the start of the 20th Century. During this period, magic and witchcraft experienced a complex and transformative journey. Witchcraft was formally decriminalised and though occasional witch trials persisted, the fervor and fear that once surrounded this practice significantly diminished. In this era, the influence of the Rosicrucians led to a rise in secret societies such as the Freemasons, which contributed to the popularity of ritualistic magic and an interest in ancient practices.
Secret societies played a pivotal role in the evolution of magic during this time. While Masonic rituals had an essential influence on later magical practices, they were not directly relevant to the magical practices themselves. Instead, these societies fostered an environment where ritualistic magic could thrive. The late 18th century societies saw the development of somnambulism, a deep hypnotic trance state that would later become a significant aspect of magical and witchcraft activities.
A page from William Blake’s ‘The Four Zoas’, c.1800
One of the most symbolically intriguing developments of this period was the creation of the Four Zoas by the poet William Blake, for whom magic was a critical part of his practice. The Four Zoas are as follows:
Los: The Spirit of Prophecy and divine vision, derived from Sol, the guiding sun.
Urizen: The Spirit of Thought and Eternal Mind, residing in the Silver Mountains of wisdom.
Luvah: The Prince of Love, representing Eros and Eternal Youth, derived from the Lover.
Tharmas: The Corporeal Water of Matter, the fluid matrix of form and Prima Matter.
Blake’s work was a synthesis of millennia of magical thinking, exemplifying the third way that magic has always stood for. It imbued every element of his work, work that dealt antiquity and religion through a unique, magically informed, perspective.
Towards the end of this period, two significant occult groups emerged: the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Theosophical Society.
The Golden Dawn, formed through the writings of S.L. MacGregor Mathers and the ideas of three Freemasons, was arguably the most important occult group in history. The society operated on a three-tier hierarchical system and was notable for admitting women as equals alongside men, a significant departure from other secret societies. The First Order of the Golden Dawn taught Qabalah philosophy, Geomancy, Astrology, and Tarot Divination. The Second Order, known as the Inner Order, focused on Alchemy, Vision Quests, and Astral Projection. The Third and final order was reserved for the Secret Chiefs, who allegedly controlled the others through spiritual powers. Though the Golden Dawn lasted only about 15 years, it profoundly influenced modern magic practices, including Wicca and Thelema and popularised magical practices that had long fallen out of use.
An etching of Abramelin the Mage.
The Theosophical Society was founded by Madame Helena Blavatsky, and predated the Golden Dawn. It was inspired by Blavatsky's extensive travels and studies of Eastern and Asian philosophies. The society was an amalgamation of Buddhist and Hindu ideas interpreted through Neo-Platonic thought, envisioning humanity's destiny as a spiritual evolution. Blavatsky's ideas, expounded in her book "Isis Unveiled," introduced modern concepts of witches communicating with spiritual entities, which she viewed as mischievous elementals like gnomes, fairies, undines, sylphs, and salamanders, corresponding to the four elements.
These two groups gave rise to two of the most important figures in contemporary magic – Aleister Crowley and Abramelin the Mage. Crowley, known as the Beast 666, began with white magic but later developed a fascination with the Occult, becoming associated with black magic. Contemporary occultism still owes an insurmountable debt to Crowley, whos writings and ideas are the basis for modern Black Magic.
Abramelin the Mage, on the other hand, was an ancient Egyptian mage, retranslated and contextualised by a contemporary group. The works of Abramelins, who’s very existence is disputed, were compiled and translated by S.L.M. Mathers, focused mainly on Kabbalistic magic, Demonology and featured a number of Sator Squares which were believed to contain malevolent energy.
“The rise of psychoanalysis also influenced the understanding of magic and witchcraft. Much of white magic can be seen as rudimentary psychoanalysis, focusing on the inner workings of the mind and self-improvement.”
During this time, academic interest in historical witchcraft surged, most notably through the Witch-Cult Hypothesis. Proposed by German scholars Jarcke and Mone in the early 19th century, this theory suggested that the witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries targeted a surviving pre-Christian Pagan cult that had descended into a Satanic sect. Although this theory, popularized by Margaret Murray's book "The Witch-Cult in Western Europe," has been widely rejected by modern scholars due to a lack of evidence, it significantly influenced the modern perception of witchcraft.
The rise of psychoanalysis also influenced the understanding of magic and witchcraft. Much of white magic can be seen as rudimentary psychoanalysis, focusing on the inner workings of the mind and self-improvement. W.G. Gray incorporated Jungian psychoanalytic theory into modern magic, refining the symbolism of witchcraft. This is best exemplified by the four magical weapons:
The Sword: Divides, cuts, and inscribes.
The Wand: Points, directs, or indicates.
The Cup: Contains.
The Disc/Coin/Shield: A field upon which information is laid out.
These symbols, rooted in ancient Celtic mythology and Arthurian legends, represent the four tenets of Wicca and Witchcraft, as well as a basis of a psychoanalytical understanding of the subconscious.
Magic and witchcraft evolved in this time through the influence of secret societies, literary contributions, emerging occult groups, and the integration of psychoanalytic theory. These developments laid the groundwork for modern practices and significantly shaped contemporary understandings of magic and witchcraft. They returned magic to its origins, not as something separate from religion or science, but as something complimentary, necessary and integral to understanding the world and ourselves.
Flora Knight is an occultist and historian.
The Moon (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel June 15, 2024
The Moon is yellow and raining down its influence over the waters and creatures of the Earth. The sky is filled with its rays. Two dogs look up upon it, and within the water there is a shelled creature…
Name: The Moon
Number: XVIII
Astrology: Pisces
Qabalah: Qoph ק
Chris Gabriel June 15, 2024
The Moon is yellow and raining down its influence over the waters and creatures of the Earth. The sky is filled with its rays. Two dogs look up upon it, and within the water there is a shelled creature.
This card is the emblem of lunacy. It represents the maddening influence of the Moon, that makes dogs howl, transforms men into monsters, moves the tides and the creatures therein. This is the card of the unconscious.
In Marseilles, we find the “Man in the Moon” looking down morosely upon the earth. He is surrounded by a central halo of rays, and specks beyond that. On the earth, between two castles, two dogs are howling at it. Within the water, there is a lobster whose head and pincers are rising out of the depths.
In Rider, we see the same image, though here the Moon is seemingly disappointed. The towers are simpler, the emanating specks are distinctly in the form of the Hebrew letter Yod י, and the lobster is entirely out of the water.
In Thoth, we are given a similar form, but with major differences. The moon is faceless and fluidic, blood swirls within the water below. The towers remain, but the dogs have been elevated to forms of the Egyptian God Anubis holding wands and ankhs with his jackal form at his feet.. The shelled creature is no longer a lobster, but the scarab form of the God Ra, Keph-Ra, the dung beetle who rolls the Sun day by day.
The influence of the Moon in our lives is ubiquitous. We see it move the tides and we hear dogs howl at it. Our calendars are structured according to the lunar cycle, which also tracks to the menstrual cycle. We get tattoos of the Moon, we watch movies where werewolves are transformed by it. We expect strange things to occur on the night of a full moon, and they often do!
The watery unconscious is symbolized perfectly by the Moon, for under its zenith we dream night by night. The werewolf embodies our experience of this cycle well, when repressed bestial energy spills out and dominates our conscious self.
And the lobster, as Jung told us, is what we meet when we stare long enough into our own reflection and see what is beneath.
Marseilles and Rider show the influence of this dark Moon to hold what Edgar Allen Poe described as ‘illimitable dominion over all’. Thoth offers a significantly more hopeful image, the Sun is already moving through the sky to illuminate all that is dark.
When this card is pulled we are to consider these dark influences, the forces within us that may be brought out at random, and to hold it in our hearts that whether or not this dark night of the soul is but a night, a terrible week, or a cursed year, that the Sun is coming. And on the other hand, if we are engaged in acts that need this cover of darkness, that we can move stealthily therein.