The Subtle and The Gross (Alchemy I)

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

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Molly Hankins December 5, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theaters of Authenticity

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Ana Roberts, December 3, 2024

David Bowie released his first album in 1967 to little acclaim or success, and there are many who say it rightly deserved neither. A peculiar blend of psychedelic rock, folk and whimsical music hall acts, the album is incompatible with the rest of his career. It is a combination of twee songs of pastoral England, saccharine love songs and quaint lyrics that seem to come from an oral tradition of medieval story telling. It is an album mostly not worth talking about, save for a single track ‘We Are Hungry Men’ undoubtedly amongst the few embarrassing moments in Bowies career. It is a muddled song telling a rather shallow story, feeling halfway between a radio play and a song, with an undeniably catchy chorus, yet in it Bowie plays the part of a Messiah, come to earth to warn of overpopulation. The lyrics read like a pulp science-fiction novel of the 50s, a known influence on Bowie, but it is not ludicrous to suggest that Bowie had seen how Dylan had created himself as a prophet and began flirting with the idea. In fact some four years later, on Hunky Dory, he paid direct homage to his influence on ‘Song for Bob Dylan’, illustrating how deeply he understood the power of Dylan’s creation, ‘You sat behind a million pair of eyes / And told them how they saw’. Bowie understood the power of Dylan’s ability to transplant his truth on others, rather than make any claims for himself but more importantly, he understood that Dylan was playing a character, addressing him by his given name and referring to Dylan as a separate entity entirely; ‘Now, hear this, Robert Zimmerman / Though I don’t suppose we’ll meet / Ask your good friend Dylan / If he’d gaze on down the street’.

Bowie saw that Dylan was a created character, and that his mythology as a prophet was a tool of genius, but even on ‘We Are The Hungry Men’ Bowie took this tool far further than Dylan ever did, on this very first outing he presents himself directly as a prophet, something Dylan never dared to do throughout his career. In a mostly forgettable album, this single moment shows that Bowie, so early in his career, is already comfortable with playing characters, willingly inauthentic at his very origin and entirely aware of how Dylan has created himself, and dealt with his own problem of authenticity. It would be another five years until the Bowie’s journey of the created prophet would reach it’s origin with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars.

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“Bowie created a prophet, and created for him a prophecy he knew would come true. While Dylan ensured that his work could not be falsifiable, Bowie ensured that his was able to be proven true.”

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Fans waiting outside the concert in D.A. Pennebacker’s ‘Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’, 1979.

In the D.A. Pennebacker, who had made the Bob Dylan film ‘Dont Look Back’ some 6 years earlier, concert film of Ziggy’s last performance we open with glimpses of a crowd waiting outside. One by one, boys and girls alike, are seen in makeup, in crimson hair, dressed as mime artists, as aliens, as the lost population of Ziggy’s world. These are not just fans, they are inhabitants, they are part of the performance, they are the disciples of Ziggy who have followed him from outer space to earth to revel in his glory, in his sex, in his pure rock’n’roll. This is the genius of Ziggy and the genius of Bowie; it is in this that he is able to become entirely authentic through playing a created character. Bowie does not have to comment on or confront whether he is authentic because through creating the character of Ziggy Stardust, he has created a theater. His understanding of mime and comedia dell’arte, studied in the interim years between his first album and this, he was able to create a world through himself alone. The reduction of comedia dell’arte into purest forms of emotion to convey character allowed him to forget about the particulars. It is why Ziggy Stardust doesn’t tell a cohesive story and still creates a world. It is a masterpiece of maximalist reductionism. Bowie did not create a glass onion, he created an alien, and presented him openly for the world to see. He created a singular narrative, rejecting the need for a continuous one. Though his albums before all built up to this, they have no relation to it. David Bowie needs to be authentic, needs to create a glass onion, but Ziggy Stardust has no such requirements. Watching the opening minutes of the concert film, with a gaggle of kids dressed up as freaks, it is clear that this is true. The audience believes in the world, and they believe in Ziggy, so they become part of the world. They no longer question whether he is being authentic, because they have authentically inhabited the same created world as him. It is easier to create worlds than to change them.

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars ends as promised, with a fall. ‘Ziggy Stardust’ offers the most cohesive chronicling of the events of the album so far, and, sung from the perspective of one of the spiders, it describes his death, ‘Like a leper messiah / When the kids had killed the man / I had to break up the band’. It offers a parable of fame and success, the overcoming of an ego that leads to destruction. Yet, it is not the last song on the album. Instead, it precedes ‘Suffragette City’ and the album finishes with ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’. The live show too, while it differed in track listing from the album, always finished with this track. In Pennebackers documentary of this final performance, at the end of the show, stripped of costumes, wearing just a sheer black top, Bowie delivers a speech before he begins, announcing the end of Ziggy Stardust that this is to be ‘the last show we’ll ever do’. He turns, as the opening piano chords begin and circles the stage, stopping in the middle to sing, delicately, ‘Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth’. The song matches the tone of the opener, ‘Five Years’, both feeling more like ‘avante-garde show song than straight rock songs’, biographer David Buckley suggests. The repeated refrain of the song, sung with unbridled passion and emotion by Bowie at the final show, ‘You’re not alone’ feels like a message to his fans, written in the knowledge he would kill Ziggy. Bowie created Ziggy with the intention of him to die, ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’ is the final prophecy, fulfilled 18 months after it’s release. It is this track that is perhaps the ultimate stroke of genius in creating Ziggy. Bowie created a prophet, and created for him a prophecy he knew would come true. While Dylan ensured that his work could not be falsifiable, Bowie ensured that his was able to be proven true.

Ziggy Stardust had truth embedded in him at the moment of his creation, to be ultimately revealed at the moment of his death. Bowie knew too, that in order for Ziggy to be authentic he had to die. Not just in the grand tradition of dead rock stars but more potently in the tradition of theater, where no piece of art can last forever, and they are imbued with truth because of it. Bowie employed mime in every aspect of Ziggy’s creation, and it is because of this that he was able to create authenticity. He undermined himself, acknowledged that he could never be authentic and so instead created someone who was. ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’ speaks as directly about Bowie as it does to Ziggy. Bowie had to commit suicide of the self, suicide of his rock n roll dreams in order to create Ziggy and reach authenticity and communicate truth. It would not be the first time such a suicide was performed. ‘You’re not alone’ is as much words of comfort for the freaks in Ziggy’s world as it is to Bowie himself, his repeatedly fracturing personalities ensuring that it would be nearly a decade before he performed as himself, alone. Bowie confronted authenticity as directly as The Monkees did, but where Head was a critique of their own inauthenticity, Ziggy Stardust was a celebration of it. Embedded within Ziggy is knowledge that Bowie had in his first record, we are never ourselves, never for ourselves and we are all the more powerful because of it.

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

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Five of Disks (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Worry, the Five of Disks
Number: 5
Astrology: Mars in Taurus
Qabalah: Gevurah of He

Chris Gabriel November 30, 2024

In the Five of Disks, the Earth quakes and cracks, structures crumble and confusion comes. This is material instability, a crash.

In Rider, we find two beggars enduring a snow storm. The man is lame and using crutches, his head is bandaged as he looks up in agony. The woman is barefoot, covered in a shawl and thin skirt, she looks down in defeat. They are passing a stained glass window made up of five pentacles pointing up. The material comforts enjoyed by the previous 4 figures in the suits have withdrawn, there are now distinct haves and havenots.

In Thoth, we have five cracked disks forming a downward pentagram. They bear the symbols of the five Tattvas, the magical elements that form reality. Astrologically the card is Mercury in Taurus, an unhappy position, quick and agile Mercury here is weighed down by the laborious Bull.

In Marseille, we are shown our most pleasant image, five simple coins and two flowers. Here the disruption to the stable four is seen as a growth: they are not moving up or down as in Rider and Thoth, but remain balanced. This Growth can be good, like a flower, or bad, like cancer. Qabalistically, this is the Anger of the Princess.

This card reminds me of chapter 77 of the Tao Te Ching, in which the Tao of Heaven is likened to a bow, the high is made low and the low is made high, but the Tao of Man brings the high higher and forces the low lower. The Five of Disks is an excellent expression of this.

As Mars in Taurus it raises to mind Sigmund Freud and Salvador Dali, who make excellent use of their fallen Mercury through science and art. The Parapraxis or Freudian Slip is an idea that could only arise from Mercury Taurus, the worry that our words reveal ulterior motives is exactly the kind of paranoia that flourishes in the sign. 

Dali develops the “Paranoiac Critical Method” through which he follows paranoid fantasies as far as they can go. Psychoanalysis, and its town crier Surrealism, shook the very foundations of civilization by revealing their true basis in the terrifying and inhuman Unconscious.

Materially, this is a stock market crash and economic collapse, the stable power of the Four of Disks is broken. The money goes up, leaving the poor to suffer, as in Rider, or the system itself crumbles, as in Thoth.

When we pull this card, expect your comfort to be shaken, for it harkens a breaking down and collapse. Trust your suspicions. This can be a failed investment, a car crash, a break up, or a job loss but it can also be the positive risk of a new opportunity. 

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Walking in the City, Part 2

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Michel De Certeau was a Jesuit Priest and Scholar whose work on topics across history, sociology, philosophy, semiotics, theology and psychoanalysis helped define him as one of the most substantial and unique thinkers of his era. This essay, from his work ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’ published in 1974, is an attempt to individualize the concept of mass culture that Guy Debord and the Situationists had established a decade earlier. He finds art in the unconscious action of living, and argues that though systems are placed upon us, humans cannot and will not act as a monolith but always as individuals, employing individual tactics of expression in every facet of life.

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Michel De Certeau November 28, 2024

The Concept-city is decaying. Does that mean that the illness afflicting both the rationality that founded it and its professionals afflicts the urban populations as well? Perhaps cities are deteriorating along with the procedures that organized them. But we must be careful here. The ministers of knowledge have always assumed that the whole universe was threatened by the very changes that affected their ideologies and their positions. They transmute the misfortune of their theories into theories of misfortune. When they transform their bewilderment into 'catastrophes', when they seek to enclose the people in the 'panic' of their discourses, are they once more necessarily right?

Rather than remaining within the field of a discourse that upholds its privilege by inverting its content (speaking of catastrophe and no longer of progress), one can try another path: one can analyse the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay; one can follow the swarming activity of these procedures that, far from being regulated or eliminated by panoptic administration, have reinforced themselves in a proliferating illegitimacy, developed and insinuated themselves into the networks of surveillance, and combined in accord with unreadable but stable tactics to the point of constituting everyday regulations and surreptitious creativities that are merely concealed by the frantic mechanisms and discourses of the observational organization.

This pathway could be inscribed as a consequence, but also as the reciprocal, of Foucault's analysis of the structures of power. He moved it in the direction of mechanisms and technical procedures, 'minor instrumentalities' capable, merely by their organization of 'details', of transforming a human multiplicity into a 'disciplinary' society and of managing, differentiating, classifying, and hierarchizing all deviances concerning apprenticeship, health, justice, the army or work. 'These often miniscule ruses of discipline', these 'minor but flawless' mechanisms, draw their efficacy from a relationship between procedures and the space that they redistribute in order to make an 'operator' out of it. But what spatial practices correspond, in the area where discipline is manipulated, to these apparatuses that produce a disciplinary space? In the present conjuncture, which is marked by a contradiction between the collective mode of administration and an individual mode of reappropriation, this question is no less important, if one admits that spatial practices in fact secretly structure the determining conditions of social life. I would like to follow out a few of these multiform, resistant, tricky and stubborn procedures that elude discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised, and which should lead us to a theory of everyday practices, of lived space, of the disquieting familiarity of the city.

The Chorus of Idle Footsteps

The goddess can be recognized by her step.
Virgil, Aeneid, I, 405

Their story begins on ground level, with footsteps. They are myriad, but do not compose a series. They cannot be counted because each unit has a qualitative character: a style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation. Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities. Their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together. In that respect, pedestrian movements form one of these 'real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city'. They are not localized; it is rather they that spatialize. They are no more inserted within a container than those Chinese characters speakers sketch out on their hands with their fingertips.

It is true that the operations of walking on can be traced on city maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths (here well-trodden, there very faint) and their trajectories (going this way and not that). But these thick or thin curves only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by. Surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of passing by. The operation of walking, wandering, or 'window shopping', that is, the activity of passers-by, is transformed into points that draw a totalizing and reversible line on the map. They allow us to grasp only a relic set in the nowhen of a surface of projection. Itself visible, it has the effect of making invisible the operation that made it possible. These fixations constitute procedures for forgetting. The trace left behind is substituted for the practice. It exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten.

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“Only the cave of the home remains believable, still open for a certain time to legends, still full of shadows. Except for that, according to another city-dweller, there are only 'places in which one can no longer believe in anything’.”

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Walking Rhetorics

The walking of passers-by offers a series of turns (tours) and detours that can be compared to 'turns of phrase' or 'stylistic figures'. There is a rhetoric of walking. The art of 'turning' phrases finds an equivalent in an art of composing a path (toumer un parcours). Like ordinary language, this art implies and combines styles and uses. Style specifies 'a linguistic structure that manifests on the symbolic level ... an individual's fundamental way of being in the world'; it connotes a singular. Use defines the social phenomenon through which a system of communication manifests itself in actual fact; it refers to a norm. Style and use both have to do with a 'way of operating' (of speaking, walking, etc.), but style involves a peculiar processing of the symbolic, while use refers to elements of a code. They intersect to form a style of use, a way of being and a way of operating.

A friend who lives in the city of Sevres drifts, when he is in Paris, toward the rue des Saints-Peres and the rue de Sevres, even though he is going to see his mother in another part of town: these names articulate a sentence that his steps compose without his knowing it. Numbered streets and street numbers ( 112th St., or 9 rue Saint-Charles) orient the magnetic field of trajectories just as they can haunt dreams. Another friend unconsciously represses the streets whjch have names and, by this fact, transmit her - orders or identities in the same way as summonses and classifications; she goes instead along paths that have no name or signature. But her walking is thus still controlled negatively by proper names. 

What is it then that they spell out? Disposed in constellations that hierarchize and semantically order the surface of the city, operating chronological arrangements and historical justifications, these words (Borrégo, Botzaris, Bougainville ... ) slowly lose, like worn coins, the value engraved on them, but their ability to signify outlives its first definition. Saint-Peres, Corentin Celton, Red Square ... these names make themselves available to the diverse meanings given them by passers-by; they detach themselves from the places they were supposed to define and serve as imaginary meeting-points on itineraries which, as metaphors, they determine for reasons that are foreign to their original value but may be recognized or not by passers-by. A strange toponymy that is detached from actual places and flies high over the city like a foggy geography of 'meanings' held in suspension, directing the physical deambulations below: Place de l'Etoile, Concorde, Poissonniere ... These constellations of names provide traffic patterns: they are stars directing itineraries. 'The Place de la Concorde does not exist,' Malaparte said, 'it is an idea.' It is much more than an 'idea'. A whole series of comparisons would be necessary to account for the magical powers proper names enjoy. They seem to be carried as emblems by the travellers they direct and simultaneously decorate.

Linking acts and footsteps, opening meanings and directions, these words operate in the name of an emptying-out and wearing-away of their primary role. They become liberated spaces that can be occupied. A rich indetermination gives them, by means of a semantic rarefaction, the function of articulating a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning. They insinuate other routes into the functionalist and historical order of movement. Walking follows them: 'I fill this great empty space with a beautiful name.' People are put in motion by the remaining relics of meaning, and sometimes by their waste products, the inverted remainders of great ambitions. Things that amount to nothing, or almost nothing, symbolize and orient walkers' steps: names that have ceased precisely to be ‘proper'.

Ultimately, since proper names are already 'local authorities' or ‘superstitions', they are replaced by numbers: on the telephone, one no longer dials Opera, but 073. The same is true of the stories and legends that haunt urban space like superfluous or additional inhabitants. They are the object of a witch-hunt, by the very logic of the techno-structure. But their extermination (like the extermination of trees, forests, and hidden places in which such legends live) makes the city a 'suspended symbolic order'. The habitable city is thereby annulled. Thus, as a woman from Rouen put it, no, here 'there isn't any place special, except for my own home, that's all ... There isn't anything.' Nothing 'special': nothing that is marked, opened up by a memory or a story, signed by something or someone else. Only the cave of the home remains believable, still open for a certain time to legends, still full of shadows. Except for that, according to another city-dweller, there are only 'places in which one can no longer believe in anything’.

It is through the opportunity they offer to store up rich silences and wordless stories, or rather through their capacity to create cellars and garrets everywhere, that local legends (legenda: what is to be read, but also what can be read) permit exits, ways of going out and coming back in, and thus habitable spaces. Certainly walking about and travelling substitute for exits, for going away and coming back, which were formerly made available by a body of legends that places nowadays lack. Physical moving about has the itinerant function of yesterday's or today’s 'superstitions'. Travel (like walking) is a substitute for the legends that used to open up space to something different. What does travel ultimately produce if it is not, by a sort of reversal, 'an exploration of the deserted places of my memory’, the return to nearby exoticism by way of a detour through distant places, and the 'discovery' of relics and legends: 'fleeting visions of the French countryside’, 'fragments of music and poetry', in short, something like an 'uprooting in one’s origins' (Heidegger)? What this walking exile produces is precisely the body of legends that is currently lacking in one's own vicinity; it is a fiction, which moreover has the double characteristic, like dreams or pedestrian rhetoric, of being the effect of displacements and condensations. As a corollary, one can measure the importance of these signifying practices (to tell oneself legends) as practices that invent spaces.

From this point of view, their contents remain revelatory, and still more so is the principle that organizes them. Stories about places are makeshift things. They are composed with the world's debris. Even if the literary form and the actantial schema of 'superstitions' correspond to stable models whose structures and combinations have often been analysed over the past thirty years, the materials (all the rhetorical details of their 'manifestation') are furnished by the leftovers from nominations, taxonomies, heroic or comic predicates, etc., that is, by fragments of scattered semantic places. These heterogeneous and even contrary elements fill the homogeneous form of the story. Things extra and other ( details and excesses coming from elsewhere) insert themselves into the accepted framework, the imposed order. One thus has the very relationship between spatial practices and the constructed order. The surface of this order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order.

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Michel de Certeau was a Jesuit Priest and Scholar who lived in Paris, France and contributed to innumerable fields of study. He was born in 1925 and died in 1986.

Walking in the City, Part 1

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Michel De Certeau was a Jesuit Priest and Scholar whose work on topics across history, sociology, philosophy, semiotics, theology and psychoanalysis helped define him as one of the most substantial and unique thinkers of his era. This essay, from his work ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’ published in 1974, is an attempt to individualize the concept of mass culture that Guy de Bord and the Situationists had established a decade earlier. He finds art in the unconscious action of living, and argues that though systems are placed upon us, humans cannot and will not act as a monolith but always as individuals, employing individual tactics of expression in every facet of life.

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Michel De Certeau November 26, 2024

Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. Beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea, lifts up the skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at Greenwich, then rises again to the crests of Midtown, quietly passes over Central Park and finally undulates off into the distance beyond Harlem. A wave of verticals. Its agitation is momentarily arrested by vision. The gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyes. It is transformed into a texturology in which extremes coincide - extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterday's buildings, already transformed into trash cans, and today's urban irruptions that block out its space. Unlike Rome, New York has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future. A city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs. The spectator can read in it a universe that is constantly exploding. In it are inscribed the architectural figures of the coincidatio oppositorum formerly drawn in miniatures and mystical textures. On this stage of concrete, steel and glass, cut out between two oceans (the Atlantic and the American) by a frigid body of water, the tallest letters in the world compose a gigantic rhetoric of excess in both expenditure and production.

Voyeurs or Walkers

To what erotics of knowledge does the ecstasy of reading such a cosmos belong? Having taken a voluptuous pleasure in it, I wonder what is the source of this pleasure of 'seeing the whole', of looking down on, totalizing the most immoderate of human texts. 

To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the city's grasp. One's body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it according to an anonymous law; nor is it possessed, whether as player or played, by the rumble of so many differences and by the nervousness of New York traffic. When one goes up there, he leaves behind the mass that carries off and mixes up in itself any identity of authors or spectators. An Icarus flying above these waters, he can ignore the devices of Daedalus in mobile and endless labyrinths far below. His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which ·one was 'possessed' into a text that lies before one's eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more. 

Must one finally fall back into the dark space where crowds move back and forth, crowds that, though visible from on high, are themselves unable to see down below? An Icarian fall. On the 110th floor, a poster, sphinx-like, addresses an enigmatic message to the pedestrian who is for an instant transformed into a visionary: It's hard to be down when you're up.

The desire to see the city preceded the means of satisfying it. Medieval or Renaissance painters represented the city as seen in a perspective that no eye had yet enjoyed. This fiction already made the medieval spectator into a celestial eye. It created gods. Have things changed since technical procedures have organized an 'all-seeing power'? The totalizing eye imagined by the painters of earlier times lives on in our achievements. The same scopic drive haunts users of architectural productions by materializing today the utopia that yesterday was only painted. The 1370-foot-high tower that serves as a prow for Manhattan continues to construct the fiction that creates readers, makes the complexity of the city readable and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text. 

Is the immense texturology spread out before one's eyes anything more than a representation, an optical artefact? It is the analogue of the facsimile produced, through a projection that is a way of keeping aloof, by the space planner urbanist, city planner or cartographer. The panorama-city is a 'theoretical' (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices. 

The ordinary practitioners of the city live 'down below', below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk - an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmanner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban 'text' they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other's arms. The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility. It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness. The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.

Escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface, or whose surface is only its upper limit, outlining itself against the visible. Within this ensemble, I shall try to locate the practices that are foreign to the 'geometrical' or 'geographical' space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions. These practices of space refer to a specific form of operations ('ways of operating'), to 'another spatiality' (an ‘anthropological', poetic and mythic experience of space), and to an opaque and blind mobility characteristic of the bustling city. A mi9rational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city.

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“This is the way in which the Concept-city functions; a place of transformations and appropriations, the object of various kinds of interference but also a subject that is constantly enriched by new attributes, it is simultaneously the machinery and the hero of modernity.”

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From the Concept of the City to Urban Practices

The World Trade Center is only the most monumental figure of Western urban development. The atopia-utopia of optical knowledge has long had the ambition of surmounting and articulating the contradictions arising from urban agglomeration. It is a question of managing a growth of human agglomeration or accumulation. ‘The city is a huge monastery', said Erasmus. Perspective vision and prospective vision constitute the twofold projection of an opaque past and an uncertain future on to a surface that can be dealt with. They inaugurate (in the sixteenth century?) the transformation of the urban fact into the concept of a city. Long before the concept itself gives rise to a particular figure of history, it assumes that this fact can be dealt with as a unity determined by an urbanistic ratio. Linking the city to the concept never makes them identical, but it plays on their progressive symbiosis: to plan a city is both to think the veiy plurality of the real and to make that way of thinking the plural effective; it is to know how to articulate it and be able to do it.

An Operational Concept?

The 'city' founded by utopian and urbanistic discourse is defined by the possibility of a threefold operation. 

First, the production of its own space (un espace propre): rational organization must thus repress all the physical, mental and political pollutions that would compromise it; 

Second, the substitution of a nowhen, or of a synchronic system, for the indeterminable and stubborn resistances offered by traditions; univocal scientific strategies, made possible by the flattening out of all the data in a plane projection, must replace the tactics of users who take advantage of 'opportunities' and who, through these trap-events, these lapses in visibility, reproduce the opacities of history everywhere;

Third and finally, the creation of a universal and anonymous subject which is the city itself: it gradually becomes possible to attribute to it, as to its political model, Hobbes's State, all the functions and predicates that were previously scattered and assigned to many different real subjects - groups, associations, or individuals. 'The city', like a proper name, thus provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties.

Administration is combined with a process of elimination in this place organized by 'speculative' and classificatory operations. On the one hand, there is a differentiation and redistribution of the parts and functions of the city, as a result of inversions, displacements, accumulations, etc.; on the other there is a rejection of everything that is not capable of being dealt with in this way and so constitutes the 'waste products' of a functionalist administration (abnormality, deviance, illness, death, etc.). To be sure, progress allows an increasing number of these waste products to be reintroduced into administrative circuits and transforms even deficiencies (in health, security etc.) into ways of making the networks of order denser. But in reality, it repeatedly produces effects contrary to those at which it aims: the profit system generates a loss which, in the multiple forms of wretchedness and poverty outside the system and of waste inside it, constantly turns production into ‘expenditure'. Moreover, the rationalization of the city leads to its mythification in strategic discourses, which are calculations based on the hypothesis or the necessity of its destruction in order to arrive at a final decision. Finally, the functionalist organization, by privileging progress (i.e. time), causes the condition of its own possibility - space itself - to be forgotten; space thus becomes the blind spot in a scientific and political technology. This is the way in which the Concept-city functions; a place of transformations and appropriations, the object of various kinds of interference but also a subject that is constantly enriched by new attributes, it is simultaneously the machinery and the hero of modernity.

Today, whatever the avatars of this concept may have been, we have to acknowledge that if in discourse the city serves as a totalizing and almost mythical landmark for socio-economic and political strategies, urban life increasingly permits the re-emergence of the element that the urbanistic project excluded. The language of power is in itself 'urbanizing', but the city is left prey to contradictory movements that counterbalance and combine themselves outside the reach of panoptic power. The city becomes the dominant theme in political legends, but it is no longer a field of programmed and regulated operations. Beneath the discourses that ideologize the city, the ruses and combinations of powers that have no readable identity proliferate; without points where one can take hold of them, without rational transparency, they are impossible to administer.

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Michel de Certeau was a Jesuit Priest and Scholar who lived in Paris, France and contributed to innumerable fields of study. He was born in 1925 and died in 1986.

Ten of Cups (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Satiety, the Ten of Cups
Number: 10
Astrology: Mars in Pisces
Qabalah: Malkuth of He

Chris Gabriel November 23, 2024

The Ten of Cups is entirely satisfied, the ooze and gunk that had dirtied the cups before has been washed away, and now clean water overflows. This is the ‘over the rainbow’ - the storm has passed and we can appreciate the beauty. This is the flow state.

In Rider, we find a happy family, a man and wife rejoice as they look up to a rainbow, upon which ten cups are superimposed, and a brother and sister dance for joy. A little cottage sits a ways away, and a creek runs through the yard. This image is Dorothy’s yearning dream in the Wizard of Oz, the technicolor world  “heard of once in a lullaby”.

In Thoth, we have ten cups arranged as the Tree of Life. Clean water flows from the top cup downwards as a complex but perfectly functioning fountain. It sits atop a flat image of a red lotus. Astrologically this card is Mars in Pisces, where the force of war is made dreamy and psychic: the flow state.

In Marseille, we have 9 full, open cups below one large sealed cup. Qabalistically this is the Kingdom of the Queen. The Kingdom of the Queen is satiated.

The Ten of Cups is one of the most pleasant cards in tarot, alongside the Ten of Disks. While the Ten Disks are the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, this is the wonderful dreamland, the promised peace. This is the rainbow as a sign from God after the flood. 

It calls to mind William Wordsworth’s poem My Heart Leaps Up:

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

As the flow state of Mars in Pisces, this card may indicate “oblique strategies”, obstacles that seemed immense will melt away through a strange solution.

When we pull this card, we may resolve lasting difficulties, find gnawing issues satisfied, or find joy in something dreamy.

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

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Pauli and Jung’s Synchronicity

Illustration from Carl Jung’s ‘Liber Novus’ or ‘The Red Book’. 1917.

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Molly Hankins November 21, 2024

In 1945, the Viennese physicist Wolfgang Pauli won the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum numbers and the structure of matter that predicted the existence of the neutrino 20 years before it was confirmed. This was 18 years after he started seeing Carl Jung for psychotherapy and dream analysis following his mother’s suicide, and 7 years before he and Jung would publish The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche exploring in great detail the concept of ‘synchronicity.’ It is a word intrinsically ties to Jung, who started using it in lectures a few years after meeting Pauli and published a book of the same name a year before his death, but the idea was brought to life in their  collaboration. 

In The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, synchronicity describes an acausal relationship between events that occur sequentially in linear time and appear meaningfully related but with no identifiable, underlying relationship. At the time, using physics as a lens to study metaphysics wasn’t controversial; Pauli’s friends and contemporaries like physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were working together to explore theories that would bridge understanding between esoteric philosophy, practice and science. 

The same year his treatise with Jung was published, Pauli spent the summer in Copenhagen with Bohr and Heisenberg having these very conversations. Heisenberg said that physicists needed to make every effort to grasp the meaning of old religions because, “… it quite obviously refers to a crucial aspect of reality.” This was before the chokehold of post-World War II and the Cold War thought made physics-funding the exclusive business of the war machine and condemned exploration of metaphysics to the realm of taboo. Fellow Austrian physicist and Tao of Physics author Fritjof Capra famously never received institutional funding again for his research after the book was published in 1975.

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“Synchronicity mirrors quantum entanglement, which occurs when two particles link together and influence each other's state no matter how far apart they are, because at the quantum level, the laws governing the interactions of space and time stop behaving according to the principle of causality.”

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Like so many revolutionary minds, Pauli was troubled and controversial, known for his alcoholism and quarrelsome nature. His mother’s suicide, which followed his father’s infidelity, devastated him, but ultimately pushed him to seek out Jung while they were both living in Zurich. Their relationship continued by letter, most famously documented in their published book of letters from 1932 to 1958, Atom and Archetype, named after a Pauli quote included in the collection. “As I regard physics and psychology as complementary types of examination,”, he wrote, “I am certain that the investigation of the psyche can throw light on the structure of the atom, just as the study of the atom can illuminate the structure of the psyche.” The core tenet of this thought is that both the human psyche and atom contain a central core, “a nucleus of self” surrounded by orbiting subatomic particles or “unconscious electrons” such as archetypes or complexes that influence conscious awareness. Atomic stability depends on the arrangement of the electrons, so their analogy espoused that stability of the psyche depended on the balance between aspects of the conscious and unconscious mind. 

Synchronicity was present in their daily lives too, as Pauli was known for disrupting experiments simply by being nearby. This became known to physicists as the ‘Pauli effect’ and describes the inexplicable disruption of technical equipment in the presence of certain people. When an experiment failed at University of Göttingen after a measuring device stopped working, the lab’s director James Franck wrote to Pauli joking that he could not have been the cause because he wasn’t physically present. In response Pauli revealed that he actually had been at the Göttingen rail station at the time of the failure. After a china vase fell and shattered for no discernible reason at a symposium in 1948 as he entered the meeting hall at Jung’s Institute, Pauli attempted to explain the phenomenon and its relationship to psychology in a new paper called ‘Background-Physics.’

While Pauli and Jung were never able to completely pin down the mechanism of synchronicity explored in their 30 year collaboration on the subject, they did conclude that the experience must somehow correlate to quantum entanglement. Synchronicity mirrors quantum entanglement, which occurs when two particles link together and influence each other's state no matter how far apart they are, because at the quantum level, the laws governing the interactions of space and time stop behaving according to the principle of causality.

And it makes sense that the phenomenon of synchronicity was explored and articulated by a psychologist and a physicist: the experience of it feels like a feedback loop between what’s going on in our minds and the physical world. As Jung himself said, “Synchronicity is the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that cannot be explained by cause and effect and that is meaningful to the observer.” Quantum physics tells us that to observe reality is to essentially render it, and synchronicity leaves us with the feeling our perspective is undeniably influencing the experience being rendered. 

The study of the occult lies at the intersection of observation and creation of what’s rendering in the physical and how we can work with it. Synchronicity, as Terrence McKenna said, is the universe nodding at us as confirmation that we’re on the right track.

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

Why Collect Digital Art? What Do You Believe? (Gen Art)

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Ian Rogers November 19, 2024

On the 14th of November, I received a text message from the Digital Art Curator Grida Hyewon Jang asking if I would mind giving an answer to three questions she had posted on X. She told me she planned to use the responses in a lecture she would be delivering to art students in Korea who are not particularly familiar with digital art. “Who knows – your comments might inspire a future artist!” she wrote.

That same day I was traveling from Paris, France to Marfa, Texas, for ArtBlocks annual community gathering (for more on ArtBlocks please read my earlier Tetragrammaton piece, Chimera: The Not-so-Still Life of Mpkoz). I had many thoughts bouncing around in my head that morning regarding digital art, a medium much maligned in the aftermath of FTX yet somehow still living and gaining momentum again. Grida’s request was a welcome opportunity to put those thoughts here on digital paper. I’m very happy for the opportunity to save these thoughts for posterity and present them to you, dear Tetragrammaton reader.I welcome your feedback and discussion.

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“Basquiat's work increases in value because the number of people who know the story increases while the supply does not. Luxury brands are trading on heritage and storytelling, not only products. Similarly, if you are wondering if the value of Cryptopunks will increase over the next 25 years you only need to ask: Will people still talk about them in 25 years?”

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Collectors: Why collect? What do you believe?

Modern, digital technology is a tool, created and wielded by humans, ostensibly under our control. Throughout history, the adoption of new technologies has driven profound shifts in society and this has been especially true when the technologies connect humans in new ways (shipping, telephony, trains, airplanes, internet, mobile connectivity) that lead younger generations to live differently than those who matured ahead of them.

Today, most of us are living in two worlds at once: physical and digital. We breathe in the physical world where we hug our children, eat, sleep, make love, run, ride skateboards, and play vinyl records. Often simultaneously, we email, DM, scroll, heart, create, share, shitpost and type with thumbs in a world of small-yet-powerful computers connected to one another via TCP/IP. We value the opinion of our network neighbors far more than our physical ones. We operate in dual worlds most of our waking moments, and share data with the cloud while we sleep. 

In my lifetime, as the five-year-old recipient of my brother's KISS vinyl, a teenage collector of VHS tapes about skateboarding and music, and MP3-trader-turned GM of Apple Music, I've lived through the digitization of all information. Obscure performances once mail-ordered from the classified ads in a newsprint magazine are now available to 5.52 billion Internet users with a simple keyword search on YouTube. 

Now, we have begun the digitization of all value. The "renting services on the Internet" business (internet-services business) has a current marketcap of about $4.75 trillion. The "owning digital value" business (cryptocurrency) is currently valued at $3.2 trillion. I believe the "owning digital value" marketcap will be at least an order of magnitude larger than this "renting digital services" industry within the next 25 years, and if Instagram hadn’t chickened out of their digital collectible market the lines would already be beginning to blur. The value of Internet services is centralized with the shareholders of companies whose product is the user. The marketcap of cryptocurrency will at least partially belong to the world's digital citizens held in permissionless digital self-custody.

The digitization of value, however, has a cold start problem. Asset value is relative to network effect -- it only exists if we all agree it does. Adoption curves to new technologies always takes time but the emerging Internet of Value has a different foe than the 1990s Internet of Information. In 1999, digital media was challenging an $895 billion traditional media market;today, the crypto industry is challenging a $9 trillion banking industry. Replacing 3% credit card surcharges is inevitable but will take a long time and digital ownership is much more than just finance. It's trustless proof of humanity, identity, and anything else.

www.beastieboys.com in December of 1998.

Music apps hold "early adoptor" status in online history. Many of the first CD-ROMs, Shareware, Web and mobile applications were applications to find and listen to music. "Self-publishing" music platform IUMA pre-dates the World Wide Web. CD Baby bridged digital and physical self-publishing ten years before Amazon started allowing authors to publish their own books. The iPhone wouldn't have come into existence without the success of the iPod.  There are many reasons music was the tip of the proverbial spear, among them relatively small file sizes, artist/album/track/genre being a remedial database challenge, and every college-age computer programmer loving and listening to music while they code. 

Similarly, Digital Art is the tip of the digital value spear. Someone creates something. Someone else likes it. They exchange value. It's the simplest form of a digital economy. Scale helps, but isn’t required. As with traditional art and luxury goods, the number of market participants can be small relative to value. It only took two bidders to drive the value of Francis Bacon's Three Studies of Lucien Freud to $142.2 million dollars. 

In the 1990s I was the conduit between the band Beastie Boys and their online fans. I posted tour dates, press articles, and photos from the stage. I kept the FAQ up to date and moderated the message board and IRC channel. We shared information about the band's not-for-profit and indie record label. As a "market" the fanbase was relatively small, but extremely passionate and dedicated. It felt as if the internet was made especially for communities like this to gather. I used to say my job was "to turn a casual listener into an obsessed fan".

Similarly today, the "obsessed fans of Kim Asendorf market" (who gather in a private Discord of which I am part) is very small. Yet if you enter you will find it is indeed a market with rising prices due to demand growing faster than supply. 

When talking about value people often get stuck trying to puzzle out intrinsic value instead of simply admitting the obvious fact: Storytelling + Time = Value. Basquiat's work increases in value because the number of people who know the story increases while the supply does not. Luxury brands are trading on heritage and storytelling, not only products. Similarly, if you are wondering if the value of Cryptopunks will increase over the next 25 years you only need to ask: Will people still talk about them in 25 years? If yes then you have Storytelling + Time, which amounts to more value. If everyone forgets about Cryptopunks and stops talking about them, the value will decline. Intrinsic value be damned.

I'm not arguing that everything digital has value any more than I'm arguing that every song on Spotify is worth hearing. But I believe digital art holds and will continue to hold "early adopter" status as online economies grow because the barriers to creating very small test markets are very low. 

Crypto Punks from higallery’s collection, paired with Egon Schiele sketches, c.1912.

A value exchange between a creator and a collector is a beautiful thing, especially relative to the business models of stealing and selling attention or speculating and gambling.

What’s the biggest difference from the traditional art scene?

I'm the least qualified to answer this question. In the traditional art world I rate as "museum-goer and collector of work from skateboarders I know". 

Which is exactly why I've enjoyed the digital art world so much.

I love peering into the mind of a creator through their output.

I love being a patron.

I love the opportunity to get to know or even assist an artist in some way.

I studied and practice computer science; I'm more qualified to appreciate a generative art piece than a painting.

The digital art world is small and self-selecting, full of creative, intelligent, and often downright weird people. Those still participating in 2024 believe in something most do not with enough conviction to weather being negatively judged by their peers. I remember being called a "gayboarder", laughed at for wearing bermuda shorts and growing long bangs. But I can’t imagine my life without skateboarding and the people I met through it. I'm very comfortable in a crowd of idealistic, thoughtful, creativity-loving outcasts. 

In 2022 my wife Hedvig and I were sitting around our dining table with FVCKRENDER and his wife, OSF, Farokh, and Raoul Pal. Raoul said, when talking about this moment in digital art and the digitization of value,  "We will always remember that this was the time when everyone knew each other." I love that time. I'm proud to have been a skateboarder long before it was allowed in the Olympics and a punk rock fan long before The Offspring. I learned much more building pieces of the Internet than I do today as one its 5.52 billion consumers. I guess my preferred moment in any market is the one decades before "traditional".

Thanks for asking me to reply. I’m sure this isn’t the response you were expecting. I guess it’s dangerous to ask an idealist “what do you believe?” I hope it’s useful anyway!

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Ian Rogers

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The Seven of Swords (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Futility, the Seven of Swords
Number: 7
Astrology: Moon in Aquarius
Qabalah: Netzach of Vau

Chris Gabriel November 16, 2024

The Seven of Swords is a card lost in its own imagination. It symbolizes daydreaming, brainstorming and the material consequences that come of it. 

In Rider, we find a clownish thief, sneakily walking off with five swords. He dons a fez, fuzzy boots, and a polka dot tunic. He warily looks to see if anyone has seen him. In the distance is a circus, three tents, and a group of people.

In Thoth, we have a single solar sword being struck and chipped by 6 smaller planetary swords. This is the singular idea destroyed by a restless mind, countless thoughts erode the strength of one good idea. As the Moon in Aquarius, this is the mind set upon the Strange.

In Marseille, we have a singular sword in the midst of 6 intersected swords. Four flowers sit at the intersections. Qabalaistically, it is the Love of the Prince, and the Love of the Prince is Futile

As it is the Love of the Prince, consider this card as a comedy of errors: the Prince plots out exactly what he’s going to do to win his love, everything that can go wrong and, because of this way of thinking, he fails to even take the first step. It is the paralysis that comes from analysis.

The card suggests there is a sort of cowardice in daydreaming and planning. This is explicitly clear when we contrast this card with Valour, the Seven of Wands: It shows a man willing to fight thoughtlessly without the consideration even of victory. With Futility the fellow would never have picked up his sword in the first place. The foolish courage of Valour can win honor, but the intelligent cowardice of Futility gains nothing, not even experience. 

With Rider, we can see intelligence applied negatively and the scheme works out. The circus goers, lost in fantasy, lose their swords, the thief wins them through his scheming logic.

This card is both schemers and suckers - the good idea undone. 

This is of course how we learn. We get tricked, and then we become better so as not to get tricked again. In its highest form, Futility is the lived comedy of errors, the countless mistakes that form and shape our lives. As I have compared the suit of Swords to Hamlet, here we find his countless mistakes, his failed romance with Ophelia, but most importantly his overthinking and failure to act. This is Hamlet as “John-a-Dreams”.

When we pull this card we may be given a confusing situation that requires planning and brainstorming. We may hesitate and procrastinate and miss our chance. When we properly utilize this energy, we can pull off a well thought out scheme. Don’t overthink - think just enough and then act!

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Mediating Planetary Co-Existence

Yggdrasill, The Mundane Tree. From a plate of the Prose Edda, Oluf Olufsen Bagge. 1847.

Tuukka Toivonen November 14, 2024

Heather Barnett, an artist who works with slime mold, recently told me she viewed herself not simply as a practitioner of art but as a mediator. Through years of collaborative experimentation she had found herself, without intending to, acting as an intermediary between two mutually foreign forms of intelligence — slime molds and human beings. Curating the often astonishingly clever behaviors of these oatmeal-loving, network-making slime molds for human audiences, she uncovered new synergies and creative connections. In live performances, she invited audiences to mimic the physical movements of such ‘lesser beings’, resulting in surprising patterns of group behavior. This workconjured up a kind of interspecies awareness and relationship in Heather, and those who saw it, where none had previously existed. Another experienced artist I spoke to, Julia Lochmann, expressed a similar ethos of intermediation — in this case, one focused on seaweed-human relations. Both practitioners had set up collectives for like-minded slime mould and seaweed enthusiasts that brought artists together with scientists, students, designers and even entrepreneurs. These conversations prompted me to reflect further on the significance of those who mediate immersively between different organisms or environments. Could their experimental, connective engagements open up new possibilities for a deeper planetary co-existence? And what could those of us with less experience in this area learn from seasoned intermediators? 

At a basic level, to mediate is to form a link between two previously disconnected or estranged entities. By occupying an intermediary position, one takes on the task of facilitating an agreement or reconciliation of some kind, and fostering mutually beneficial forms of co-existence. Mediators of various kinds abound in our daily lives; people who introduce us to opportunities and ideas we did not know about or familiarize us with technologies we knew not how to operate. Those who teach us novel languages mediate a new relationship between us and other cultures. With a little help from such fluent speakers and cultural mediators, it becomes far easier to pick up the meanings, structures and nuances — even the perceptual and aesthetic inclinations — of new languages and cultures. What once seemed indecipherable becomes more and more intelligible, accessible and rich in meaning. We gradually enter a shared world. and then, for a moment, we feel awed by the uplifting resonance — a sense of synchrony, agreement or correspondence — that we discover between ourselves and an aspect of the world that used to be alien to us. 

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“We have long positioned humans as the only ‘intelligent’ species while denying the cognitive abilities, agency and aliveness of every other life-form. We now possess the opportunity to change course…”

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In their revelatory book on the search for planetary intelligence, one that involves animals, plants, and machines, the author James Bridle dedicates a chapter to exploring how plants perceive the world and what scope might exist for us to relate to them at a sensorial and existential level. Bridle recounts an experiment by two biologists from the University of Missouri during which a recording was made of the sound of cabbage white caterpillars feeding on a cress plant (Arabidopsis thaliana). The scientists subsequently removed the caterpillars, playing back only their sounds to the cress plant, which caused the plant to switch on its chemical defenses for deterring predators, despite their absence. Having ensured this reaction arose exclusively in response to the specific sound of caterpillars, there was only one conclusion to be drawn: the cress plant could hear. Bridle reads this and other eye-opening experiments on ‘plant sensing’ as suggestive of 

multiple distinctive worlds and as expressions of common ways of being and perceiving that cross species lines: 

‘We share a world. We hear, plants hear; we all hear together. We all feel the same sun, breathe the same air, drink the same water. Whether we hear the same sounds in the same way, whether they are meaningful to us in the same way, is beside the point. We exist, together, in the shared experience and creation of the more-than human world’ (Bridle 2023: 69-70).¹

Atlas des Champignons, M. E. Descourtilz. 1827.

Bridle’s work engages in acts of mediation that takes notable interspecies experiments and discoveries, and translates them into relational transformations. It reveals how profoundly illusionary our prior assumptions of a disconnected existence have been, and how false the idea that plants, animals, fungi and ourselves inhabit essentially separate worlds is. By submitting to a vacuous kind of objectivity, Bridle shows we have tried to make the world conform to our man made, fixed conceptualizations, and in doing so have limited the full use of our own perceptual capabilities. We have long positioned humans as the only ‘intelligent’ species while denying the cognitive abilities, agency and aliveness of every other life-form. We now possess the opportunity to change course, and to whole-heartedly cohabit the shared world Bridle so animatedly writes about. We can do this through updating our mental constructs and discovering new resonances between ourselves and the living world. Much like the feelings of connection we gain when learning a new language, might we feel a similar (or perhaps an even greater) sense of enchantment and resonance as we regain the ability to participate fully in the more-than human world — a world where intelligence is present everywhere? 

I suspect that mediators — whether nominally classified as artists, writers, scientists, naturalists or entrepreneurs — matter precisely because they have the power to help us see such novel possibilities for planetary co-existence. They awaken us to ways of being, to a new type of sensing and relating that we have struggled to notice or thought could not be accessed within the confines of contemporary society. And not only that: they often perform intermediation work not only in theory but in practice, experimentally and at scale. Such practical work can range from the curation of intimate group experiences within local forest ecologies to masterfully finding correspondences and agreements between the seemingly incompatible tendencies of financial interests and living systems. 

It strikes me that today’s mediators may have something fundamental in common with the healers and shamans whom the ecological philosopher David Abram encountered in Nepal and Indonesia at the end of the last millennium. Focused on maintaining harmonious and mutually nourishing relations between human settlements and the wider ecologies they were part of, these traditional practitioners of magic and medicine could ‘slip out of the perceptual boundaries that demarcate his or her particular culture’ while exhibiting a ‘heightened receptivity to the meaningful solicitations—songs, cries, gestures —of the larger, more-than-human field’ (Abram 1996:9).² There is a certain perceptual kinship between these traditional practitioners and the contemporary mediators I have discussed, one found in a shared style of viscerally inhabiting and bridging multiple worlds. It is remarkable that for the traditional shamans and magicians Abram observed, their role as human-nonhuman intermediaries appeared to be their primary function, while healing activities were of only secondary importance. 

Surely the kinds of mediators — whatever their formal identities — who can radically shrink the distance between us and myriad other life forms that constitute this planet have a far more important role to play than we have hitherto realized. And surely it will be through myriad acts of intermediation, whether initiated by seasoned practitioners or ourselves, that we will find it easier to once again experience the more-than-human world as intelligible, rich in meaning, even wondrous — and, perhaps most importantly, as truly shared. 

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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. 

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¹  Bridle, James. 2023. Ways of being: Animals, plants, machines: the search for a planetary 1 intelligence. London: Penguin Books. 
²  Abram, D. 1996. The spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a more-than-human 2 world. New York: Pantheon books.

On The Nature of Visions

Before the First World War and the infliction of politics into the art movement, the Austro-German Expressionist artists were concerned with, above all else, The Spirit. Oskar Kokoschka was a painter and poet whose intensity of emotion bled through into everything he produced, finding harmony with Nature and God in the untamed, free, and innocent soul of the artist. He offered a way into the self through religious experience, and payed respect to dreams and imaginations as visions of the inner eye just as valuable as optical sight. The true artist, Kokoschka believed, saw no difference in value between perceptions of the inner and outer world. This essay was originally delivered as a lecture in Vienna in 1912, before being transcribed into essay form for an early Monograph of the artist.

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Oskar Kokoschka November 12, 2024

The state of awareness of visions is not one in which we are either remembering or perceiving. It is rather a level of consciousness at which we experience visions within ourselves. 

This experience cannot be fixed; for the vision is moving, an impression growing and becoming visual, imparting a power to the mind. It can be evoked but never defined. 

Yet the awareness of such imagery is a part of living. It is life selecting from the forms which flow towards it or refraining, at will. 

A life which derives its power from within itself will focus the perception of such images. And yet this free visualizing in itself - whether it is complete or hardly yet perceptible, or undefined in either space or time - this has its own power running through. The effect is such that the visions seem actually to modify one's consciousness, at least in respect of everything which their own form proposes as their pattern and significance. This change in oneself, which follows on the vision's penetration of one's very soul, produces the state of awareness, of expectancy. At the same time there is an outpouring of feeling into the image which becomes, as it were, the soul's plastic embodiment. This state of alertness of the mind or consciousness has, then, a waiting, receptive quality. It is like an unborn child, as yet unfelt even by the mother, to whom nothing of the outside world slips through. And yet whatever affects his mother, all that impresses her down to the slightest birthmark on the skin, all is implanted in him. As though he could use her eyes, the unborn receives through her his visual impressions, even while he is himself unseen. 

The life of the consciousness is boundless. It interpenetrates the world and is woven through all its imagery. Thus it shares those characteristics of living which our human existence can show. One tree left living in an arid land would carry in its seed the potency from whose roots all the forests of the earth might spring. So with ourselves; when we no longer inhabit our perceptions they do pot go out of existence; they continue as though with a power of their own, awaiting the focus of another consciousness. There is no more room for death; for though the vision disintegrates and scatters, it does so only to reform in another mode. 

“Bride of the Wind”. Oskar Kokoschka, 1913. Oil on Canvas.

Therefore we must harken closely to our inner voice. We must strive through the penumbra of words to the core within. 'The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.' And then the inner core breaks free - now feebly and now violently - from the words within which it dwells like a charm. 'It happened to me according to the Word”

If we will surrender our closed personalities, so full of tension, we are in a position to accept this magical principle of living, whether in thought, intuition, or in our relationships. For in fact we see every day beings who are absorbed in one another, whether in living or in teaching, aimless or with direction. So it is with every created thing, everything we can communicate, every constant in the flux of living; each one has its own principle which shapes it, keeps life in it, and maintains it in our consciousness. Thus it is preserved, like a rare species, from extinction. We may identify it with 'me' or 'you' according to our estimate of its scale or its infinity. For we set aside the self and personal existence as being fused into a larger experience. All that is required of us is to release control. Some part of ourselves will bring us into the unison. The inquiring spirit rises from stage to stage, until it encompasses the whole of Nature. All laws are left behind. One's soul is a reverberation of the universe. Then too, as I believe, one's perception reaches out towards the Word, towards awareness of the vision.

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“Consciousness is the source of all things and of all conceptions. It is a sea ringed about with visions.”

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As I said at first, this awareness of visions can never fully be described,  its history can never be delimited, for it is a part of life itself. Its essence is a flowing and a taking form. It is love, delighting to lodge itself in the mind. This adding of something to ourselves - we may accept it or let it pass; but as soon as we are ready it will come to us by impulse, from the very breathing of our life. An image will take shape for us suddenly, at the first look,  as the first cry of a newborn child emerging from its mother’s womb. 

Whatever the orientation of a life, its significance will depend on this ability to conceive the vision. Whether the image has a material or an immaterial character depends simply on the angle from which the flow of psychic energy is viewed, whether at ebb or flood. 

Illustration from “The Dreaming Boys”. Oskar Kokoschka, 1908. Photolithograph.

It is true that the consciousness is not exhaustively defined by these images moving, these impressions which grow and become visual, imparting a power to the mind which we can evoke at will. For of the forms which come into the consciousness some are chosen while others are excluded arbitrarily. 

But this awareness of visions which I endeavour to describe is the viewpoint of all life as though it were seen from some high place; it is like a ship which was plunged into the seas and flashes again as a winged thing in the air. 

Consciousness is the source of all things and of all conceptions. It is a sea ringed about with visions. 

My mind is the tomb of all those things which have ceased to be the true Hereafter into which they enter. So that at last nothing remains; all that is essential of them is their image within myself. The life goes out of them into that image as in the lamp the oil is drawn up through the wick for nourishing the flame. 

So each thing, as it communicates itself to me, loses its substance and passes into the hereafter which is my mind. I incorporate its image which I can evoke without the intermediacy of dreams. 'Whenever two or three are gathered together in My name, I am in their midst' [Matt. 18:20]. And, as though it could go out to men, my vision is maintained, fed, as the lamp is by its oil, from the abundance of their living. If I am asked to make all this plain and natural the things themselves must answer for me, as it were, bearing their own witness. For I have represented them, I haw taken their place and put on their semblance through my visions. It is the psyche which speaks. 

I search, inquire, and guess. And with what sudden eagerness must the lamp wick seek its nourishment, for the flame leaps before my eves as the oil feeds it. It is all my imagination, certainly, what I see there in the blaze. But if I have drawn something from the fire and you have missed it, well, I should like to hear from those whose eyes are still untouched. For is this not mv vision? Without intent I draw from the outside world the semblance of things; but in this way I myself become part of the world's imaginings. Thus in everything imagination is simply that which is natural. It is nature, vision, life. 

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Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) was an artist, poet, playwright, teacher and theorist from Austria. His writing and ideas on vision formed a basis for Vienesse Expressionism and brought a new focus on the role of the imagination in artworks.

The Empress (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: The Empress
Number: III
Astrology: Venus
Qabalah: Daleth

Chris Gabriel November 9, 2024

The Empress is maternal, feminine power. In each depiction we find the Empress crowned, enthroned, and bearing a scepter. She is the perfect balance to the masculine Emperor.

In Rider, she wears a flowery white dress marked with red flowers, and a crown of 12 stars resting atop her laurels. She wears a pearl necklace and her blonde hair falls down to her shoulders. She is looking calmly ahead. Her raised wand is topped with an orb while her other hand rests upon her knee. She is seated on voluptuous red cushions, and near her feet, a stone heart bears the mark of Venus. Behind her flows a waterfall.

In Thoth, we find the Empress in a pink blouse adorned with bees and flowers. Her skirt is emerald and her crown is a curved mitre with a Globus Cruciger. Her girdle is the wheel of the Zodiac. She has pale, almost white, blonde hair, and we see her only in profile. She is expressionless, with aLotus wand in one hand, and her other held out beneath. This posture forms the Alchemical sign of Salt. Waxing and Waning Moons emanate from spirals to her left and right, each topped with a pink and white bird. At her feet there is a shield with a double headed white bird. Beside it is a Pelican pecking her breast to feed her blood to the chicks. This is the ultimate maternal sacrifice.

In Marseille, she wears a royal dress marked with a triangle. Her crown is of gold, and topped with a Fleur de Lys and she has a triangular necklace. She holds her wand, topped by the Globus Cruciger, and cradles the eagle marked shield beside her. A plant grows at her feet.

In each of these cards, the Empress serves as a balance to their respective Emperor. Where the Emperor is the Father of the Nation, the Empress has an altogether different role? Thoth provides the most direct explanation - , she gives her blood, sweat and tears for the sake of Love. This is the role of the Good Mother who, just as the Good Father, sacrifices her desires for the sake of her children, even to the point of bodily harm.

The Thoth card also reveals the tripartite components of the feminine, as the tripartite Moon we saw in the Priestess. The Empress is the full Moon, the Maternal.

As Venus, she is the feminine ideal of beauty, the sensual and aesthetic. She is a Lover of life, children, art, and even men. Her willingness to sacrifice for the sake of her children shows that it is not a simple equation, but a weighted, meaningful one. The symbol of Venus is the Mirror, something Venus is often holding, but as the Empress, the Goddess of Love will scar her breasts to feed her young.

When the Empress is pulled in a reading, I find it tends to relate directly to a significant woman in our lives, a mother, lover, or dear friend. Appreciate the sacrifices she has made for you, and reciprocate her Love.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Peter Carroll’s 5th Dimension And The Pentagram

Geometrical Psychology, or, The Science of Representation an Abstract of the Theories and Diagrams of B. W. Betts, Louisa S. Cook. 1887.

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Molly Hankins November 7, 2024

As the idea of a fifth dimension continues to percolate through the spiritual zeitgeist,  it is worth looking to the prolific occult writer and chaos magician Peter J. Carroll for his insight on 5D as it pertains to magic. In his famous treatise  Liber Null & Psychonaut, Carroll explains how we seem to live in a world of effect rather than cause, where we measure effects to speculate towards details of cause. 

The 5th dimension, for Caroll, is the causal plane,  also known as the aether or chaos, where forms arise and all magical practice begins. He references  Kabbalist thought that the causal world exists in a hidden dimension, and contends that this is the fifth dimension to which we have limited access. If we were able to reach it, it  could  explain all occult phenomena, and even some of the mysteries of quantum mechanics.  

Take, for example, fundamental particles and quarks that can’t be continuously observed in our reality - could it be because they’re flickering in and out of a causal plane? Could they be carrying the information that creates our shared and individual realities in and out of this dimension? And what if we’re generating that information consciously? By Carroll’s explanation, this could very well be the underlying mechanism of effective occult practice and ritual.  

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““As above, so below.” By that  logic, if this is how mathematical proofs and computer networks behave, shouldn’t it stand to reason that the fifth dimensional causal plane mirrors our reality?”

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He describes the information load required for effects to manifest using the example of how  much less information is required to generate the magical effect of causing someone to fall  under a 16-ton weight than to make a 16-ton weight fall down on someone. Fewer variables are required to create the first effect, and therefore it has a smaller information field and thus  can manifest in this reality more quickly and easily. Lightening the information load needed to generate the desired effect when setting intentions for magical practice makes working with the 5D causal plane consciously efficient. 

Included in the Liber Null & Psychonaut explanation of Carroll’s theory of higher dimensionality is the concept of the pentagram as a symbol for 5D, a term he interchanges with cosmic mind, the hologram, acausality, hyperspace and the quantum realm. In physics, information has sometimes been proposed as a possible fifth dimension, and in computer network science, the  idea of information as the fifth dimension refers to the temporal aspect of information flow in complex networks. Throughout the book the reader is reminded of the occult axiom, “As above, so below.” By that  logic, if this is how mathematical proofs and computer networks behave, shouldn’t it stand to  reason that the fifth dimensional causal plane mirrors our reality? As information flows, systems are affected, and magic is the science and art of causing change in accordance with our will. Whether it’s technically accurate or not, and Carroll admits he’s partial to the theory, the  concept of 5D even just as a metaphor has great utility as a tool for understanding effective  magical expression. 

We’ve barely scratched the surface of Liber Null & Psychonaut and there is much more wisdom hiding in its pages. As Carroll writes, "He who is doing his true will is assisted by the momentum of the  universe." Perhaps our true will generates the optimal information structure, and thus the necessary subatomic momentum in the fifth dimension, to create our desired results in the third. 

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

Form Follows Phenomenon

Peter Cook, Island City. 2011-12. Work on paper.

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Robin Sparkes November 5, 2024

Architects should draw more. Marking ideas across a page connects the mind and body. It mobilises psychological and motor functions in synchronicity. Hand-drawing activates areas in the brain responsible for spatial reasoning and visual perception, bringing an architect’s imagination into form through movement. In this way, each line becomes a cognitive exploration, organising space and activating intuition. Drawing is a method of representing and organising ideas, bridging thought with physical action. Drawing is a dance, moving the arm and hand in coordination with the mind is a method of "finding"— it is an act of discovery.

Everything starts with a plan. To begin designing a building, you need a plan. It is in the act of sketching by hand that the mental processes involved in acquiring understanding, memory, and problem-solving come to life. It encompasses how we process information, make decisions, and learn. The physical act of drawing plays a formative role in ideation. In architectural design, using our physical bodies to conceive ideas is a tool for intuitive spatial understanding.

Zaha Hadid, The Peak. 1983. Work on paper.

"I confront the city with my body; my legs measure the length of the arcade and the width of the square".¹ So says Juhani Pallasmaa. To exist in physical space is to become aware of our surroundings through sensory experiences—smell, touch, sound, sight—all of which shape our understanding of place. Drawing with our hands allows us to translate these sensory impressions into physical form, capturing and communicating how we perceive space. This act allows us to explore  the relationship  between the tangible and intangible. Through this tactile process of perception, we can visualise and interpret the way we experience and position ourselves within a spiritual space.

Zaha Hadid’s approach to Architecture was rooted in her drawings. In her formative years in Baghdad, she grew up writing Arabic calligraphy. The stroke of an alphabet composing words to communicate ideas as linguistic curves and lines across a page established her relationship to drawing. To draw is to communicate. After moving to London to Study at the Architectural Association, Zaha developed a method of communicating spatial perspective through her drawings. Her eye for line weights that developed in her formative years of writing calligraphy became her hand in expressing depth and perspective in her drawing and painting.

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“When our brains choreograph the arm and hand to communicate our cognitive expression, we build a portal between our mind and space. We become an embodiment of space".”

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Calligraphy characterised her architectural drawing, it emphasised the fluidity and dynamic forms that later emerged in her painting work. Plans and sections weren't enough to describe new thinking in architecture. Her sketches and paintings informed the approach to form and space but also led to the development of her distinctive architectural style— where she reimagined architectural enclosures as fluid. “I have always been interested”, said Hadid, “in the concept of fragmentation and with ideas of abstraction and explosion, deconstructing ideas of repetitiveness and mass production.’’²

André Masson. Automatic Drawing. 1924. Ink on paper.

In this sense, drawing becomes a kinesthetic act. Drawing invites uncertainty and allows chance to emerge, encouraging a dialogue with space and form that goes beyond predetermined calculations. Drawing architectural sketches as a means of starting an idea parallels the Surrealist art movement in the beginning of the 20th century. The Surrealist concept of automatic drawing, also known as automatism, was developed by André Masson, a French painter who was fascinated with the subconscious. Exploring themes of chaos, violence, and nature Masson developed "automatic drawing," a method of creating art by allowing the hand to move freely across the canvas without conscious control. These techniques reveal how free motion and fragmentation can invite unexpected ideas, with the subconscious playing a vital role in creative expression. In architectural design, this means introducing elements of indeterminacy, a concept explored in the 1960s Fluxus movement, where chance disrupts rigid planning, giving space for spontaneous ideas to emerge. Hand-drawn designs embody this philosophy, as the marks made reflect human touch and open possibilities in form and structure.

In the same way  live music resonates differently from a recording, the fingers dancing across piano keys creates an experience that resonates deeply with those who inhabit it. Drawing with our hands allows architects to embody space through the process of defining their composition. As technology progresses, the design process becomes more automated and the body becomes more removed from the processes of making. When our brains choreograph the arm and hand to communicate our cognitive expression we build a portal between our mind and space. We become an embodiment of space through movement as a means of architectural drawing. This physical interaction embodies both the spiritual and spatial relationships, introducing an intuitive measure to the design process. When architects sketch, the choreography of the body moving through and experiencing space manifests a spatial intuition that translates the cognitive experience of being in space into a tangible perception. The way an architect's hand moves across the paper, the pressure applied, and the speed of gestures all contribute to the fluidity and emergence of space.

As we create by hand, we initiate a dialogue between mind, body, and the architecture itself. Through this dance, space begins to materialise, thought and movement merges, and abstract concepts become grounded. By sketching, we access the language of our subconscious. If we are present in time, then hand-drawing offers a means to manifest space—connecting the fluid continuum of our intentions with the permanence of form. In this interplay, space and time converge, shaping environments that hold both memory and potential.  Einstein once said "matter tells spacetime how to curve, and curved spacetime tells matter how to move".³

We should all draw more.

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¹The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Wiley, 2005.

²Zaha Hadid: Complete Works. Thames & Hudson, 2004.

³Relativity: The Special and General Theory. Translated by Robert W. Lawson, Methuen & Co., 1920. 

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Robin Sparkes, a is spatial designer, studying the kinesthetic experience of architecture. Her design, research, and writing practice traverses the relationship between the body, temporality, and the acoustics of space.

Eight of Wands (Tarot Triptych)

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

Chris Gabriel November 2, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

The Cup of Humanity

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

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Okakura Kukuzō October 31, 2024

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

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

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

Black Raku Tea Bowl, Early 17th Century Japan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Aul

The Aul by Jon Donaghy, 2024.

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Mason Rothschild October 29, 2024

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

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

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

In this spirit, lets play a game…

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

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we begin with some questions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ok!

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

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

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

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

-William James, American philosopher and psychologist

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

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

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

Would you look at that… we pulled THE AUL. 

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

LOVE, CONNECTION, AND WONDER

Now that would be a game more fun to play.

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

Two of Disks (Tarot Triptych)

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

Chris Gabriel October 26, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Avis Akvāsas Ka (Artefact VI)

WUNDERKAMMER

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

Ben Timberlake October 24, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sheep and the Horses 

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

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

Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HIRT (1939)

Owis ek'wōses-kʷe

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

LEHMANN AND ZGUSTA (1979)

Owis eḱwōskʷe

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

DANKA (1986)

Owis ek'woi kʷe

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

ADAMS (1997)

H₂óu̯is h₁ék̂u̯ōs-kʷe

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

LÜHR (2008)

h₂ówis h₁ék’wōskʷe

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

VOYLES AND BARRACK (2009)

Owis eḱwōs kʷe

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

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

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Trance (1938)

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Aleister Crowley, October 22nd, 2024

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

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

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

The Oracle at Delphi, John Collier, 1891.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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