Sourcing Gesture Pt. 1

Antonin Artaud, 1948. Le Cuziat.

Isabelle Bucklow March 4, 2025

Some months have passed since we last spoke about gesture, and we are no closer to conclusivity. I'll begin with simple observations:: we all gesture everyday, and those gestures are, more often than not, seen and understood by others. Gestures signify and transmit information and so serve a communicative function. This communicative status has led many to neatly package gesture as a language of sorts, that is, decodable, meaningful, shareable and universal. We’ve explored in earlier writings that gestures accompany and provide emphasis to language, as in persuasive speeches of antiquity to present day. But this understanding can  impose hierarchy, establishing language as the source-code that deciphers the gestures. Here, however, I am interested in those gestures that disrupt semantic meaning, that do not rely on a specific word or stable concept, but instead subtly shift according to their affective intensity, revealing the invisible according to their own symbolic logic. 

The French dramatist Antoin Artaud’s impassioned 1938 manifestos for the stage, The Theatre and its Double, speaks of the actor’s need ‘to break through language in order to touch life’, clarifying ‘it must be understood that we are not referring to life as we know it from the surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.’¹ Gesture exists  in this precarious point between fragile fluctuating life-force and corporealized form. Writing some years later, British theatre director Peter Brook referenced Artaud, adding the actor’s need to find a ‘form which would be a container and reflector of his impulses [...] We encouraged the actors to see themselves not only as improvisers, lending themselves blindly to their inner impulses, but as artists responsible for searching and selecting amongst form, so that a gesture or a cry becomes like an object that he discovers and even remoulds.’²

If we are to loosen language’s hold on gesture, then we can  more wholly consider the forms or gestures an actor selects, and where they came from. For it seems that when you are really into something or someone and your interest is piqued, you’ll quickly get an itch to know the fabled ‘origin story’ and isolate the determining factor that set it all in motion. In anticipation, we are not going to find it.

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“Just as a child imitates the actions successfully executed by those with authority over them, the gesture is borrowed from without and performed from within.”

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One approach would be to turn to evolution. We have previously considered Andre Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech where he traces ‘The essential traits of human technical gesticulation’ back to the action of grasping. Leroi-Gourhan, like us, was interested in the gestures of human hands, even more so in the ‘mesh of techniques’ that humans inhabit and from which a grasping hand emerges. But dwelling on the prehistoric conditions that produced a certain gesture feels a lot like asking someone their personal history only for them to begin at early bipedal apes roaming the Miocene epoch. So, by way of narrative license, let’s jump from Leroi-Gourhan’s paleoanthropology to a contemporary avant-garde theatre-script: Ed Atkins and Steven Zultanski’s Sorcerer, 2023, in which three protagonists, drinking beer in their friend's apartment, are discussing how they go about putting on and taking off a jumper:

‘I put my arms through like this–
(makes motion, puts her hands through the air like a long glove or like putting hands in a cow, one after the other.)
And then I do–
(swooping motion, ducks head in, almost like going under a short doorway) 
[...]
I do an awkward mixture of both. I put my head and one arm though at the same time–
(makes moton, half-lifts one arm and tilts head, like putting head through and checking on the other side of a portal)’³ 

Described are idiosyncratic combinations of gestures that achieve the same thing, as well as stage directions for gestures that employ metaphor to describe one gesture by way of a different gesture. 

One protagonist observes:

‘There’s a way people do it in the movies, which I copied as a kid: you put your arms in first– 
(puts arms in.) 
And you go–
(pulls over head in a movie way)’

In a seminal, anthropological text on gesture from 1934, Techniques of the Body, Marcel Mauss noted how movies influenced gestures. When lying in a hospital in New York he wondered, ‘where previously I had seen girls walking as my nurses walked…At last I realised that it was at the cinema…Returning to France, I noticed how common this gait was […] American walking fashions had begun to arrive over here, thanks to the cinema… ’.⁴

The walking fashions described by Mauss are not motivated by biological necessity but adopted on the basis of aesthetics, taste and an imitative desire to be like stars in the movies. It is through this  opening that we can pursue symbolic gestures that arise from what Mauss terms ‘prestigious imitation’: Just as a child imitates the actions successfully executed by those with authority over them, the gesture is in this sense borrowed from without and performed from within. And so, at the turn of the century you could say many common gestures borrowed their iconography from what was performed in the cinema. But, where then did the cinema source its gestures if not from gestures common to life? 

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¹  Antoin Artuad, The Theatre and Its Double, (Grove Press, 1958 [1938]) Preface, p. 13
² Peter Brook, The Empty Space (Penguin, 1968), p. 58
³ Ed Atkins, Steven Zultanski, Sorcerer (Prototype, 2023) p. 17-18 
⁴ Marcel Mauss, Techniques of the Body ([1934] 1973), Economy and Society, 2(2), p. 72

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Isabelle Bucklow is a London-based writer, researcher and editor. She is the co-founding editor of motor dance journal. 

The King and Prince of Cups (Tarot Triptych)

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Name:  King of Cups, Prince of Cups
Number: 1 or 3
Astrology: Water or Scorpio
Qabalah: Yod of He or Vau of He

Chris Gabriel March 1, 2025

The King of Cups is the ruler of the suit. He sits imperiously on a throne, cup in hand. He is the powerful sea, and the paradoxical strength of water. As chapter 78 of the Tao Te Ching says: 

Nothing in all beneath heaven is so soft and weak as water.
And yet, for conquering the hard and strong, nothing succeeds like water.
And nothing can change it:
weak overcoming strong,
soft overcoming hard.

This is the way of the King of Cups.

In Rider, we find a fair faced King wearing an ornate crown with golden filigree, a greenish gold cape with red scallops, and a blue robe. A fish pendant hangs around his neck and his shoes are scaly. One hand holds the Cup and the other, a scepter. Behind him the sea churns, a ship sails, and a fish swims.

In Thoth, we have the equivalent Prince. He is nude but for his helmet, which bears an Eagle. He stares into his cup which holds a serpent. In his hand is a downward lotus. His fluid chariot is drawn by a great eagle. Waves splash behind him.

In Marseille, we have the simplest image. An old grey bearded king with a large crown under which the flaps of his hat rise up. He is dressed as the other kings, but his cup is the largest.

We can interpret, in this card, the classic 1950’s image of the father, home from a long day of work and having a drink, and all of the negative connotations that may come with this.

In the phrase “Drink like a fish”, you will see the ill dignified form of the King. The solution is the serpent in the cup: St. John’s Chalice.

St. John is given a cup of poison wine. He blesses it, a serpent rises out, and he drinks it just fine. This is the highest form of the Scorpionic Water: a medicinal poison. Harmful substance distilled into a curative form. The King of Cups understands well the maxim of Paracelsus: dosis sola facit venenum. The dose makes the poison.

While the King of Wands will act on aggression and make war with the world, the King of Cups will, like water, slowly erode the foundations of his enemies. He must beware, however, lest his waters dissolve himself. This is shown perfectly in the Fisher King of Arthurian legend who, wounded again and again by the bleeding, poisonous Lance of Longinus (the Lance that wounded Christ on the Cross) and by his own poisoning, poisons his land to become a waste. The only cure is in the Holy Grail.

When pulling this card we may be met with an older, wiser man who has mastered his emotions, and is filled with love. Alternatively, they may be troubled, with a heavy heart. We may also be called on to use our love and power. Emotion is extremely powerful, be sure it sweetens and heals rather than spoil and poison those around us.

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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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Karmic Escape Velocity

George Sturdy and Solomon Young, 1869.

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Molly Hankins February 27, 2025

The Law of One is based on a series of channeled conversations between physics professor Don Elkins and Ra, the Egyptian sun god. It posits that forgiveness is the path required to exit the wheel of karma. Forgiveness of self and others corrects the imbalance of ‘energetic momentum’ between giver and receiver, described as karma in The Law of One. The momentum is said to take on a circular pattern of repetition that can only be disrupted by complete forgiveness. 

Ra is a 2.6 billion year old, sixth-dimensional social-memory complex. They chose a physicist as the preferred channel for The Law of One’s teaching because of Elkin’s advanced understanding of certain physics-based concepts, namely inertia. In physics, inertia is a property that allows matter to exist in a single state unless changed by an external force. Humans caught in the cycle of karma, unable to understand the true purpose of forgiveness, risk never being able to achieve the escape velocity necessary to get out.

Ra, and many other higher dimensional beings who’ve taken an interest in human life, acts as that external force by giving us the information necessary to overcome karmic inertia. From our limited perspective, we can’t understand the utility of forgiveness, particularly radical forgiveness for acts of violence and destruction that are deemed unforgivable. Without being able to understand why it’s useful to forgive, and how forgiveness of self is inherent in true forgiveness of another, we’re unmotivated to do so. 

Rather than repeating the lessons created by imbalance, forgiveness allows us to integrate sustainable balance in how we give and receive energy. We benefit from understanding how the physical and emotional experience of balanced energy exchange feels and the gain intellectual experience of the lesson learned. Not only does conscious forgiveness prevent us from making the same mistakes and repeating lessons, it releases us from negativity by allowing us to see others as part of ourselves.

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“Achieving peace of heart and mind stronger than rational thinking is what life feels like off the karmic wheel.”

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As suggested by the name, the premise of The Law of One is that we are all one.  Specifically that all of life is part of the original thought of The Creator, and as we all contain the initial  creative spark from one thought, we are all reflections of The Creator. By recognizing ourselves in the reflection of another, we can more easily forgive. Forgiveness is not about condoning a transgression or trying to make it right, it’s about releasing any negative emotions to free ourselves. 

Once forgiven, the transgression no longer has power over us, even if the pain caused by it still remains. This frees us to begin healing, and the Bible refers to that healed state of being as “a peace that passes all understanding” (Phillippians 4:7). Achieving peace of heart and mind stronger than rational thinking is what life feels like off the karmic wheel. While the inevitability of human drama will pull us back on,we can always forgive and hit karmic escape velocity once more. 

A passage from The Law of One uses the metaphor of a poker game to describe the role of forgiveness as a tool to ‘win’ the game of life: “I am Ra. Let us re-examine this metaphor and multiply it into the longest poker game you can imagine, a lifetime. The cards are love, dislike, limitation, unhappiness, pleasure, etc. They are dealt and re-dealt and re-dealt continuously. You may, during this incarnation begin — and we stress begin — to know your own cards. You may begin to find the love within you. You may begin to balance your pleasure, your limitations, etc. However, your only indication of other-selves’ cards is to look into the eyes.

“You cannot remember your hand, their hands, perhaps even the rules of this game. This game can only be won by those who lose their cards in the melting influence of love; can only be won by those who lay their pleasures, their limitations, their all upon the table face up and say inwardly: ‘All, all of you players, each other-self, whatever your hand, I love you.’ This is the game: to know, to accept, to forgive, to balance, and to open the self in love.”

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Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.

Wheel of Fortune (Tarot Triptych)

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Name:  Wheel of Fortune
Number: X
Astrology: Jupiter
Qabalah: Kaph, the Palm

Chris Gabriel February 22, 2025

In the Wheel of Fortune, we find one of the greatest mysteries in the deck. It is the endless flux of our lives and the universe encapsulated in a single image. Understanding this card will allow us to grasp the cosmology of tarot and divination.

In Rider, we find a wheel in the middle of a blue sky. The Cross is its center, and around it are the symbols of Salt, Sulphur, Mercury, and Aquarius. On the rim is the Tetragrammaton and TARO, serving duall

purpose as an anagram of ROTA, or Wheel. Atop the Wheel we have a Sphinx bearing a sword. A snake falls down its left side, and Hermanubis flies up from below. At the corners are the four Cherubs, winged and reading in their clouds.

In Thoth, there are vibrant purples and golds - the colors of the divine. In the center is a ten spoked wheel. Riding the wheel are the Sphinx who sits above, Apophis or Typhon falling down, and a monkey climbing up. The background is a violet spiral marred by the lightning bolts, which descend from the stars above.

In Marseille, we are shown a more material wheel sat upon a base. It has six spokes. Along the wheel are three monkeys: the one atop is crowned, winged and bearing a sword, to the left one falls and the other rises on the right.

What is the Wheel of Fortune? What is the meaning of this trinity?

Let us look to Jupiter, the God of this card. Jupiter, like the other Gods of the ancient pantheon, is very human. As the king of the Gods he rewards those who please him and punishes those who upset him, and his whims are very fickle. This is the nature of life and luck, where our conditions change extremely easily and with no warning. We find ourselves on top of the world, and then we are plummeted down again, and must fight our way back up. This is an eternal struggle.

This card argues there is a logic to this cycle of change. It can be put concisely into a magic word: IAO.

Isis
Apophis
Osiris

In these three characters, we are given the narrative cycle for life. Isis and Osiris are married, Apophis/Seth kills Osiris and chops him up, then Isis restores and mummifies him.

Isis is the mother and healer, Apophis the son and destroyer, and Osiris, the father and the destroyed. 

This is the essential magickal trinity of life, death, and rebirth, and the alchemical trinity of Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury. 

I see this pattern very clearly in children’s games: Rock, Paper, Scissor and Kiss, Marry, Kill.

Isis: Salt: Rock: Kiss
Apophis: Sulphur: Scissor: Kill
Osiris: Mercury: Paper: Marry

The trinity is even mirrored in language with the Ablaut Reduplication. Consider: Tic-Tac-Toe, hip-hop, splish splash. If we reverse these, Toe-Tac-Tic, hop-hip, splash splish, we end up with a very awkward phrase, we naturally speak in the IAO pattern.

This may seem silly, but it is through this exact pattern that we can grasp our ever changing conditions in life.

The Wheel of Fortune itself is still used extensively in games: from game shows, various wheel based auctions to, of course, roulette. In all of these, we see a very immediate form of luck and changing fortunes.

When we pull this card, we are seeing a coming change to our situation.  Luck and fate will come into play. Whether or not this will bring us higher or drop us farther can only be indicated by the other cards. For example, if a card like “Failure” precedes Fortune things may be ready to improve. 

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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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A Start

Knot, 1947. Anni Albers.

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Anni Albers was one of the key figures of 20th Century Art. Joining Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus School as an untrained, but deeply passionate, novice, she came to create a new language of textiles, a radical theory of color, and an understanding of pattern and form that would change the course of art history. Her career extended long beyond the Bauhaus, blurring the lines between craft and fine art, teaching at Black Mountain College and becoming the first textile artist to have a solo show at the MOMA. In this essay, written in 1947 but not published until Gropius’ death in 1969, she succinctly captures the feeling of a radical place that offered new promises and the development that this philosophy encouraged in all of its practitioners.

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Anni Albers, February 20, 2025

I came to the Bauhaus at its “period of the saints.” Many around me, a lost and bewildered newcomer, were, oddly enough, in white—not a professional white or the white of summer—here it was the vestal white. But far from being awesome, the baggy white dresses and saggy white suits had rather a familiar homemade touch. Clearly this was a place of groping and fumbling, of experimenting and taking chances. 

Outside was the world I came from, a tangle of hopelessness, of undirected energy, of cross-purposes. Inside, here, at the Bauhaus after some two years of its existence, was confusion, too, I thought, but certainly no hopelessness or aimlessness, rather exuberance with its own land of confusion. But there seemed to be a gathering of efforts for some dim and distant purpose, a purpose I could not yet see and which, I feared might remain perhaps forever hidden from me. 

Then Gropius spoke. It was a welcome to us, the new students. He spoke, I believe, of the ideas that brought the Bauhaus into being and of the work ahead. I do not recall anything of the actual phrasing or even of the thoughts expressed. What is still present in my mind is the experience of a gradual condensation, during that hour he spoke, of our hoping and musing into a focal point, into a meaning, into some distant, stable objective. It was an experience that meant purpose and direction from there on. 

This was about twenty-six years ago. 

Last year some young friends of mine told me of the opening speech Gropius gave at Harvard at the beginning of the new term. What made it significant to them was the experience of realizing sense and meaning in a confused world, now as then—the same experience of finding one’s bearing.

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Anni Albers (1899 –1994) was a German born, Jewish artist, writer, teacher, and printmaker. Alongside her husband Josef Albers, she helped redefine color theory in the 20th century, and was the leading voice textile art, ushering in craft practices into fine art.

Wagnerian Painting

Portrait of Téoder de Wyzewa, Jacques-Emile Blanche, 1989.

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Téodor de Wyzewa was Polish born theorist, writer, and critic who in the last decades of the 19th century became amongst the most celebrated minds in Paris, contributing a philosophical grounding to the Symbolist movement. This essay, first published in 1885 of which a section is reproduced here, anticipates the development of abstract art and espouses a number of formalist theories upon which many 20th century movements would be built. Key amongst them is the idea that art is the route to access 'the higher reality of a disinterested life'.

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Téodor de Wyzewa, February 18, 2025

The world we live in, which we declare real, is purely a creation of our soul. The mind cannot go outside itself; and the things it believes to be outside it are only its ideas. To see, to hear, is to create appearances within oneself, thus to create Life. But the baneful habit of creating the same things has made us lose the joyful awareness of our own creative power; we thought real the dreams we gave birth to, and also this inner self, limited by objects and subject to them, that we had conceived. 

Consequently, we have been the slaves of the world, and the sight of this world, where we engaged our interests, has since ceased to give us pleasure. And the Life which we had created - created in order to give us the joy of creating - has lost its original character. It is necessary therefore to recreate it; one must build, over and above this world of defiled, habitual appearances, the holy world of a better life: better, because we can make it intentionally, and know that we make it. This is the very business of Art.

But from where will the artist take the elements of this higher life? He can find them nowhere unless in our normal life, in what we call Reality. This is to say that the artist, and those to whom he wants to communicate the life that he creates, cannot, as a result of what their minds normally do, erect a living work of art in their souls, unless it presents itself to them under the very conditions in which they have always perceived life.

And so, this explains the necessity of realism in art; not a realism which transcribes the vain appearances that we think real, with no other end, but an artistic realism, which tears these appearances from the false reality of interest where we perceive them, in order to transport them into the higher reality of a disinterested life. We see around us trees, animals, men, and we assume they are living; but, seen in this way, they are only vain shadows which drape the shifting decor of our vision. They will only live when the artist, in whose special soul they have a more intense reality, inspires them with this higher life - recreates them before us.

As minds become more refined, Art requires increasingly more diverse methods than those operative in reality to suggest the same life. Thus, a polychrome statue resembles the models it has reproduced too much in its material.  

And so again, a drama, when read, will appear more alive to delicate souls than the same drama played in a theatre by living actors. In order to preserve the feelings of art, we have an ever more urgent need that the impressions of life should be given us, in the life of art, by means other than those of real life.

Painting responds to this need. The means it employs to suggest sensations to us artistically differ entirely from the means employed by reality. For the colours and lines in a. painting are not reproductions of the quite different lines and colours which are in reality; they are only conventional signs which have become equivalent to what they signify as the result of an association between the images. But they are just as different, finally, from real colours and lines as a word differs from a thought, or a musical note from the emotion it suggests.

A few outstanding masters, their eyes endowed with an almost pathological sensitivity, accustomed artists to seeing objects surrounded by the air that bathed them. From that moment, the vocabulary of painting became modified; new signs were introduced which created new sensations.

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“Marrying them in such a way as to produce in us, by their free play, a complete impression comparable to that of a symphony.”

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Painting, Literature and Music each suggest just one mode of life. But life exists in the intimate union of these three modes. Soon, their art must have appeared to painters, as it did to writers, to be insufficient to create the whole life which they conceived. Therefore, long ago they wanted to expand the possibilities of their art, to employ it to reconstitute diverse forms of life. For example, writers noticed that words, over and above their precise conceptual meaning, had assumed special resonances for the ear, and that syllables had become musical tones, as had the rhythms of the sentence. Then, they attempted a new art: poetry. They employed words no longer for their conceptual value, but as sonorous syllables evoking emotion in the soul by means of their harmonious alliance.

The same need to translate the life of the emotions with the means of their art very quickly drove painters to go beyond the limits of reproducing their sensations in a wholly realistic way.

And a new kind of painting was attempted by them, one which a happy agreement of circumstances made possible. This is to say that colours and lines themselves, like words, had also, through familiarity, assumed for souls an emotional value independent of the objects they represented. We had always seen a certain facial expression, a certain colour or certain contours accompany the objects which inspired us with such-and-such an emotion. And behold, these colours, these contours and these expressions, are linked with these emotions in our soul; they have become not just signs of our visual sensations, but signs of our emotions also; they have become, by the accident of this connection, emotional signs, like the syllables of poetry or musical notes. And so, certain painters were able to leave behind the original purpose of Art, which was to suggest the precise sensations of sight. They employed colours and lines for purely symphonic compositional ends, with no regard for the direct depiction of a visual object. And nowadays, colours and lines - the means of painting - can be used in two quite different kinds of painting: the one sensuous and descriptive which recreates exactly how objects look; the other emotional and musical, neglectful of treating the objects these colours and lines represent, using them only as signs of emotion, marrying them in such a way as to produce in us, by their free play, a complete impression comparable to that of a symphony.

Therefore, emotional painting, as well as descriptive painting, has a legitimate right to exist, and possesses the value of an art which is equally precious. Its first master was the poetic Leonardo da Vinci. He gave us the emotion of lascivious terror through the mystery of perverse and supernatural expressions. Later, Peter Paul Rubens created the most intense symphonies of colour. Whereas with Rembrandt, we find a supernatural play of chiaroscuro which creates an emotion which is at once more troubled and more restrained. Afterwards, Watteau translated elegant melancholy: he devoted the delightful grace of his drawings to light-hearted and sweet poems which seem to recall certain andante movements in Mozart's quartets. And in turn, Delacroix was the lyricist of violent passions, a little vulgar in their romanticism.

All these masters have proved that painting could equally well be descriptive of real sensations, or suggestive of real emotions. Only, they have intuited that these two possibilities demanded two quite different kinds of art, and that they had to choose one or the other, following their natural inclinations. Today, the necessity of making a choice is even more vital.

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Téodor de Wyzewa (1862-1914) was a Polish writer, critic, and translator who emigrated to France in 1869. He was a leading exponent of the Symbolist movement.

Four of Cups (Tarot Triptych)

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Name:  Luxury, the Four of Cups
Number: 4
Astrology: Moon in Cancer
Qabalah: Chesed of He

Chris Gabriel February 15, 2025

The Four of Cups is comfort, familial love, and emotion. We are given three very different interpretations of this same force in each deck.

In Rider, we see a youth no longer satisfied by material pleasure. He sits like an ascetic beneath a tree, rejecting the phantom hand that holds out a cup for him. He is like the Buddha, denouncing the world for the sake of what’s higher.

In Thoth, we see four golden cups and elaborate pipe-like roots leading to the Lotus, which is pouring down water into the cups. The clouds in the sky are the silvery gray of the Moon, and the wavey Sea is the light blue of Cancer.

In Marseille, we have four cups and a pillar-like flower. Qabalistically, the card is the Mercy of the Queen. This is the love and kindness of the mother.

A good upbringing with a loving family leads to, at its best, an individual who is secure and can withstand the tumult of the world. Often, however, people lose themselves within the comfort of home, reject the external, and remain in arrested development.

In Rider we see a boy who is becoming unhappy with his comfort. He may be preparing to grow, to expand and transform. When Crowley described his Thoth card, he gave it a subtitle: “The Seeds of Decay”, which lay in the fruits of pleasure.  

This is not to say comfort is always bad; there is a time and a need for it. Childhood may be best spent in comfort, butwhen childhood ends, the comfort must be abandoned and the enchanted circle of the mother broken.

If this fails to occur, one will remain in an illusion, a daydream, an oedipal hologram meant to keep an individual from individuating. This is the struggle of the card's astrological placement: the Moon in Cancer, even though it is in the sign of its rulership, is prone to delusions and extreme sensitivity to the world around it. 

The card is notably featured in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. The Kid finds it in a destroyed house and then pulls it while having his fortune read:

He took one. He'd not seen such cards before, yet the one he held seemed familiar to him. He turned it upside down and regarded it and he turned it back. The juggler took the boy's hand in his own and turned the card so he could see. Then he took the card and held it up. 

Cuatro de copas, he called out. 

The woman raised her head. She looked like a blindfold mannequin raised awake by a string. 

Cuatro de copas, she said. She moved her shoulders. The wind went among her garments and her hair.

When we pull the Four of Cups we can expect a slow and comfortable energy to be at play, we don’t need to worry. Nothing is falling apart, for now.

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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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Egyptian Tantra and the Ankh

Sphinx Mystagoga, 1676. Athanasius Kircher.

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Molly Hankins February 13, 2025

In Drunvalo Melchizedek’s Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life book series, he shares channeled material from Thoth, also known as Hermes Trismegistus. The second book outlines the basics of Egyptian tantra practice, explaining that recycling orgasmic energy is the key to eternal life. This is a vast departure from many other tantra traditions, but makes sense - human life begins with an orgasm.

From an energetic standpoint,  most orgasms are akin to discharging a battery into a ground wire - the energy dissipates and is gone from the battery forever. “This is what all the world’s tantric systems I am aware of believe,” he writes, “That orgasm brings one a little closer to death because a person loses his or her life-force energy in the orgasm.”

For the Egyptians, controlling sexual currents was more important than controlling sexual release. According to Thoth / Hermes, the Egyptian tantric system is unique as it recycles sexual currents as a source of infinite life-force energy. Engaging in this practice, according to the sex magic schools of Isis (partnered) and Horus (solo), can create the conditions allowing for eternal youth and life.  

Overlay the Egyptian ankh next to Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vetruvian Man, and the meeting point of his arms is the energetic starting point at which we’re directing the sexual current in our bodies - the heart chakra. The practice  is that of pushing energy out from our backs.allowing it to loop back around the top of our head, and re-enter the front of the heart chakra to form the ankh shape. 

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“Immortality is not living forever in our current form - it’s learning to work with the energy that  animate our physical bodies, to the point where we don’t age.”

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The goal of Egyptian tantra is to let sexual energy build up the spine, and then move it towards the heart chakra as you’re approaching orgasm. This practice can be used to simply build vital energy or directed towards an intention, and can be performed solo or with a partner. The instructions, as Drunvalo, explains are: .

1. Allow the sexual energy to rise up your spine and collect at the top of the heart chakra.

2. The moment you feel orgasm is imminent, fill your lungs 9/10ths of the way full and hold.

3. At the moment of orgasm, push the energy out the back of the heart chakra at a 90 degree angle relative to your spine, allowing the energy to continue in the round shape like the top of ankh, and recycle it back into your body. 

4. The instant the sexual current energy makes contact with the front of the body, draw in the rest of your breath so your lungs are full, this completes the ankh before exhaling.

To illustrate the power of this practice, Drunvalo uses the example of a standard tuning fork. Once struck, it will vibrate for a certain amount of time upon being struck. A tuning fork with the ankh shape on top, however, will vibrate for a much longer period of time because the energy is being recycled back into itself rather than immediately dissipating. 

Egyptian tantra posits that recycling our life-force energy keeps us vibrant in form for longer. Immortality, Drunvalo believes, is not living forever in our current form - it’s learning to work with the energy that  animate our physical bodies, to the point where we don’t age. The goal of this practice is to evolve to a point where we can live as long as we wish in a healthy, vibrant body then choose when and how to transition. 

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Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.

Sound Shapes the Mind: A Binaural Beats Primer

Danny Timur February 11, 2025

We live in a world of noise. We are inundated with honks of traffic, buzzes of phones, and din of conversations that we now spend much of our lives attempting to drown out the sounds of the artificial world, which in turn only pushes us further from nature. We strive for silence, believing that may be the answer, seemingly unaware that nestled within the frequencies we hear are wavelengths that could hold the power to calm our minds, sharpen our focus, or even alter our emotional states. These are known as binaural beats—a type of auditory illusion that can shape the way we think and feel, and their possible benefits are enormous.

Binaural beats are simple. In a pair of headphones, two different frequencies are played, one in each ear. What seems like a straightforward auditory experience opens a door to something far more profound. Your brain doesn’t hear the two tones separately; instead, it creates a third frequency—a "beat" that is the difference between the two sounds. For example, if one ear hears a tone at 300 Hz and the other hears one at 310 Hz, your brain perceives a 10 Hz beat. This influences the very frequencies of your brainwaves, guiding them into specific states as it synchronizes itself in a process called brainwave entrainment. 

Our brains are malleable, and a variety of activities and tools can help us synchronise and rewire them. Meditation, exercise, movement, surges of dopamine from scrolling timelines - all of these are modes of entrainment that alter our consciousness and send us into new states, but they are often scattershot in their efforts. The real power of binaural beats lies in their ability to influence these patterns in a targeted way. Our brainwaves are categorized into distinct frequency bands, each associated with different states of consciousness:

• Delta (0.5–4 Hz): Deep sleep or unconsciousness.

• Theta (4–8 Hz): Light sleep, meditation, and creativity.

• Alpha (8–12 Hz): Relaxation while awake, calm but alert.

• Beta (12–30 Hz): Active thought, alertness, and concentration.

• Gamma (30–100 Hz): Intense focus and cognitive processing.

When we listen to a binaural beat at 4 Hz, we enter the theta state, which is associated with deep relaxation, creativity, and even meditation. At 10 Hz, we move into the alpha state—calm, but alert. For moments when focus is needed, binaural beats in the beta range (12–30 Hz) can help foster concentration and alertness.

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“In the symphony of human experience, music has always informed our emotions. Songs, speech, birdcall - these can change our mood in seconds. Binaural beats are an extension, a distillation, of this eternal idea.”

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Binaural beats act as a gentle guide, steering your mind into a particular wavelength. Like a dancer moving in time with music, your brain follows the rhythm, adapting its own frequencies to match the beat. These shifts are not merely psychological. They are physiological, rooted in the way our brains process and respond to sound. 

We can be precise in our responses, identify harmful or painful emotions and find their sonic mirror, the audio antidote to reclaim balance. The brain waves in a stressed state, for example, are often fast-moving beta waves which make it hard to focus or think clearly. Listening to binaural beats in the alpha or theta ranges will counterbalance this by promoting slower, more relaxed brainwave patterns. In the same way, if we are tired, Binaural beats can be used to enhance cognitive performance by encouraging brainwave activity that promotes alertness and concentration. Our morning coffee can be listened to, instead of drunk, and the energy that we have so long relied on from external sources can be unlocked within ourself.

This form of deep listening, of allowing the subconscious to be guided by the sonic, has the potential to unlock deeper states of consciousness—states where creativity flows freely, where anxiety dissipates, and where we reconnect with the present moment. The theta state, which binaural beats can induce, brings deep meditative experiences, a sense of inner peace, and heightened creativity. For those who struggle with finding time to meditate or who are unable to quiet their minds on their own, binaural beats offer a shortcut—a gentle, guided entry into mindfulness.

In the symphony of human experience, music has always informed our emotions. Songs, speech, birdcall - these can change our mood in seconds. Binaural beats are an extension, a distillation, of this eternal idea and they offer a unique key to unlocking the mind’s potential. Through the simple act of listening, we can influence our brainwaves, shifting our mental state from tension to relaxation, from distraction to focus, or from confusion to creativity.

There is a deep, almost primal connection between sound and the mind. In a world filled with noise, the quiet power of binaural beats reminds us that the gentlest frequencies can have the most profound effects. By simply tuning into the rhythm of sound, we might just find a way to harmonize our minds with the world around us.

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Danny Timur is a musician and DJ based in Hong Kong.

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Page of Wands (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Page of Wands or Princess of Wands
Number: 4
Astrology: Earth of Fire
Qabalah: He of Yod

Chris Gabriel February 8, 2025

The Page of Wands is measuring up, stacking up, and determining value according to the Measure of his wand. The Princess, on the other hand, disregards all this and flies into action.

In Rider, the Page is a young man with a feathered cap, a yellow tunic adorned with salamanders, a scarf, and fiery yellow boots. His clothes are similar to the Knight, and he is set in the same pyramid spotted desert. He is looking up toward the tip of his wand, holding it in place. The Wand is taller than him.

In Thoth, the Princess is naked, save for a huge double uraeus crown. She has caught a tiger by its tail and is rushing ahead with the flames, dragging the tiger along. There is a burning altar beside her, as she holds a solar wand.

In Marseille, the Page is dressed very simply. He stands in a field with sprouting plants and looks ahead unsure. His wand is kept on the ground, directing his fiery energy into the Earth, causing the growth. The question is, what will make him raise his wand?

In each of these cards we see the interrelation of Fire and Earth. In Marseille, fire is something feeding the earth, in Rider it competes with the earth, and in Thoth, earth is the fuel to fire.

It is here that I find the Page of Rider most fascinating. While the suit of wands is generally proud, aggressive and arrogant, the youngest of them is shown struggling to measure up against his wand, his destiny. If the face cards in the suit of wands are having a “dick measuring competition”, the Page is losing, even against the Queen.

The Page of Marseille appears to be content with his Wand being more of a tool to fertilize the Earth, rather than as a tool of aggression. He is untroubled. 

The Princess disrupts both of these modes entirely. She is taking up the creature of the Earth, the tiger, as she ascends with the burning flames. This is a frenetic, excited young woman, who is quick to drag you along on an adventure. She represents extreme and blind enthusiasm, the freedom of the feminine, as opposed to the distinctly masculine insecurity in Rider. 

When pulling this card, we may be met with an assisting Page for our greater pursuits or we may assist someone in theirs. We may also be like the Tiger and get dragged along on a greater adventure.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

The Power of Shame

Detail from ‘Ashes’, Edvard Munch. 1895.

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Suzanne Stabile February 6, 2025

There are times when I teach Enneagram Wisdom and I become aware that I sound like I’m offering an answer to managing all the things that make life complicated and painful. That may sound somewhat arrogant, but the truth is, it’s exactly what I’m doing. After thirty years of teaching and studying the Enneagram, it is clear to me that using it every day changes your life for the better. Enneagram wisdom teaches that there are nine ways of seeing and nine ways of processing how we see. We can change what we do with how we see, but we can never change how we see. Knowing that alone is helpful in identifying some of our responses to life that we would like to change. 

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There are multiple sets of three to be found in Enneagram Wisdom. Among them are three Triads and their corresponding Default Emotions. All three Triads revolve around a powerful emotional response. For the Thinking triad, fear is the foundational motivation for behavior. For the Doing triad, anger is always within reach. For the Heart Triad, it is shame that guides the way. Each Enneagram number struggles to understand and manage the dominant or default emotion of the Triad. It is challenging work that never ends. 

In this series of articles, I’m exploring the emotions of shame, fear and anger as they relate to Enneagram wisdom. We experience all three, and we need to learn to respect each one and use it for its value, understanding how each can be helpful and can be harmful. We also need to learn to respect the power of each one without allowing it to have unnecessary influence in our lives. 

One of the three is the default emotion for each personality type or number in the Enneagram. Enneagram Twos, Threes and Fours  make up the Heart triad, and these three personalities, shame dominates how they see themselves, others and the world. So, it’s healthy for us to know what shame looks like. 

We live our lives telling stories. My work is to teach, and model, the art of connecting the Enneagram with the stories that make up our lives. In doing so, we can “find ourselves” both in the present and the past, and we can also imagine ourselves in new ways as we look to the future.  

According to the work of Curt Thompson, M.D., there is a story we tell ourselves about shame, and there is a story that shame tells about us. I’m a Two on the Enneagram and I was adopted at birth. Part of the story shame tells about me, in relation to my birth narrative, is that I am not good, not wanted and not enough. It is challenging to live with the never-ending premise that we are fundamentally unworthy, inadequate and flawed but Enneagram Twos, Threes, and Fours have no other option 

Unlike guilt, which is about what we do,shame is about who we are. One might feel guilty about telling a lie to a friend,  yet feel shame about being the kind of person who would do such a thing. In the same way, we feel embarrassed because we think we look bad and feel shame because we think we are bad.  

Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Masaccio. 1425.

In her work, Brene’ Brown suggests that we need to know these three things about shame. First, we all have it. Second, we are all afraid to talk about it. Third, the less we talk about it the more control it has over our lives. Brown suggests that “shame is the fear of disconnection.” Keeping in mind that it is the default emotion for The Heart triad, it makes sense that the  personality types that most want connection would be the perfect target for shame. 

A 2011 study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, along with other agencies, found that, “as far as the brain is concerned physical pain and intense experiences of social rejection hurt in the same way.” Think about that! We’ve all experienced shame and often, in trying to talk about it, we describe it using language such as “intensely painful” or “unbelievably exhausting”, because that is literally how it feels.  

If everything contains its opposite, what then could be the purpose of shame? Like anger and fear, it is most often a negative emotion. And yet, some professionals say we need to acknowledge that both sides are necessary if we are to function in the healthiest ways possible. In looking back over your own life, I would suggest that there are ways that shame, though painful, has been helpful.

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“When we tell our own stories, including the parts we are ashamed of, we get to write the ending.”

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Shame can be preventative, helping us to avoid repeating mistakes. It can be helpful in our learning to take responsibility for our actions. And it can provide us with the desire to question ourselves, and the actions we take that have a history of leading us toward regrettable behaviour.  

Yet too much shame is overwhelming.. As a Two, I find it to be like a hologram. It looks like me and it shows up, unbidden and unwanted. These days, I question the hologram when she approaches, knowing that she wants to move in and cover me. “Did I behave in ways that caused harm?”, I ask.  If the answer is “no” then I move on. If the answer is “yes” then I consider whether it would be harmful if repeated. 

We must move through the experience of shame without sacrificing our value or our values. If we address shame appropriately, the experience and lessons offered can be very helpful. The most effective practice I have found for holding the hologram at bay is to know, own, and tell my story honestly. When we tell our own stories, including the parts we are ashamed of, we get to write the ending. Shame hates to have other words wrapped around it. Especially words that would show it for what it is. For obvious reasons our tendency is to hide it but shame is a big emotion that gains strength in the dark and shrinks in the light. 

For Enneagram Twos, Threes and Fours shame is always in the wings, just off stage, waiting to enter the story of your life at any moment.  Some common expressions  of shame as named by Twos are feelings of inadequacy and being unable to live up to expectations. . Twos tell me that when they look inside themselves it’s a struggle to feel joy or pride, they feel I feel inferior to most of the people, and  wonder if God is disappointed in them.  

Threes express to  me that it is common for them to say to themselves, “I am a fake. I feel like if people really knew me, they might have contempt for me. I’m not as successful as I pretend to be.”  Fours tell me they feel flawed inside, like they are blemished in some meaningful way. They say they are sure they will never measure up to what they ought to be. “I feel as if I will never be acceptable. I am always either too much or not enough.”  

Lucretia, Rembrandt van Rijn. 1666.

Feelings are messy for all of us, but they are particularly problematic for those who are in this triad. Of the three Enneagram Triads, the Heart Triad is the least capable of rational thinking, and shame thrives off irrationality. Often, it is difficult for all of us to distinguish multiple feelings as they flow in and out of our awareness but for Twos, Threes and Four it is particularly challenging because Twos feel other people’s feelings. They will often be unsure of their own feelings, but they read the feelings of others whether they want to or not.  

Threes find that feelings interfere with their top two priorities, efficiency and effectiveness. They set them aside waiting for a more convenient time to address them. Unfortunately, that time seldom presents itself to the number that is the best at multitasking. Fours are not content with average feelings. As a result, they find ways to exacerbate feelings so that when they are sad, they can be sadder; and when they are happy, they can engineer ways to be happier.  

Shame finds a home in these three Enneagram types because as long as we identify with our number, with our personalities, something deeper goes unaffirmed. Of course, there are three different solutions to this dilemma. Twos begin by creating and identifying with a false reality. “I love everybody.” But we don’t. We follow that with going out of our way to please others so they will like us, and we end up resenting that. Threes have their own false identity which is, “I am successful.” They maintain the image by under-reporting or reframing failure. And they use their energy to become outstanding in every way they can, hoping to avoid failure so they will be admired and affirmed.  Fours create a false identity around an image of uniqueness and their own understanding of authenticity. That sense of who they are is usually accompanied by an elaborate story about themselves that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. 

At the end of the day, these three numbers struggle to believe that they have value. So, the agendas of their personalities are about hiding that lack of value from others and more importantly from themselves. As a Two this is a very personal part of the journey for me. I still have so much to understand about the shadows of shame. But there is one thing I know for sure: the antidote for shame is found in learning to fulfill your needs from the inside out rather than from the outside in.

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Suzanne Stabile is a speaker, teacher, and internationally recognized Enneagram master teacher who has taught thousands of people over the last thirty years. She is the author of ‘The Path Between Us’, and coauthor, with Ian Morgan Cron, of ‘The Road Back to You’. She is also the creator and host of The Enneagram Journey podcast. Along with her husband, Rev. Joseph Stabile, she is cofounder of Life in the Trinity Ministry, a nonprofit, nondenominational ministry committed to the spiritual growth and formation of adults.

Wandering: Farmhouse

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Caspar David Friedrich, 1818. Oil on canvas.

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Herman Hesse helped bring Eastern religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions into the western mainstream through his exquisite writing of poetry and prose. His novel ‘Siddartha’, a story of a young man’s spiritual journey of self discovery in the time of Gautama Buddha, was written in 1922 but became a seminal and influential counter-cultural work of the 1960s, informing much of the hippie movement. ‘Wandering’, published two years before, deals with many of the same themes. A series of short essays and reflections, it explores the longing to return to nature, a journey away from home and into oneself, and the possibility of living a different kind of life. In this, the opening essay, Hesse considers the very nature of movement, and how the landscape of our birth shapes us in unknowable ways.

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Herman Hesse February 4, 2025

This is the house where I say goodbye. For a long time I won’t see another house like this one. You see, I’m approaching a pass in the Alps, and here the northern, German architecture, and the German countryside, and the German language come to an end.

How lovely it is to cross such a boundary. The wandering man becomes a primitive man in so many ways, in the same way that the nomad is more primitive than the farmer. But the longing to get on the other side of everything already settled, this makes me, and everybody like me, a road sign to the future. If there were many other people who loathed the borders between countries as I do, then there would be no more wars and blockades. Nothing on earth is more disgusting, more contemptible than borders. They’re like cannons, like generals: as long as peace, loving kindness and peace go on, nobody pays any attention to them — but as soon as war and insanity appear, they become urgent and sacred. While the war went on, how they were pain and prison to us wanderers. Devil take them!

I am making a sketch of the house in my notebook, and my eye sadly leaves the German roof, the German frame of the house, the gables, everything I love, every familiar thing.

Once again I love deeply everything at home, because I have to leave it. Tomorrow I will love other roofs, other cottages. I won’t leave my heart behind me, as they say in love letters. No, I am going to carry it with me over the mountains, because I need it, always. I am a nomad, not a farmer. I am an adorer of the unfaithful, the changing, the fantastic. I don’t care to secure my love to one bare place on this earth. I believe that what we love is only a symbol. Whenever our love becomes too attached to one thing, one faith, one virtue, then I become suspicious.

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“I am not complete, and I do not even strive to be complete. I want to taste my homesickness, as I taste my joy.”

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Good luck to the farmer! Good luck to the man who owns this place, the man who works it, the faithful, the virtuous! I can love him, I can revere him, I can envy him. But I have wasted half my life trying to live his life. I wanted to be something that I was not. I even wanted to be a poet and a middleclass person at the same time. I wanted to be an artist and a man of fantasy, but I also wanted to be a good man, a man at home. It all went on for a long time, till I knew that a man cannot be both and have both, that I am a nomad and not a farmer, a man who searches and not a man who keeps. A long time I castigated myself before gods and laws which were only idols for me. That was what I did wrong, my anguish, my complicity in the world’s pain. I increased the world’s guilt and anguish, by doing violence to myself, by not daring to walk toward my own salvation. The way to salvation leads neither to the left nor the right: it leads into your own heart, and there alone is God, and there alone is peace.

A damp mountain wind drifts across me, beyond me blue islands of heaven gaze down on other countries. Beneath those heavens I will be happy sometimes, and sometimes I will be homesick beneath them. The complete man that I am, the pure wanderer, mustn’t think about homesickness. But I know it, I am not complete, and I do not even strive to be complete. I want to taste my homesickness, as I taste my joy.

This wind, into which I am climbing, is fragrant of beyonds and distances, of watersheds and foreign languages, of mountains and southern places. It is full of promise.

Goodbye, small farmhouse and my native country. I leave you as a young man leaves his mother: he knows it is time for him to leave her, and he knows, too, he can never leave her completely, even though he wants to.

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Herman Hesse (1877-1962) was a German Swiss poet, novelist, and painter who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. Hesse remains one of the most widely read and translated European authors of the 20th century, and his novels have served as essential touchstones for generations of young people looking to find themselves.

King of Swords (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: King of Swords, Prince of Swords
Number: 1 or 3
Astrology: Aquarius
Qabalah: Yod of Vau or Vau of Vau

Chris Gabriel February 1, 2025

The King of Swords is the highest card in the suit, but as the Prince, as he appears in Thoth, he is the third highest. In each depiction he bears a sword and wears a crown,  looking with judgment and considering how to apply his sword.

In Rider, we have a King cloaked in sky blue and grey. His throne is adorned with butterflies and sylphs. He is crowned, and his sword is held aloft, slightly to the right. He looks straight ahead. 

In Thoth, we see a Prince riding in a chariot drawn by three little men. Geometric figures swarm about him. He is preparing to strike with his sword, while his other hand holds the reins and a scythe.

In Marseille, the King is looking to the left. He is adorned in ceremonial armor with two Lunar shoulder pads. He is holding court, giving orders, and forming plans - not going to war. He is giving orders and forming plans. His sword is pointed straight up, and his scepter is by his side.

In both Rider and Marseille we are shown the King as Judge. This calls to mind the Judgment of Solomon, in which two women claim to be the mother of a child and come before their King to solve the dispute.

24 And the king said, Bring me a sword. And they brought a sword before the king.

25 And the king said, Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other.

26 Then spake the woman whose the living child was unto the king, for her bowels yearned upon her son, and she said, O my lord, give her the living child, and in no wise slay it. But the other said, Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it.

27 Then the king answered and said, Give her the living child, and in no wise slay it: she is the mother thereof.

-Kings 3:24-17

A King judging by the sword is a perfect example of this card. 

The Prince, on the other hand, is judging only ideas. He is in a realm of intellect, not practical matters of the court. With his sword and scythe he cuts every sprout and sapling before they have time to mature, for each is imperfect. This card always reminds me of masturbation, and the phrase “mental masturbation”. None of these ideas will be fertilized. This is Hamlet himself, thinking and thinking.

The Kings on the other are interested not necessarily in Justice, but in balance and symmetry. The butterflies on the Rider King’s throne are not beautiful per se, but beautiful in their symmetry. The Kings are interested in using their swords to cut perfect borders, to divide bounty, to create laws and boundaries for their subjects.

When we pull this card we can expect an orderly person in the case of the King, or a mental person in the case of the Prince. Their ideas can bring peace and balance to our lives, or set us spinning our wheels. This may be energy we have to embody, setting things in their right place, and removing excess.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

We Are Cosmic Code - An Interview with Kaitlyn Kaerhart

Telepathic Transference of Numbers Between Two People, 1908. ‘The Naturalisation of the Supernatural’.

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Molly Hankins January 30, 2025

The title of numerologist, musician, and mystic Kaitlyn Kaerhart’s best-selling book You Are Cosmic Code is quite literal in its meaning - through understanding the mathematical equations of our individual life paths we can tap into universal intelligence. She’s proven with her own life’s work that the data contained in each of our own life’s equations opens up an endless well of creative inspiration and naturally leads to easier, more effective decision-making. 

“I think we are coming into a world now where science is merging with the spiritual, where the left brain and right brain are going to come together and people are going to be able to comprehend on a different level that there isn’t a difference between these two things. They can co-exist and they do co-exist, and when you think about it, music is really just patterns and frequencies - it’s math! Music is math, numerology is math.” 

The intersection between spirituality and music is what she’s always been about, and you can hear it in the way she speaks. There’s a cadence to her voice, particularly when she’s reading personal or universal cosmic code, that sounds like a subtle energy beatbox. As a musician for most of her adult life, she’s been a solo artist under the name Kaerhart, played guitar in several bands and written songs for other artists. Numerology was something she always studied for fun, but when a bad break-up left her homeless and sleeping in a friend’s recording studio, she started doing readings to make a living. Within a year she’d built that business online and was being courted by Penguin-Randomhouse U.K. to write You Are Cosmic Code.

Kaerhart’s philosophy of pattern recognition as the gateway to self-knowledge is a pathway to finding out what we as individuals need to thrive. It also helps that she has a photographic memory, which means her proficiency in numerology, astrology, Human Design, Galactic Maya and Destiny Cards entails almost perfect recall. She believes that, “All these different mystical tools I use are different entry points for people to access their purpose.” The well of information contained in these systems, if integrated into our lives, offers knowledge which empowers us in a way that can bring about a complete shift in priorities. 

“Numerology is an incredibly powerful tool that can instantly access who you really are,” she said. “When you realize how much power you actually hold over your life, you no longer accept things that are out of alignment or keeping you down. The more we do this, the more we’re raising consciousness.” Kaerhart also contends that whether we believe in systems like numerology or astrology is irrelevant because if we’re willing to hear the information, it causes us to reflect on whether it feels true or not. That consideration of our underlying motivations and behavioral patterns alone is an empowering invitation to authentic living.

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“Just as musical instruments naturally fall out of tune from being both over-played or from sitting untouched, so do our states of being - mental, physical, emotional and spiritual.”

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Her particular brand of numerology, fully explained in her book, Instagram videos and in the materials on her website, emphasizes the study of personal annual cycle patterns that occur every nine years. We’ll use July 10th as an example to show how the equation works:.

Birth Month (7) + Birth Date (10) + Current Year’s Numerals Added Up (2+0+2+5) = 26

Reduce to total sum of those numbers, 2 +6 = 8 

According to Kaerhart, 8 is a year of achievement related to developing personal and financial power, but she gives deeply specific answers to every possible outcome of this equation. Like any responsible spiritual practitioner, she’ll tell you to “take what resonates and leave the rest” from any of her content but for Kaerhart, numerology is a very clear roadmap for how to live an optimized life. It came to her intuitively in a dream,. She kept hearing the words ‘spiritual numbers,’ decided to find out what that meant and accidentally built a wildly successful online business and became an international best-selling author as a result.

In addition to the personal annual cycles, there are also personal monthly cycles (108 total months in each cyclical, 9 year cycle) and life destiny numbers that speak to macro-themes related to the realization of our personal destinies. Each life destiny number is related to a certain archetype, and Kaerhart is a life path 1, which is the path of leadership. It’s something she always felt deeply uncomfortable with, but ultimately worked through using numerology.

Memory Tricks, 1617. Robert Fludd.

“In my old bands even though I was just a guitar player who wrote the songs, I was constantly in these positions where I was thrust into the spotlight. And when I found out I was a life path 1 I was like, what if I tried to embrace that? What if I tried embracing being the leader archetype even though it’s so uncomfortable for me and I don’t want to be seen?” she recalled. “And when I finally stepped into that role of leader instead of trying to hide, that’s when I got my book deal and my socials started to grow. I was embracing the traits and qualities of the path I’m meant to walk, and numerology helped me. It’s an incredible tool to learn to love and accept ourselves.”

Digesting her materials feels like an attunement. Just as musical instruments naturally fall out of tune from being both over-played or from sitting untouched, so do our states of being - mental, physical, emotional and spiritual. Working with numerology, and especially Kaerhart’s particular practice of incorporating multiple information systems, feels like being tuned to harmonize our state of being. “A lot of people who come to me feel really lost, and I was too - I felt like everything was failing and I didn’t know what path I was supposed to take. Following my cosmic code helped me try on being a leader, and I just tried being in that energy and flowing with my annual and monthly cycles. As soon as I did it everything manifested.”

Kaerhart still writes music and happily described how much lighter it feels to be creative now that the pressure is off from having to be commercially successful enough to make a living at it. She was even offered a record deal recently, contingent upon “knocking off the numerology” on her Instagram. Most of her old friends from the music business have been baffled by the shift in her focus, and she hears the same feedback from peers in the spiritual community who don’t understand why she’s still making music. 

“Music and numerology are both incredible tools for healing. With music it’s instant, you put on a song and your vibration instantly changes. Even if you’re depressed, when you put on your favorite song, the healing is instant,” she said. “Music transcends language and culture, but so do numbers. Numerology requires us to take a moment to understand it, to do the math. But in terms of results, they’re exactly the same.” 

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You can find Kaitlyn Kaerhart at Kaerhart.com and @Kaerhart.

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Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.

Disharmony as Intelligence

Color Analysis From A Mummy Cloth, Emily Noyes Vanderpoel. 1902.

Tuukka Toivonen January 28, 2025

Iwakan is one of my favorite Japanese phrases. It consists of three Chinese characters, 違 (i, meaning difference, deviation), 和 (wa, meaning harmony, peace) and 感 (kan,  meaning feeling, sense), that together form a single word that loosely translates as a ‘sense of disharmony’. In daily interactions, I use the term casually  when something feels off or out of place, yielding a mild yet noticeable dissonance rather  than a jarring sense of wrongness. A friend recently pointed out that having an iwakan does not necessarily suggest a negative situation or grave problem as such, only that  something—a sentence, a bit of furniture, a stylistic choice—might need to be rearranged  or reconsidered. 

What strikes me as remarkable about this single word—beyond how it incorporates the  beautiful wa character (considered quintessentially Japanese) in its midst—is its gentle emphasis not explicitly on disharmony or dissonance per se, but our sensing of it.. Along with foregrounding the utterer’s subjective experience, iwakan for  me serves as an eloquent reminder of the embodied nature of human knowing. It is the final kan character that signals this definitive quality, in a gesture so subtle that it becomes all too easy to overlook its potency. Here, dissonance becomes something felt intuitively in the body as opposed to a rational or purely intellectual observation of a discrepancy or  incongruence.  

Many  other Japanese emotional and relational expressions end with  kan or ki (気), the Chinese character of Daoist origin that (in Daoist usage) refers  to the fundamental universal energy that permeates all life and the entire cosmos. 

Think of the curious feeling you get, having just left home, that ‘something’s not  quite right’, prompting you to realize a moment later that the keys are still on the kitchen  table or that the air-conditioning is still humming. Or imagine spotting a dirty piece of  plastic waste in the middle of your most cherished beach and the  sensations this sight arouses in your body (while suspending any explicit thoughts about what should or should not be done in response). Next, recall how your abdominal area or your shoulders feel after a challenging conversation or an outright verbal conflict. What sensations can you detect or remember? What is the ‘shape’ and contour of your unease in each case? If you are anything like me, your experience of disharmony in situations like  these may range from a strange tickle or tingle to slight disgust and heaviness.  

In some cases, disharmony grows into a persistent, nagging signal that is simply  impossible to ignore. Think back to the moment you first faced ‘adult’ pressures — when you began to get serious about your education, find a proper job or plan for career  success. Alongside any immediate feelings of anxiety or frustration, did this generate any  disharmonies or recurring kinds of bodily discomfort in you? In my case, the unease I felt in relation to future expectations surged around the age of 17 and 18, producing a lingering, growing discomfort that eventually led to a major life transformation. 

The inner resistance I experienced in that now distant moment in my small hometown in Finland did not spring purely from my  naïveté or lack of familiarity with the ‘real world’. No— it was rather that the transitions I  was being asked to undertake felt devoid of meaning and resonance. The foremost paths into further study and work that I was being offered appeared  alienating and uninteresting at the time. Internally, I met this situation with a screaming  ‘why?’ along with the desire to find an escape hatch. 

This sense of disharmony may not have resolved had it not been for a surprising turn of events that led me to discover an alternative route forward. On one  sunny winter morning, seemingly out of the blue, an American youth musical group visited my high school in Kotka. That encounter inspired me to put all other  plans—and uncomfortable expectations—properly on hold. Upon graduation, I duly flew to Denver to join a year-long tour that would first take me to the United States and then  onwards to new lives in Japan and the United Kingdom. For the first time, I found a vigorous sense of aliveness, belonging and meaning in a totally new  context. 

It was iwakan that encouraged me to commit to this transition, coupled with  the strong positive sentiments I felt towards the musical program. To me, this served as a powerful demonstration of the surprising influence that a subtle, embodied sensation can wield when we stay (or are forced to stay) with it. Building on these reflections alongside other experiences, I have come to see disharmony as a vital kind of  intelligence, a  holistic one that we all too often ignore at our peril. We may not have the words to latch onto and express it, or perhaps  our society does not (yet) view it as a perfectly legitimate way of knowing,  learning or making decisions. Change, however, may be on its way even in cultures that, unlike Japan, do not incorporate nuanced references to felt sensations in daily spoken language. 

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“All this should help us see why the humblest inner twitch or sensation—whether dissonant  or harmonious—has the potential to be an important bridge between our day-to-day  experience and the civilizational priority of protecting the Earth.”

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Drawing inspiration from contemplative traditions, dance, and structured  experiments and surveys, a growing body of multidisciplinary academic research  approaches the felt dimension of intelligence through the concepts of embodiment and embodied cognition. Although still a new field of empirical inquiry, this research is already coalescing on understandings that profoundly challenge conventional definitions of  intelligence as well as the reductive views of  intelligence as algorithmic or computational. It proposes, simply, that intelligence  emerges not in the brain alone but through the ongoing interaction of our minds, bodies and environments. The bodily sensations we feel as we go about our daily lives—whether  relating to the temperature of the air, the motion of our legs as we walk, or the discomfort  we sense before an important presentation—are integral to the way we exist and navigate  the world, rather than something peripheral or subordinate to the explicit, conscious thought we bring to focused tasks and problem-solving.  

One way to interpret this trend is to view it as the gradual and long-overdue incorporation  of our animality, aliveness, and wholeness into mainstream thought. It is a liberating shift,  in at least three respects: first, it encourages us to stop suppressing or discounting aspects  of ourselves we internally feel compelled to follow but culturally devalue. This may result in enhanced feelings of personal integrity, wholeness and connectedness. Second, the realization that we are fundamentally embodied beings—living organisms with  bodies—helps us understand that the essence of our intelligence cannot be replicated or appropriate technologically, for it relies on direct lived experience. Third, embracing our embodied, animal selves brings us radically closer to the more-than-human world, highlighting and activating a foundational commonality, a shared way of being that the various artificial (conceptual and material) divides we have enacted between us and the  rest of the living world have not—and can never—eliminate.  

In the ecological philosopher David Abram’s words, this subtle transformation means we  no longer “look upon nature from a cool, detached position ostensibly outside of that  nature”, instead we (once again) become nature.¹ As such, our lives can more fully embrace the processes uncovered by embodiment scholars where intelligence fundamentally arises through the interaction of mind, body and ecology rather than from the individual brain or algorithmic machines.  

All this should help us see why the humblest inner twitch or sensation—whether dissonant  or harmonious—has the potential to be an important bridge between our day-to-day  experience and the civilizational priority of protecting the Earth. As the German  philosopher and psychiatrist Thomas Fuchs insightfully observes, “[e]ven an ecological redefinition of our relationship to the earthly environment will only succeed if our  corporeality and aliveness—as connectedness or conviviality with our natural environment —is at its center. Only if we inhabit our bodies will we also be able to maintain the earth in  habitable form”². Should we fail to recover and revalue our embodied natures, we will put ourselves at risk of becoming diminished and disempowered by artificial intelligence  technologies, allowing the opportunity to reconnect with our planet tragically slip beyond our grasp. 

So it turns out that iwakan—in a marked contrast with the subtlety of the phrase—has quite a few major lessons to teach us, both individually and societally. By observing  not only the disharmonies of our world but also  paying keen attention to our embodied sensations, we begin to relearn how to live fully in  our bodies. If we do so in a way that welcomes every kind of sensation as constitutive  of our intelligence, we will learn to once again live intelligently in the more-than-human  world. This is not an easy task—the learning journey I have personally experienced  has been long and remains far from complete, replete with myriad mysteries that may  never be resolved—but with practice, the basic ability to listen to our senses and inner  interoceptive, somatic signals eventually becomes effortless. Thus, striking a beautifully  harmonious and satisfying chord, we discover that by participating in our own existence  wholly, we will also find it radically easier to participate—experientally and and  regeneratively—in the larger sphere of life that our existence is rooted in.

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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. 

Tuukka would like to thank Elina Osborne and Chiharu Suzuki for the suggestions they kindly  offered in the process of this article’s germination at Amigo House.

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¹  Abram, D. 2010. Becoming animal: An earthly cosmology. New York (N.Y.): Vintage books.
²  Fuchs, T. 2021. In defence of the human being: Foundational questions of an embodied 2 anthropology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Knight of Wands (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Knight of Wands
Number: 1 
Astrology: Sagittarius or Leo
Qabalah: Yod of Yod 

Chris Gabriel January 25, 2025

The Knight of Wands is the embodiment of fire, the true bearer of the Wand. In each depiction, we are shown figures of pure externalized energy racing toward their highest aims..

In Rider, we see a rearing brown horse whose rider is dressed in tattered yellow robes. This robe itself is fire, and bears the mark of its elemental creature, the Salamander. The knight wears silver armor, and his helmet is topped with a fiery plume. His wand is verdant. He is riding through a desert landscape with pyramids in the distance.

In Thoth, we find a black horse with a mane and tail of fire. His rider is adorned in black armor with a beard of fire and a helmet topped with a hawk. His wand is aflame. His cloak joins the great fire that fills the card.

In Marseille, we have a far more calm scene, a cloaked horse and his rider both gaze down from their height upon an unseen sight below. Here we see the dominance of the rider over the horse, while the others aggressively ride, this knight reigns in that strength.

The Knight of Wands is the highest and fieriest card in the suit of Wands. In Thoth and Rider, this is shown as aggression, and as extreme and volatile movement, while the Knight in Marseille seeks to control this fire. It is a difficult task, as fire is the element most difficult to contain: water can be dredged, dammed and bottled, air can be blocked by a wall and blown out your mouth, earth can be shaped with ease, but fire burns or dies. 

Both Knights in Thoth and Marseille are white knuckled as they grip the reins of the horse. They are “riding the tiger” of aggression, and cannot simply turn away. The Knight in Marseille has broken his horse thoroughly, controlling his primal drives. 

This is a struggle for many, especially children whose immense emotions cannot be fully expressed by language and freedom, and so they throw tantrums and grow angry. The Knight of Wands can be an unstoppable person firing on all cylinders, which can be exciting or terrifying. This can also be the force you will embody.

As Sagittarius, we can think of arrows and bullets, an extremely useful tool of aggression when pointed in the right direction. The Knight of Wands working in the wrong direction is horrible, but in the right direction it is an astounding force.

Therefore let us have the discipline to aim our wills at the right target, and then move ahead full speed.

When we pull this card, we can expect a great deal of energy either in ourselves or in a fiery person. If you use this energy well and move in the right direction, the results will be swift and certain.

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

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The Is The Life

Kolo Rock Paintings, Tanzania.

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Annie Dillard is a Pulitzer Prize winning author of fiction and non-fiction narrative prose, as well as a poet and educator. Her work moves seamlessly between the macro and micro of life, balancing the grandest, celestial ideas of existence with a beauty in the mundanity of daily life. In this essay, written for ‘Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion’, and published by the Center for Religious Humanism at Seattle Pacific University in 2002, she considers the totality of human experience, in search of the simple question, what makes a good life?

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Annie Dillard January 21, 2025

Any culture tells you how to live your one and only life: to wit as everyone else does. Probably most cultures prize, as ours rightly does, making a contribution by working hard at work that you love; being in the know, and intelligent; gathering a surplus; and loving your family above all, and your dog, your boat, bird-watching. Beyond those things our culture might specialize in money, and celebrity, and natural beauty. These are not universal. You enjoy work and will love your grandchildren, and somewhere in there you die.

Another contemporary consensus might be: You wear the best shoes you can afford, you seek to know Rome's best restaurants and their staffs, drive the best car, and vacation on Tenerife. And what a cook you are!

Or you take the next tribe's pigs in thrilling raids; you grill yams; you trade for televisions and hunt white-plumed birds. Everyone you know agrees: this is the life. Perhaps you burn captives. You set fire to a drunk. Yours is the human struggle, or the elite one, to achieve... whatever your own culture tells you: to publish the paper that proves the point; to progress in the firm and gain high title and salary, stock options, benefits; to get the loan to store the beans till their price rises; to elude capture, to feed your children or educate them to a feather edge; or to count coup or perfect your calligraphy; to eat the king's deer or catch the poacher; to spear the seal, intimidate the enemy, and be a big man or beloved woman and die respected for the pigs or the title or the shoes. Not a funeral. Forget funeral. A big birthday party. Since everyone around you agrees.

Since everyone around you agrees ever since there were people on earth that land is value, or labor is value, or learning is value, or title, necklaces, degree, murex shells, or ownership of slaves. Everyone knows bees sting and ghosts haunt and giving your robes away humiliates your rivals. That the enemies are barbarians. That wise men swim through the rock of the earth; that houses breed filth, airstrips attract airplanes, tornadoes punish, ancestors watch, and you can buy a shorter stay in purgatory. The black rock is holy, or the scroll; or the pangolin is holy, the quetzal is holy, this tree, water, rock, stone, cow, cross, or mountain and it's all true. The Red Sox. Or nothing at all is holy, as everyone intelligent knows. spear points, hoe, plant; they kill aurochs or one another; they prepare sacrifices as we here and now work on our projects. What, seeing this spread multiply infinitely in every direction, would you do differently? No one could love your children more; would you love them less? Would you change your project? To what? Whatever you do, it has likely brought delight to fewer people than either contract bridge or the Red Sox.

However hypnotized you and your people are, you will be just as dead in their war, our war. However dead you are, more people will come. However many more people come, your time and its passions, and yourself and your passions, weigh equally in the balance with those of any dead who pulled waterwheel poles by the Nile or Yellow rivers, or painted their foreheads black, or starved in the wilderness, or wasted from disease then or now. Our lives and our deaths count equally, or we must abandon one-man-one-vote, dismantle democracy, and assign six billion people an importance-of-life ranking from one to six billion, a ranking whose number decreases, like gravity, with the square of the distance between us and them.

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“People look at the sky and at the other animals. They make beautiful objects, beautiful sounds, beautiful motions of their bodies beating drums in lines.”

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What would you do differently, you up on your beanstalk looking at scenes of all peoples at all times in all places? When you climb down, would you dance any less to the music you love, knowing that music to be as provisional as a bug? Somebody has to make jugs and shoes, to turn the soil, fish. If you descend the long rope-ladders back to your people and time in the fabric, if you tell them what you have seen, and even if someone cares to listen, then what? Everyone knows times and cultures are plural. If you come back a shrugging relativist or tongue-tied absolutist, then what? If you spend hours a day looking around, high astraddle the warp or woof of your people's wall, then what new wisdom can you take to your grave for worms to untangle? Well, maybe you will not go into advertising.

Then you would know your own death better but perhaps not dread it less. Try to bring people up the wall, carry children to see it to what end? Fewer golf courses? What is wrong with golf? Nothing at all. Equality of wealth? Sure; how?

The woman watching sheep over there, the man who carries embers in a pierced clay ball, the engineer, the girl who spins wool into yarn as she climbs, the smelter, the babies learning to recognize speech in their own languages, the man whipping a slave's flayed back, the man digging roots, the woman digging roots, the child digging roots what would you tell them? And the future people what are they doing? What excitements sweep peoples here and there from time to time? Into the muddy river they go, into the trenches, into the caves, into the mines, into the granary, into the sea in boats. Most humans who were ever alive lived inside one single culture that never changed for hundreds of thousands of years; archaeologists scratch their heads at so conservative and static a culture.

Over here, the rains fail; they are starving. There, the caribou fail; they are starving. Corrupt leaders take the wealth. Not only there but here. Rust and smut spoil the rye. When pigs and cattle starve or freeze, people die soon after. Disease empties a sector, a billion sectors.

People look at the sky and at the other animals. They make beautiful objects, beautiful sounds, beautiful motions of their bodies beating drums in lines. They pray; they toss people in peat bogs; they help the sick and injured; they pierce their lips, their noses, ears; they make the same mistakes despite religion, written language, philosophy, and science; they build, they kill, they preserve, they count and figure, they boil the pot, they keep the embers alive; they tell their stories and gird themselves.

Will knowledge you experience directly make you a Buddhist? Must you forfeit excitement per se? To what end?

Say you have seen something. You have seen an ordinary bit of what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through, and time's soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting stars. Then what?

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Annie Dillard (b.1945) is an American writer of narrative prose, in both fiction and non-fiction, and a poet. In 1975 she won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Four of Coins (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Power, the Four of Disks
Number: 4
Astrology: Sun in Capricorn
Qabalah: Chesed of He

Chris Gabriel January 18, 2025

Here we see the beginning of structure, and how proper structure creates the seat of power on the Earth. Here the work of the suit becomes sturdy and stable.

In Rider, we see a King guarding four golden coins. He wears a crown and is dressed in red. His feet lay upon two coins, he holds one at his chest, and rests another upon his crown.

In Thoth, we have a birds eye view of a castle with four towers, in each of which sit the symbols of the four elements. The castle is the indigo of Capricorn, the ground around it is the bright orange of the Sun.

In Marseille, there are four coins around a central heraldic shield bearing a flower and sometimes a Phoenix. Two flowers grow between the four coins.

The Four of Disks is home, a place of stability to rest after we have accumulated our resources. The sturdiness of our home is the source of our power. In the Ace of Disks we saw the importance of building upon a rock, here we see the importance of building with good stone and strong wood.

No better expression of this truth can be found than in the Three Little Pigs! The Wolf, who has easily blown in houses of straw and shrubs and eaten the first two pigs, finds himself at the third Pig’s house made of brick:

So the Wolf came, as he did to the other little Pigs, and said, "Little Pig, little Pig, let me come in."

"No, no, by the hair of my chinny chin chin."

"Then I'll huff and I'll puff, and I'll blow your house in."

Well, he huffed and he puffed, and he huffed and he puffed, and he puffed and he huffed; but he could not get the house down.

The Four of Disks is the house made of bricks, the strong house that cannot be shaken by the world outside. This is our daily life, our daily bread, the things that keep our life going strong.

When we pull this card we are being shown our strength, and being reminded that we may need to fall back on our home, or even reinforce it against coming difficulty, if we have neglected it.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Ageless Wisdom From Tarot Key 13

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Molly Hankins January 16, 2025

The Malkuth is the realm of physicality in Kabbalistic traditions, and as we make our way through it, we live with the inevitability of death. Malkuth is pictured down at the very bottom of the Tree of Life, the world of form being the farthest away we can get from what Kabbalists describe as ‘the one mind of The Creator’. Going in and out of form is the catalyst of spiritual progress that physical life offers us. Without death, as Builders of the Adytum founder Paul Foster Case tell us, life in Malkuth would be akin to a defective record player with the needle remaining forever in the same groove. “Endless repetition would replace progress.” 

Tarot Key 13, the Death card, carries the ageless wisdom that death is the essential mechanism driving the evolution and understanding of our true selves within the world of form. Until our souls realize we are one with all of life we need death to advance the plot of our personal spiritual growth. Key 13 is associated with the sign of Scorpio, representing reproductive energy, as well as the Hebrew letter Nun. As a verb, Nun means to grow or sprout while as a noun it means both fish and movement, each of the layers of meaning signifying the life energy released by death.

The Death card most commonly includes a skeleton riding a white horse or scythe next to a white rose, both representing the movement generated by purified desire. In the tarot, red roses symbolize base desire as a driving force of our personal journeys through the material world, but white represents desire purified by direct experience. The scene in Key 13 takes place at sunrise, with death as the bearer of a new day releasing a burst of growth-promoting energy. Once we know this, not just intellectually but as a fully embodied truth learnt  through many incarnations, we become what Builders of the Adytum refer to as “a new order of human being.”

When we advance to this new order, we loosen our attachment to the temporal nature of life and no longer have the same need for death to catalyze the evolution of our consciousness. Many occult traditions carry the promise of conscious evolution as a means of achieving immortality, but the great spoiler is that overcoming death paradoxically comes from embracing it. By getting to know our physical bodies as temporary vehicles for our consciousness, we come to understand that our true immortal nature is actually the cause of physical death, removing us from the unconscious cycle of endless repetition. “Death is proof of eternal life,” wrote Reverend Ann Davies of Builders of the Adytum. We must learn to consciously embody the rhythm of the death and rebirth cycle in order to transcend it.

With this embodied knowing, we become conscious enough to choose growth-promoting thoughts and actions, instead of relying on death and entropy to advance the plot of our spiritual evolution. There are countless records of occultists from modern Kabbalists to ancient members of the Tat Brotherhood in Egypt who treat death asa force akin to gravity, an inherent and essential feature of life that, with sufficient knowledge and creative efforts, can be overcome. Once we fully accept that life is continuous change and dedicate ourselves to facilitating our ongoing transformation, we can step into the role of being a conscious agent of change. This, according to Kabbalistic philosophy, is the most practical means of overcoming death. 

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“The greatest expression of life’s benevolence and The Creator’s love for us is the fact that we are being taught by an ongoing cycle of movement, change, life and death, whether we want it or not.”

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Serving as our own agents of change rather than relying on the algorithm of life and death to drive spiritual progress has benefits beyond simply feeling more relaxed about the human condition. Embodying immortal consciousness as a way of life changes our relationship with dying. This can take many forms of expression, removing the fear and stress of death, or even slowing the aging of our physical bodies to the point of being able to choose when and how we die. The occult definition of immortality is not that of living forever in a single physical body, it’s learning to keep the beat of eternal change in our lives by making transformation-promoting choices so we no longer have a spiritual need for entropy and death.

Whether or not we subscribe to the possibility of conscious immortality and seek it as a goal of our experience, we all get to reap the harvest of wisdom from our choices. In her lecture on Tarot Key 13, Rev. Ann Davies tells us that the greatest expression of life’s benevolence and The Creator’s love for us is the fact that we are being taught by an ongoing cycle of movement, change, life and death, whether we want it or not. The numbers 1 and 3 represent love and unity and they are the basis of the algorithm of life itself, always pushing us towards acceptance of the nature of how things are as a basis for right action. This is the acceptance that nothing we experience in form, no matter how painful it may be, is meant to harm our souls.

“One who arrives at this state can say with St. Paul, ‘I die daily.’ Every morning becomes a resurrection to the awakened soul. All the old motives, petty ambitions, all the foolish opinions and prejudices gradually die out,” Paul Foster Case wrote in Learning Tarot Essentials. “Thus, little by little, there comes an adjustment of all one’s personal conceptions of life and its values.” Consider this essay an invitation to keep making adjustments to our perspectives that promote transformation, so we can become conscious curators of change in our own lives, and be curious about what the life experience algorithm brings us in response.

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Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.

Yoga and Human Evolution

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Sri Aurobindo was an philosopher, yogi, maharishi, and poet who developed the concept of Internal Yoga. Here, in this piece from 1909, he lays out some of the foundations of this practice: human progress, according to Hindu philosophy, is a cycle of spiritual evolution where the material world emerges from the spiritual, and mankind advances from animal impulses to self-realization in God. This evolution is not just intellectual, but a holistic purification of body, emotions, and intellect, culminating in unity with the Divine, which is the ultimate goal of humanity's development. For Aurobindo, the path to this unity is through Internal Yoga, a practice that unifies the body, mind, and soul in perfect harmony.

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Sri Aurobindo January 14, 2025

The whole burden of our human progress has been an attempt to escape from the bondage to the body and the vital impulses. According to the scientific theory, the human being began as the animal, developed through the savage and consummated in the modern civilised man. The Indian theory is different. God created the world by developing the many out of the One and the material out of the spiritual. From the beginning, the objects which compose the physical world were arranged by Him in their causes, developed under the law of their being in the subtle or psychical world and then manifested in the gross or material world. From kārana to sūksma, from sūksma to sthūla ¯ , and back again, that is the formula. Once manifested in matter the world proceeds by laws which do not change, from age to age, by a regular succession, until it is all withdrawn back again into the source from which it came. The material goes back into the psychical and the psychical is involved in its cause or seed. It is again put out when the period of expansion recurs and runs its course on similar lines but with different details till the period of contraction is due. Hinduism regards the world as a recurrent series of phenomena of which the terms vary but the general formula abides the same. The theory is only acceptable if we recognise the truth of the conception formulated in the Vishnu Purana of the world as vijñāna-vijrmbhitāni, developments of ideas in the Universal Intelligence which lies at the root of all material phenomena and by its indwelling force shapes the growth of the tree and the evolution of the clod as well as the development of living creatures and the progress of mankind. Whichever theory we take, the laws of the material world are not affected. From aeon to aeon, from kalpa to kalpa Narayan manifests himself in an ever-evolving humanity which grows in experience by a series of expansions and contractions towards its destined self realisation in God. That evolution is not denied by the Hindu theory of yugas. Each age in the Hindu system has its own line of moral and spiritual evolution and the decline of the dharma or established law of conduct from the Satya to the Kaliyuga is not in reality a deterioration but a detrition of the outward forms and props of spirituality in order to prepare a deeper spiritual intensity within the heart. In each Kaliyuga mankind gains something in essential spirituality. Whether we take the modern scientific or the ancient Hindu standpoint the progress of humanity is a fact. The wheel of Brahma rotates for ever but it does not turn in the same place; its rotations carry it forward. 

The animal is distinguished from man by its enslavement to the body and the vital impulses. Aśanāyā mrtyuh, Hunger who is Death, evolved the material world from of old, and it is the physical hunger and desire and the vital sensations and primary emotions connected with the prāna that seek to feed upon the world in the beast and in the savage man who approximates to the condition of the beast. Out of this animal state, according to European Science, man rises working out the tiger and the ape by intellectual and moral development in the social condition. If the beast has to be worked out, it is obvious that the body and the prāna must be conquered, and as that conquest is more or less complete, the man is more or less evolved. The progress of mankind has been placed by many predominatingly in the development of the human intellect, and intellectual development is no doubt essential to self-conquest. The animal and the savage are bound by the body because the ideas of the animal or the ideas of the savage are mostly limited to those sensations and associations which are connected with the body. The development of intellect enables a man to find the deeper self within and partially replace what our philosophy calls the dehātmaka-buddhi, the sum of ideas and sensations which make us think of the body as ourself, by another set of ideas which reach beyond the body, and, existing for their own delight and substituting intellectual and moral satisfaction as the chief objects of life, master, if they cannot entirely silence, the clamour of the lower sensual desires. That animal ignorance which is engrossed with the cares and the pleasures of the body and the vital impulses, emotions and sensations is tamasic, the result of the predominance of the third principle of nature which leads to ignorance and inertia. That is the state of the animal and the lower forms of humanity which are called in the Purana the first or tamasic creation. This animal ignorance the development of the intellect tends to dispel and it assumes therefore an all-important place in human evolution. 

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“The highest term of evolution is the spirit in which knowledge, love and action, the threefold dharma of humanity, find their fulfilment and end.”

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But it is not only through the intellect that man rises. If the clarified intellect is not supported by purified emotions, the intellect tends to be dominated once more by the body and to put itself at its service and the lordship of the body over the whole man becomes more dangerous than in the natural state because the innocence of the natural state is lost. The power of knowledge is placed at the disposal of the senses, sattva serves tamas, the god in us becomes the slave of the brute. The disservice which scientific Materialism is unintentionally doing the world is to encourage a return to this condition; the suddenly awakened masses of men, unaccustomed to deal intellectually with ideas, able to grasp the broad attractive innovations of free thought but unable to appreciate its delicate reservations, verge towards that reeling back into the beast, that relapse into barbarism which was the condition of the Roman Empire at a high stage of material civilisation and intellectual culture and which a distinguished British statesman declared the other day to be the condition to which all Europe approached. The development of the emotions is therefore the first condition of a sound human evolution. Unless the feelings tend away from the body and the love of others takes increasingly the place of the brute love of self, there can be no progress upward. The organisation of human society tends to develop the altruistic element in man which makes for life and battles with and conquers aśanāyā mrtyuh. It is therefore not the struggle for life, or at least not the struggle for our own life, but the struggle for the life of others which is the most important term in evolution, — for our children, for our family, for our class, for our community, for our race and nation, for humanity. An ever-enlarging self takes the place of the old narrow self which is confined to our individual mind and body, and it is this moral growth which society helps and organises. 

So far there is little essential difference between our own ideas of human progress and those of the West except in this vital point that the West believes this evolution to be a development of matter and the satisfaction of the reason, the reflective and observing intellect, to be the highest term of our progress. Here it is that our religion parts company with Science. It declares the evolution to be a conquest of matter by the recovery of the deeper emotional and intellectual self which was involved in the body and overclouded by the desires of the prāna. In the language of the Upanishads the manah.kos.a and the buddhikos.a are more than the prānakosa and annakosa and it is to them that man rises in his evolution. Religion farther seeks a higher term for our evolution than the purified emotions or the clarified activity of the observing and reflecting intellect. The highest term of evolution is the spirit in which knowledge, love and action, the threefold dharma of humanity, find their fulfilment and end. This is the atman ¯ in the anandakos ¯ .a, and it is by communion and identity of this individual self with the universal self which is God that man will become entirely pure, entirely strong, entirely wise and entirely blissful, and the evolution will be fulfilled. The conquest of the body and the vital self by the purification of the emotions and the clarification of the intellect was the principal work of the past. The purification has been done by morality and religion, the clarification by science and philosophy, art, literature and social and political life being the chief media in which these uplifting forces have worked. The conquest of the emotions and the intellect by the spirit is the work of the future. Yoga is the means by which that conquest becomes possible. 

In Yoga the whole past progress of humanity, a progress which it holds on a very uncertain lease, is rapidly summed up, confirmed and made an inalienable possession. The body is conquered, not imperfectly as by the ordinary civilised man, but entirely. The vital part is purified and made the instrument of the higher emotional and intellectual self in its relations with the outer world. The ideas which go outward are replaced by the ideas which move within, the baser qualities are worked out of the system and replaced by those which are higher, the lower emotions are crowded out by the nobler. Finally all ideas and emotions are stilled and by the perfect awakening of the intuitive reason which places mind in communion with spirit the whole man is ultimately placed at the service of the Infinite. All false self merges into the true Self. Man acquires likeness, union or identification with God. This is mukti, the state in which humanity thoroughly realises the freedom and immortality which are its eternal goal.

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Sri Aurobindo (1872 – 1950) was an Indian philosopher, yogi, maharishi, poet, educator and was one the most influential leaders of the Indian Independence Movement before become a spiritual teacher, introducing the world to his ideas on human progress and spiritual evolution.