Geometry in the Garden Pt. 2

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Tofuku-ji Temple, Kyoto. Mirei Shigemori 1939. (East Garden)

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Peter Newman July 16, 2024

The Japanese archipelago consists of 14,125 islands and is home to 111 volcanoes, nearly a tenth of those active in the world. Most famous of all, Mount Fuji occupies the physical, cultural and spiritual landscape with a compelling symmetrical presence. For centuries pilgrims have climbed to the summit and performed a ritual walk around the crater.

The rock garden is an alternative proposition to ideas of abundance. Instead, it offers a kind of rich austerity. A metaphorical abstraction of nature, at once playful and meaningful. More akin to atmospheres of the mind and conceptually seductive. Geological time is set against the seasons or a day. Providing a space for reflection, often to be viewed from a slightly elevated Engawa platform, but not walked into. Scholars’ rocks as objects for contemplation, originated in China and aligned with an earlier Shinto veneration of stone, and the belief in its ability to attract Kami, or mythological spirits. A form of geomancy is present in the asymmetric placement of rocks and their relationship to one another. Within the confines of the garden imaginative projection and interpretation abound.

Tofuku-ji Temple, Kyoto. Mirei Shigemori 1939 (South Garden)

Mirei Shigemori (1897-1975) made two hundred and forty gardens across Japan. Although working exclusively in his home country, he collaborated with his friend Isamu Noguchi in choosing rocks for the UNESCO Garden in Paris (1958). His most famous work and his first major commission is the Zen garden at Tofuku-ji Temple in Kyoto. A fire had destroyed the main building and he was tasked with renovating the gardens. The temple couldn’t afford to pay him for his work, but he agreed on the condition of total creative freedom. “If I were to make a garden here, my work would live forever,” he said.

The garden is composed of four parts, one for each face of the central hall. As you enter, on the right are seven cylindrical rocks. The foundation stones from an earlier building, rearranged in a seemingly abstract way. As you walk further, the pattern reveals itself as the stars in the Plough or Big Dipper asterism, one of the most useful in celestial navigation. A line through the first two stars locates Polaris, the North Star.

On the left, the South Garden is inhabited by four dramatic rock clusters, representing Horai, the islands of immortals. The tallest is a dark monolith of rugged volcanic rock. These are set in an expansive sea of gravel, from which a green landscape rises in the distance, symbolizing five sacred mountains. Walking clockwise around the hall are two further gardens, more abstract still. First, a checkered pattern, in the form of clipped azalea hedges. And again, in a sweep of alternating squares of stone and moss. The pattern surfaces from a fluid green earth, before dissolving back into the ground away from you.

Tofuku-ji Temple, Kyoto. Mirei Shigemori 1939. (North Garden)

A grid is a rational mapping of space, but also invokes an idea of the infinite. A fragment cropped from a larger fabric, it suggests a world beyond the frame. An alternating grid is an interweaving of opposites, the stage on which the ancient games of Go and Chess are enacted. Grids appear in traditional craftwork, like the Ichimatsu pattern of dark and light squares, which represents prosperity and expansion. The same pattern can be found in the floors of black and white marble of grand houses in Europe. They also feature in the Renaissance perspective studies of Uccello and Leonardo. Yet the grid remains inherently modern.

‘In the cultist space of modern art, the grid serves not only as emblem but also as myth. For like all myths, it deals with paradox or contradiction.’ For artists like Mondrian and Agnes Martin, the grid is ‘a staircase to the universal’¹. They exist outside of time. By expanding in all directions, a grid defies the linearity of a narrative. An abstraction of endless choice and possibilities. No direction home.

“It’s a great game of chess that’s being played—all over the world—if this is the world at all, you know.” ²

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¹ Grids. Rosalind Krauss 1979. October magazine. MIT Press
² Though the Looking Glass 1871. Lewis Carroll

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Peter Newman is an artist. There are two permanent installations of his Skystation works in London, at Nine Elms and Canary Wharf.   

Terry Stamp - Fatsticks (Out of Print)

Matt Sweeney July 15, 2024

Terry Stamp’s early 70’s band Third War is often cited as a primary influence on punk rock. Then Stamp made this impossibly great album with the best band imaginable, quit the music biz and moved to LA, where he still lives. 

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Matt Sweeney is a record producer and the host of the popular music series “Guitar Moves”. He is a member of The Hard Quartet (debut album out Fall of 2024). Rick reached out to Matt Sweeney in 2005 after hearing his “Superwolf” album, and invited him to play on albums by Johnny Cash, Neil Diamond, Adele and many others. Follow Matt Sweeney via Instagram.

Against The Written Word: Towards a Universal Illiteracy

The Star (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: The Star
Number: XVII
Astrology: Aquarius
Qabalah: He ה, the Window

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Chris Gabriel July 13, 2024

A woman is naked and we are the voyeur of her celestial act. She is pouring two vessels as she stands before a body of water. Above her are eight Stars. This card emphasizes the influence of the stars over our lives, and our own starry nature. This is the emblem of Astrology.

In Marseille, we see a naked blonde woman pouring two vessels while she kneels in a stream. She is pleased, and her hair is flowing. Behind her, a bird stands in a tree. Above her, there are seven stars, led by a central star. Some of these stars are heptagrams, others octograms

In Rider,  essentially the same image is shown but with some slight alterations. Here the naked woman is kneeling on the ground before a pool of water, one foot steps in while the other rests on the ground. She pours water from each vessel, one onto land and one into the lake. She has a more reserved look of calm. Here all eight stars are octograms, and they seem to be coming down to the ground.

In Thoth, as ever, there is a rather  different image. Here our lady is looking away into the distant universe, she is in the midst of the cosmos, her vessels are flowing with geometric water as she stands in a crystalline structure. Behind her is a brilliant star, topped with a heptagram, and in the far left corner, an octogram which seems to be spiralling brings forth all the stars in the sky.

These three cards depict Aquarius, the water bearer. Aquarius is the sign of the strange far out processes, and here it represents Astrology. This is the image of the astrological theory underpinning much of the Tarot’s structure. A human being unknowingly influenced by distant heavenly bodies. This is, as the first nude card in Marseille and Rider, a literal “unveiling”, of the female form, and of the esoteric philosophy at play. 

This card illustrates the Thelemic motto “Every man and woman is a star”. Stars are endless, yet each is unique, we are infinitely unique. This idea has trickled down into culture in the form of “Rock Stars” and “Movie Stars”. We see the bodily process of life, our movements, thoughts, and feelings as the invisible influence of the beyond.

This is also what Jung called Synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence. The idea that meaningful occurrences in our lives are mirrored in outside processes like the movement of the heavens, the random shuffling of cards, the throwing of coins, and that this mirroring is in fact an intimate connection.

Diagram of Synchronicity, Kristin Middleton and Chris Gabriel

As our lady pours out her vessels, and her water flows down, we need only look up to see the stars pouring forth their influence onto her. She is like the heavenly Star, giving and receiving flows.

We can shift it again, and see the Goddess Hera, and the forming of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. And how is it we see all of this? By way of the card’s Hebrew correspondence, He ה, the Window.

The tarot cards were formed through a process of compounding symbolism, where a card is not just a card, but an astrological form, a Qabalastic place, a myth, a philosophy, and a poem.

The Tarot is a framing device for our exploration of these distant esoteric ideals brought down into the palm of your hand, which is exactly where they belong!

Aesop warns us in his tale of the Astronomer, that someone who keeps his head in the clouds will fall down a hole. Our lady is looking upon her work.

When you pull the Star, you are being given the image of distance, of the far off and far out. This is something that’s a long way off, or something you find strange, an opportunity that falls out of the sky. Keep your feet on the ground and the stars will come down to you!

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Questlove Playlist

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Questlove has been the drummer and co-frontman for the original all-live, all-the-time Grammy Award-winning hip-hop group The Roots since 1987. Questlove is also a music history professor, a best-selling author and the Academy Award-winning director of the 2021 documentary Summer of Soul.

Film

Boltzmann Brains — 2. Solipsism in a Lonely Cosmos

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Les nouvelles idées sur la structure du système nerveux : chez l'homme et chez les vertébrés, 1894. Santiago Ramon y Cajal's.

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Irà Sheptûn July 11, 2024

‘Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think’. 
- The Dhammapada, Twin Verses

In Boltzmann Brains Part 1, we defined entropy as a measure of the number of ways you can arrange a system without changing its overall state. The more arrangements there are for a system, the higher the entropy, and by association the system is considered to be more disordered. We discovered that if we were to have some low entropy state, we would have to assume it came from a higher entropy state by fluctuation and will return to maximal entropy over time, as the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us. One might interpret  from this that entropy has a kind of ‘direction’; what we call the Thermodynamic Arrow of Time. In his renowned lecture series, Physicist R. Feynman writes: “For some reason, the universe at one time had a very low entropy for its energy content, and since then the entropy has increased. So that is the way toward the future. That is the origin of all irreversibility, that is what makes the processes of growth and decay, that makes us remember the past and not the future, remember the things which are closer to that moment in history of the universe when the order was higher than now, and why we are not able to remember things where the disorder is higher than now, which we call the future.” 

Władysław T. Benda, c.1918.

So what if this low entropy state was a whole world - a Boltzmann Universe, arising as a fluctuation from an ancient ‘dead cosmos’ of maximal entropy? What are the chances that we exist in such a world? Astronomer A. Eddington dismissed this possibility, positing that if random fluctuations from higher entropies are the sole driver of creation, then it’s statistically more probable that intelligent observers such as you or I will randomly fluctuate into existence than for an entire complex world to emerge with intelligent observers in it!

Going one step further, physicists Albrecht and Sorbo toyed with the irrationality of cosmological theories based solely on a statistical argument.They argued that if we accept that large ‘world-like’ fluctuations are exponentially more improbable than smaller fluctuations from maximal entropy, then these smaller fluctuations will occur much more frequently. Following Eddingtons ideas to their logical extremum, their theory predicts any intelligent observer, equipped with a consciousness to justify their own reality, is likely to be one such example of a smaller fluctuation. What constitutes an intelligent observer in this case? Well plausibly, such  a being would only need only the very basic anatomies that are essential to cognition and  conscious thought – disembodied brains suspended in a dead vacuum complete with a set of  false memories of an artificial life. A Boltzmann Brain. All thoughts both complete and distant in these brains are a by-product of the same statistical improbabilities.

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“Perhaps everything we understand about the laws of physics, and the cosmological model we have constructed that predicts we are Boltzmann  Observers, are also random fluctuations in our minds. Indeed, there is no reason to trust that  our own knowledge of present and past is accurate, or that we have even correctly deduced  the nature of this cosmological model up to this point.”

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The absurdity of a Boltzmann Brain does raise a very interesting cosmological conundrum – is it more probabilistically likely that all the particles that make up an infinite cosmos  somehow converge to form new worlds, or a small local group of high energy particles collide  in a vacuum spontaneously to create a sentient brain that begins to dream, if only for a brief  time? This is an example of reductio ad absurdum, highlighted by Eddington, and often used  in cosmology to test scientific theories. It serves to remind us that we cannot forsake the physics in favor of any other kind of argument, statistical or otherwise, no matter how appealing. It’s a little bit like the monkeys on typewriters scenario  – it’s far more likely for a hardworking team of monkeys, bashing at random keys on their  typewriters, to randomly type up The Hobbit in its entirety than all the complete works in the  Library of Congress.

On a Distinct Form of Transient Hemiopsia, 1873. Hubert Airy.

In the same manner of speaking, it’s far more likely that you are a Boltzmann Brain, and not some happy by-product of an incredibly rare and convoluted aging universe full of unresolved energy in all its improbability! That everything held in your memory and construction of reality; from your first kiss to the French Revolution to the invention of radar, was weaved together by your isolated dreaming mind from the same statistical fluke that brought you into creation. Before you get too worried, one should note the high entropy universe that Boltzmann postulated from statistical thermodynamics looks very different from the relatively ordered cosmos that we actually do observe. Many examples of low-entropy states are seen to emerge naturally. Later theories in modern physics suggest a finite past; ordered states hold memory of conditions when things first started. However, the concept of Boltzmann Brains has continued to be compelling in cosmology, as it cannot be so easily ruled out.

While we might know in ourselves that we are not disembodied brains floating in a dead  vacuum, we cannot claim that we and our environment haven’t fluctuated into existence from maximal entropy equilibrium, as an example of a more ordered state. Rather, we are Boltzmann Observers born from an  ancient, randomly fluctuating chaotic universe. Perhaps everything we understand about the laws of physics, and the cosmological model we have constructed that predicts we are Boltzmann  Observers, are also random fluctuations in our minds. Indeed, there is no reason to trust that  our own knowledge of present and past is accurate, or that we have even correctly deduced  the nature of this cosmological model up to this point. How do we move past this disturbing  theory? How can we reconcile our entire lived experience as a fabricated one beyond the  certainty of our own consciousness?  

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“If I am the only being in the cosmos, who I am is also you as the only being in the cosmos. Your thoughts are transient  properties that hold no true essence in their universality – I too experience them.”

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These ideas, initially inspired by Eddington’s deductions, ushered in one of the first practical examples of the anthropic principle in modern science. The anthropic principle roughly tells us that the laws of physics ‘are what they are’ in order for the constraint that is life to exist. If you remember in Part 1, I left you back in 2006, watching the DVD logo bounce around your TV screen. You must first exist in order to observe the rare chance the logo locks perfectly into a corner, otherwise who’s to say it even happened? With the anthropic comes a fair pinch of solipsism, that we should take center stage in this story of the universe, otherwise why else would we be here?   

Subjective Image of the Milky Way, 1902. Pannekoek.

Huayan Buddhism teaches us that both “all phenomena are present in each phenomenon” and that “no phenomenon knows another phenomenon”. In other words, every possible phenomenon is alone in the cosmos, which  seems to also paradoxically point to the idea that every other possible phenomenon is also  alone in the cosmos. Put even simpler by the Tiantai Buddhists: If I am the only being in the  cosmos, who I am is also you as the only being in the cosmos. Your thoughts are transient properties that hold no true essence in their universality – I too experience them. If we accept our minds are made of all the same processes, we can argue that the notion of being a Boltzmann Observer in a randomly fluctuating universe is what D.Z. Albert would call ‘cognitively unstable’. If you can reason with yourself to believe you are a product of such a cosmological system, you also must conclude you have no justification for accepting your own reasoning. There is no reference point for the lonely solipsist.  

It does seem a bit self-defeating to grant substantial confidence to the prospect that we  have no right to grant substantial confidence to anything. We must satisfy ourselves then  with rejecting the cosmological models in which Boltzmann Brains occupy, as they serve us  little purpose in our further understanding beyond a resigned cognitive instability. That is not  to say that we discard the possibility that you might still be a Boltzmann Brain given the odds. Perhaps the distant memories of 2006 and old movies on the DVD Player are indeed false, after all – how well do you remember the past anyway?  

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Irà Sheptûn, @iradelune

Ari Emanuel

A Whole New Relationship with the Air

Lectures on Ventilation (1869). Lewis W. Leeds.

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Tuukka Toivonen July 8, 2024

“-The shifting clouds, the endless colors of dawn, rainbows and fog: All this is a form of everyday magic. This is the magic of the real, not the supernatural. But to really notice it, our own perception must shift a little.” Per Espen Stoknes

I vividly remember the day when my assumptions about the air became seriously disturbed.

One winter Monday a few years ago, air pollution indicators in London hit troubling levels. The city was left unusually dark and gloomy by a thick, impenetrable cloud of fog that tightly hugged its streets, schoolyards, office blocks and gardens. Residents were alerted to the dangers of the situation and asked to stay indoors where possible. For many, this was an  abrupt induction to how it feels like when the air becomes hostile.

On the several smoggy days that followed, my initial reaction was to try to reclaim a modicum of control by firmly shutting all the windows and vents, staying at home when not lecturing at university and wearing a mask when I absolutely needed to go outdoors. Whatever sense of calm and relief this offered, the effects were at best temporary.

I still tasted the sinister flavor of heavy metal particles too often for comfort. Walking outdoors, it sometimes felt like a thousand tiny blades of steel were cutting their way through my airways with abandon. On the worst days, I was generally unwell and lethargic. This confrontation with hostile air triggered a cycle that blurred the line between what was ‘real’ and what was not, for I had only the news and my increasingly confused bodily signals to go on. I began to look for a way to restore my previous sense of normalcy, or the ability to once again take the air for granted without having to think about its movements, qualities, or problems.

Balloon-Prospect, Airopaidia (1786). Thomas Baldwin.

Soon after that dark Monday, I had the opportunity to meet the energetic founder of a new technology company that promised to offer a citizen-led approach to tackling anxieties about the air. They sought to empower people with the tools to track the shifting currents of air quality on a moment-by-moment basis, not only in their own cities or districts but their own neighborhoods. Using an app that made live air quality data highly accessible, citizens with smartphones could choose healthier behaviors and routes on smoggy days, removing unnecessary concerns when the air was verifiably safe. This was a creative company that had recently struck up an unlikely collaboration with an army of pigeons in East London, equipping them with tiny backpacks to transmit live air quality data from the skies above. 

I became an avid user of the company’s app and found it a useful aide for planning my day-to-day urban existence. Yet, something still did not feel entirely right. Some of my concerns for the air lingered and remained a quiet source of anxiety. Implicitly, I continued to view the air not in benevolent terms, but as a threatening presence, a potential killer. The standard terminology of environmental science typically used to gain a grasp on problems of the air were of limited help when trying to resolve or at least process the anxieties I shared above. Having had my assumptions broken, I struggled to see how one might approach the air in some alternative way that was more whole, more resonant, and more healing.

Several years after the initial crumbling of my beliefs about the air, I was introduced to the work of Norwegian psychologist, economist and philosopher Per Espen Stoknes that happens to speak precisely to this question. Stoknes suggests that we start by approaching the air’s way of being in a much more holistic sense. To do this, we simply start by using our senses to connect with the air in the here and now. How does the movement of the air feel on your skin? How does the air smell? Does it carry the wonderful fragrance of flowers or fresh leaves outside your window or a cocktail of unpleasant odors from a road or a factory? What sounds does it make? Is there something the air is signaling to you, something it is trying to tell you? The key is to begin by reclaiming our embodied experience of the air, to help ground our new understandings and to see how, in a real sense, the air mediates everything we do.

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“Air keeps us alive moment-to-moment. It allows us to breathe in the same ancient argon molecules once respired by the Buddha and many extinct species of animals.”

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Building on sensory perceptions, it becomes easier to treat the air as something much more than a passive object, external to us and our human world. The air starts to reveal its character as something that is animate, intelligent, even imaginative – an entity that is much more alive than we normally recognize. As Stoknes provocatively suggests, much like the Navajo’s ‘Holy Wind’, we may even begin to perceive the possibility that the living air constitutes a kind of a mind that we get to participate in, and that  if we listen, has volumes to teach us. 

To cultivate a richer relationship with the air, one must go beyond a casual understanding of breathing to recognize how profoundly it connects us to the world. Our very existence is bound up with the air’s way of being:

“Yet the air isn’t just what we breathe into our lungs, briefly visiting us before we exhale it. It is also our primary link to the world. It fully envelops us, from the soles of our feet to each hair on the top of our head, from the day we draw our first breath to beyond our death. It holds us gently, with a benign embrace without which our bodies would fall apart. To be born is to enter the air. To be is to be in the air.”

(From Stoknes’ What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming: Toward a New Psychology of Climate Action, 2015). 

Air (1580-1584). Adriaen Collaert after Maerten de Vos.

Air keeps us alive moment-to-moment. It allows us to breathe in the same ancient argon molecules once respired by the Buddha and many extinct species of animals. It  protects us as an unthinkably thin layer of film woven around our delicate blue planet. As soon as we stop and think, suddenly the air appears (literally) filled with wonder. There is no longer a scarcity of material or a shortage of inspiration for reimagining our relationship with the air.

These fresh perspectives having enriched my imagination, one thing became painfully obvious: on that dark Monday in London several years ago, I only had a relationship with the air when it asserted itself as a problem. I was a living, breathing representative of the ways of thinking that positioned humans as fundamentally separate from the more-than-human world. 

It was ultimately this deeper, insidious thought structure that began to fracture in the smog and that I struggled to find alternatives for thereafter. This produced a lingering sense of discomfort with and alienation in relation to the air that I had entered at birth and that had mediated everything I had done in my life.  

Detail of a Wind Cherub, c.1650.

What cried out for more attention within me was this elementary disconnect. I now see that what I was yearning for, as a basis for a more satisfying approach to my concerns, was a fuller, more genuine relationship with the air. One that was appreciative of its aliveness, its quirks and its immeasurable blessings. What I needed was not a rosier worldview somehow magically cleansed of all serious and complex problems but rather a rinsing of the mind from artificial notions of a separation between humans and nature. In the end, I had to let go of the ingrained assumption that it was the air – or air pollution, narrowly defined – that was the problem.

Given just how intrinsically our entire existence is bound up with that of the air across all levels of life, it is astonishing how little attention we pay to it beyond the specific, externalized ‘slices’ that we label as problems (in a way that reinforces the assumed separation of humans from the rest of the living world). We have denied the reciprocal nature of our relationship with the air by refusing to approach it in a way that makes full use of all our perceptual instruments – scientific, sensuous, imaginative – and this has meant we have been unable to embrace the full brilliance of the living air. 

By viewing the air and the more-than-human world as alive – and taking the time to perceive it as richly as we can – we can re-establish a symbiotic relationship that is whole and integrated, even in the face of troubling human-made particulates that permeate the air that permeates us. Although only having just started to take in the vast new possibilities stirred by this switch in perspective, I sense that the assumptions that caused my original anxieties have already vanished – seemingly into thin air.

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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. 

Film

Iggy Pop Playlist

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Iggy Pop is an American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and actor. Since forming The Stooges in 1967, Iggy’s career has spanned decades and genres. Having paved the way for ‘70’s punk and ‘90’s grunge, he is often considered “The Godfather of Punk.”

Let The Moon Be Free

The Hanged Man (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: The Hanged Man
Number: XII
Astrology: Water
Qabalah: Mem

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Chris Gabriel July 6, 2024

The Hanged Man is a card of self sacrifice. In each depiction, a man is hung by his foot,  his legs crossed, as he looks ahead. As to the reward for this self sacrifice, each deck has a very different answer.

In Marseille, we see a man in colorful clothes hung by his foot, his blonde hair hanging out. The card is framed by a simple wooden structure upon which he hangs. 

In Rider, we have a similar image but, significantly, he is hung upon a tree. About his head a radiant nimbus has formed for he has achieved enlightenment through self sacrifice.

In Thoth, we have a violent departure from the other two. Here a corpse-like man is hung by an inverted ankh, one of his feet and both of his hands have been nailed. The other foot is surrounded by a serpent as he dreams of the serpent.

In many religions self sacrifice holds the highest regard. There are many gods who are hung, crucified, flayed, ripped limb from limb, burned, and so on. They are then resurrected, restored, and gain infinite power through their sacrificial offering of themselves.

These stories have inspired people to live lives of sacrifice. Each deck has a very different view of this means of enlightenment.

Rider is an absolute affirmation of martyrdom, the nimbus indicates his success. This is Christ on the cross and Odin on the tree. As it says in the Havamal:

Symbol: The Gift of Thoth

“I know that I hung on that windy tree
Nine days and nights
Stabbed with a spear, and offered to Odin,
Myself to myself”

This self hanging brings Odin the divine knowledge of language and writing, the Runes.

Marseille makes no indication as to how effective the act is, the man is simply hanging. Waiting and hanging.

Thoth is vitriolic in its denunciation of self sacrifice. The hanged man is left a corpse, pained and dreaming venomous dreams. This is an undeniably Nietzschean view of Christianity. Thelema asserts that the past Aeon was typified by slain Gods like Osiris and Christ, and that having progressed into the New Aeon, we no longer need to sacrifice our bodies to attain.

The inverted Ankh is the ideogram of this, as the ankh is the ‘Sandal of the One who Goes’ the inverted ankh is not going, not doing. The divine faculties paralyzed.

When I draw this card in a reading, it often frightens people. It conjures death and pain when the truth tends to be much less severe. Consider the phrase “a hung jury”, a jury that cannot reach a verdict, Or when you reach out to some but you are “left hanging” - these are both expressed in the Hanged Man.

As for the spiritual role of the Hanged Man, we live in a time without public execution, thus the significance of a Hanged Man has been altered significantly.

I find the spiritual role embodied particularly well for modern times in car accidents.

This is an event with similar violence, mortality, and potential for life changing insight. One often hears of near death experiences where your “life flashes before your eyes” And many report drastic changes in their view of life after these.

When we pull the Hanged Man, we may be faced with long waits, a call to self sacrifice, and taking on risk for greater reward. It is up to us to decide whether we wish to put ourselves first or last, whether or not our risks are worth it.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Hannah Peel Playlist

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Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello and Emmy-nominated, RTS and Music Producers Guild winning composer, with a flow of solo albums and collaborative releases, Hannah Peel joins the dots between science, nature and the creative arts, through her explorative approach to electronic, classical and traditional music.

Film

Geometry in the Garden Pt. 1

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Nazca lines, Peru. NASA.

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Peter Newman, July 4, 2024

Geometry, n. / dʒɪˈɒmɪtrɪ / jee-om-i-tree 
[C14: < Latin < Greek geometria to measure the land]

There are not many straight lines in nature. 
Beams of sunlight, through a break in the clouds or a forest canopy. 
A redwood tree across a thousand years, or bamboo’s youthful defiance of gravity. 
The flight path of birds, or fish scattering in water. 
Columns of basalt rock. 
Crystals. 
The sea horizon. 
A shooting star. 
The apple falling from a tree. 
Things of inherent wonder. Often fleeting, and somehow related to the laws of physics.
Invisible structures that define the universe.  

Endless straight lines can be imagined. We connect the stars in the night sky, or see an ideal way forward. So, it’s perhaps inevitable humans derive satisfaction from an almost godlike formation of straight lines onto the domain around us. Here we are, they seem to say, aligned with creation. Our presence is easily identified by geometries in contrast to a wild organic landscape. 

A sense of order in geometry is comforting in the face of an unpredictable world. Archaeology unearths walls and floors from earlier times. The modern sky is inscribed with vapour trails. Our existence can be seen from beyond our sphere, in the Nazca lines of Peru, the Pyramids in Egypt, or the circuit grid cityscapes in which the majority of the world’s population now live. 

Fallingwater, 1938. Frank Lloyd Wright. Image by Peter Newman.

Yet a desire to get closer to nature often involves designs quite opposite to the nature they seek to be amongst. When the Kaufmanns asked Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) to design them a house, they imagined it with a view of a waterfall they loved, in the woods of Pennsylvania. Wright raised the bar by unifying the house and waterfall. In doing so, he made a home that is literally and symbolically at one with nature. Fallingwater sits in harmony materially, built from local stone. Inside it hugs the earth, the rock on which it rests becoming part of the floor. Yet outside, it hovers between river and trees, levitating, cantilevered, orthogonal. A set of crisp rectangles, stacked on top of each other. 

A garden is a framing of nature. A composition in a given space. A place for discovery, memory and reflection. The passing seasons mark chapters in the progress of time. Past, present and future, are all implicitly there. 

We’ve evolved to recognise symmetry. It’s useful for noticing other living things. All vertebrate creatures, and many invertebrates, possess a bilateral symmetry. The language of symmetry in the garden, either its presence or absence, is an intrinsic part of the experience. 

Formal gardens are animated by reflectional symmetry. French Parterres or English Knot gardens, arranged close to a building and intended to be seen from above. Some possess a radial symmetry, like the gardens of the Taj Mahal. The fourfold symbolism invokes descriptions of paradise as a garden of abundance, through which run four rivers. 

The association of a garden with ideas of paradise goes back a long way, and is present in many mythologies and beliefs. The word paradise derives from the Avestan pairiidaeza from ancient Persia, meaning enclosure or park. Mystical gardens frequently infer the attainment of worldly pleasures. Equally, paradise can mean freedom from a cycle of desires. But to be ‘in the garden’ ultimately describes an ideal state of being.

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Peter Newman is an artist. There are two permanent installations of his Skystation works in London, at Nine Elms and Canary Wharf.   

Ezra Koenig

Glastonbury’s Temple of the Stars: A Magical History

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King Arthur with the Isle of Avalon in the distance. Unkown artist, unkown date. Woodcut. 

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Flora Knight, July 2, 2024

Glastonbury, a town steeped in mysticism and legend, serves as a remarkable microcosm of the history of witchcraft. This enigmatic place bridges the gap between ancient practices of White Magic and modern Wicca, weaving a rich tapestry of magical heritage that has captivated the imagination for centuries.

At the heart of Glastonbury's magical history lies the Holy Grail. Integral to the Arthurian Legend, the Grail symbolizes the fusion of Christian spiritualism with contemporary magical thought. Central to this legend is Merlin, the wizard who conjures King Arthur into being, embodying the archetype of the magical practitioner. The Grail literature, steeped in mystical lore, enriches the tradition of magical dynamics, with the Grail itself often depicted as a powerful and elusive artifact. 

Joseph of Arimathea Preaching to the Inhabitants of Britain, c.1796. William Blake.

The Grail's origins trace back to the Celtic Cauldron of Ceridwen, a mystical vessel believed to produce healing potions and the elixir of life. In Arthurian legend, the Grail is frequently associated with the cup used to collect the blood of Christ at the crucifixion, brought to Glastonbury by Joseph of Arimathea. According to legend, Joseph built the first church in the area, burying the Grail beneath it. King Arthur is said to have sought the Grail extensively and was brought to Glastonbury to die.

Another variation of the story suggests that Joseph of Arimathea brought the infant Jesus to Glastonbury, where they constructed a small church of mud and wattle. This humble structure evolved into the now-ruined Glastonbury Abbey, as it expanded over the centuries. The legendary Isle of Avalon, often identified with modern Glastonbury, is not only the resting place of Excalibur but also the Grail—two of the four most significant tools in modern witchcraft.

In addition to the Holy Grail, modern Wicca acknowledges another mystical vessel in Glastonbury: Cerridwen’s Cauldron of Wisdom. This cauldron, associated with dark knowledge and crucial to Welsh magical tradition, represents another facet of Glastonbury's deep connection to witchcraft and ancient magic.

Beyond its Arthurian connections, Glastonbury is renowned for its earth effigies—vast structures shaped like figures and believed to form a celestial temple. These giant effigies, visible only from the skies or the top of the Tor (the original Isle of Avalon), are thought to represent zodiac figures. Each zodiac figure holds deep symbolic meaning in both magic and the Grail legend.

The Glastonbury Zodiac is of a series of mounds, paths, streams, and rivers, coming together to form terrestrial representations of the 12 horoscope constellations. These earthly structures correspondent to the celestial zodiac, exerting spiritual power across the landscape and all who pass through and over it. 

A map of Glastonbury with the Zodiac earth effigies superimposed above.

The Zodiac symbols found in this mystical temple and their Arthurian representations are as follows:

Taurus (Earth) – King Gurgalain

Aries (Fire) – Messire Gawain (The Sun in the second quarter)

Pisces (Water) – King Fisherman

Aquarius (Air) – King Pelles/Sir Perceval (The Sun in the first quarter, the Phoenix)

Capricornus (Earth) – King of Castle Moral

Sagittarius/Hercules (Fire) – King Arthur (Sun in the east, last quarter)

Scorpio/Libra (Water/Air) – Calixtus (The Scales of Death)

Virgo (Earth) – The Damsel, Sir Perceval's Sister

Leo/Cancer (Fire/Water) – Sir Lancelot (The Midday Sun, Third Quarter)

Gemini (Air) – Lohot, King Arthur’s Son (The Sun in the West, the setting sun, Orion in Effigy)

These celestial symbols, intricately linked to the Arthurian legend, guide the way to the resting place of the Holy Grail, weaving a profound narrative that merges the earth and the heavens. It is no coincidence that the world’s largest music festival, now in its fifty fourth year, is spread across this spiritual landscape. The ley lanes that cross the fields bring with them potent energy and each year, hundreds of thousands of revellers gather to walk through Glastonbury’s temple of the stars.

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Flora Knight is an occultist and historian.

Film

Tyler Cowen Playlist

Tyler Cowen July 1, 2024

Can we find God, or perhaps Godliness in music? Here are numerous different quests, taken from various religions around the world. Apologies to anyone left out!

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Tyler Cowen is Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and serves as chairman and general director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. With colleague Alex Tabarrok, Cowen is coauthor of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution and cofounder of the online educational platform Marginal Revolution University.