The Spell of the Sensuous

Five of Swords (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Defeat, the Five of Swords
Number: 5
Astrology: Air, Venus in Aquarius
Qabalah: Gevurah of Vau

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Chris Gabriel August 17, 2024

The Five of Swords is a card of undoing, of our dreams that come crashing down. Here the Swords which have been gently building start to fall apart like a house of cards. This is the representation of a failed hypothesis.

In Rider, we find a smiling rogue picking up swords that have been lost in battle. Behind him two men mourn before a sea. The sky is cloudy. Two swords lay on the ground, and three are in hand. He is picking up the pieces, unmoved by what has occurred.

In Thoth, we find a reversed pentagram, a falling star made of chipped swords. Geometric figures sputter about it with falling petals. The card has the violet of Aquarius and the Green of Venus. Venus in Aquarius has dreams and desires, but lacks the grounding to actualize them, creating a distance and alienation.

In Marseille, we have a single central sword whose tip is weaving through the four arched around it. Through Qabalah, we find it signifies “The Anger of the Prince”. 

The Anger of the Prince is Defeat. It is an anger toward reality, after his expectations, measurements, methods and plans were undone..

This is not defeat at the hands of another, but self undoing.

My great grandfather was a Mason, and a piece of advice he gave me was to “measure twice, cut once”.This card occurs as a result of incorrect measurements. We can imagine a car stranded out of gas on the side of the road, a disappointed couple and an amused tow truck driver taking a modern form of the Rider card..

The suit of Swords pertains to the mental sphere, which is the origin of our many defeats, foibles, expectations, and visions which fall apart when they meet the real world. 

Aesop’s Astronomer, who despite his calculations of the stars falls into a well.

While the Five of Wands gives us the image of a tyrannical ruler who weighs too heavily upon his people, the Five of Swords is the image of a totally removed ruler, like Marie Antoinette, who when told that the peasants had no bread, replied: "Then let them eat cake."

While we often attribute the ‘airheadedness' of these dynamics to an ‘overdeveloped imagination’, it is in fact a failure of imagination.

It makes me think of how so many want to make art, only they need millions of dollars, expensive equipment, and the like, while the truly great artists find a way to bring their vision into reality with what they have in hand. They set aside unreal expectations for the sake of the art itself. Which requires more imagination?

The great thing about this card is that it functions as a prerequisite for the Six of Swords, which represents Science. These are the failed hypotheses, the experiments gone awry, the countless mistakes that are needed to develop a functional methodology.

When we pull this card, we are being shown a part of ourselves that holds these unreal ideas, illusions that we maintain which will be brought tumbling down by the world. 

This is not necessarily a bad thing, we can be like the smiling fellow, pick up the pieces and try again. This is how we develop a true understanding of the world.

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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

A Forager’s Take on Fairytales Pt. 1

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Izzy Johns August 15 2024

Long ago in Drumline, County Clare, in the late 19th Century, an old farmer and his wife huddled for warmth in a mud hut. Many a cold winter passed, and finally, the man agreed to build his wife a house  of bricks and mortar.  

He set to work the following Spring. Not a day had passed when the old man received a  visit from a traveler, who spoke these words:  

“I wouldn’t build there if I was you. That’s the wrong place. If you build there you won’t be  short of company, whatever else.” 

The old man paid him no mind, but sure enough, the moment he and his wife lay down to  rest in their new home, they were plagued by noise and disruption. Furniture was  knocked over, cutlery strewn across the floor, crockery smashed. They couldn’t get a wink of sleep. But, as sure as day, whenever they went to investigate, they found nothing and  no one. The old couple sought the help of the local preacher, who recognised this as the work of the Sidhe, the Little Folk of this land. He tried to exorcize the house, but to no avail.  

After five sleepless nights, the man wearily set off to the market to sell their cows. It was  the Gale day, the day that their rent was due, and money was sparse. English colonisers had seized land from the Irish farmers some years  before. Now they were renting it back to them, and the rent was high.  

The old man got a fair price for the cows, and he stopped at a roadside pub on the way  home. It was there that he encountered the traveler once again. In desperation, the man  begged the traveler for advice. He would do anything so that the Little Folk would let him  rest. The traveler walked him home, and took him to stand in the yard, on the far side of  the house.  

He said: 

“Now, look out there and tell me what you see.” 
[…] “The yard?” 
“No,” he says, “look again.” 
“The road?” 
“No. Look carefully.” 
“Oh, that old Whitethorn bush? Sure, that’s there forever. That could be there since the  start o’ the world.” 
“D’you tell me that now?” 
The old man walked out to the gable o’ the house, called [him], then says, “come over  here.” 
He did. 
“Look out there, and tell me what do you see?” 

He looked out from that gable end, and there, no farther away than the end o’ the garden,  was another Whitethorn bush, standing alone. 

“Now,” says the old man, “I told you. I warned you. The fairies’ path is between them  bushes and beyond. And you’re after building your house on it.” 

Upon the instruction of the traveler, the man built two doors in either side of the house, in line with the Whitethorns. From then on, the Little Folk had a clear passage, and  the man and his wife were not bothered again.¹

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“The higher you climb, the further you travel, the greater the view”

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British Goblins, 1880. Wirt Sikes.

I was very struck by this account. It feels different to the rich, meandering folk-tale jewels I love so much, that are wrapped in mythos and allegory. Instead, this tale falls into the  realm of family and community stories, that are still “lived in”,  in this case, by the  old couple’s grandson, who told this story to Eddie Lenihan in the living room of the very  same house. He said that he still leaves the two doors ajar each night so as to let the fairies pass. There’s no use in locking them, he says, for they’ll only be open again by the morning. 

Make no mistake, this story is not hearsay. A book of fairy tales might read like a book of  fiction, but it isn’t. What we see in this tale, and so many others like it, is a relic of a complex faith system from times gone  by, and it’s important that we storytellers hold it in that way. This story comes from  Ireland, where the fairies are called Sídhe, or Sí, though often called by euphemisms to  avoid catching their attention. The Sidhe are the descendants of the people of Danu, the  Tuatha Dé Danann, a race of fallen Gods and Goddesses that dwell in the liminality  between our world and the otherworld, the An Saol Eile. It’s only fair to acknowledge their  providence, not least is it a crucial act of cultural preservation.  

Fairies have a range of habitats depending on where you are live. In Ireland, they are particularly fond of two places: a lone Whitethorn (Hawthorn) tree, and the forts -  those grand, grassy mounds of earth, often covered in a greater diversity of wild plants  than their surroundings. In this tale, the old couple has disturbed not a habitat, but a  passage between habitats. More savvy builders would have driven four hazel rods into the ground, marking out the proposed foundations of the house. If by the next day any rod had moved, the house should be built elsewhere.  

The fairies in this story star in a role that I’ve seen in countless tales; defending their  habitat from ecological destruction. Here, they were able to communicate with the  intruders and resolve the problem quickly. It’s a good thing that the old couple were  forthcoming. Fairies will always give warnings, but it’s perfectly within their power to  cause grave suffering if those warnings aren’t heeded. They can be at best didactic and  at worst violent, but they have no interest in troubling a person who isn’t troubling them. I  can’t condone the violence, but I marvel at how proficient they are at protecting and  stewarding the land. Plus, they greatly enrich the ecosystem. Various tales see fairies  fertilizing soil for generous farmers, and producing abundances of wildflowers and fungi.  It’s said that the rings of mushrooms we see in woodlands and meadows are where  they’ve danced. 

The Intruder, c.1860. John Anster Fitzgerald.

Thinking about this with an Ecologist’s gaze, fairies are a fascinating species. They might well be a larger genus with loads of regionally-specific variants like small  people, spriggans, buccas, elves, bockles and knockers, browneys, goblins, dryads,  gnomes and piskies. There’s a wealth of anecdotal evidence of their existence,   thousands and thousands of stories, stretching back millenia,  yet we’ve never successfully captured and studied  them. Perhaps what makes this species most unique is their ability to outwit ours. Their cunning gently prods at our human arrogance, contesting our claim to be the most  “developed” of species.

Far less frequently in the UK do we hear tales of the Little Folk interfering with larger  property developments. In London, for example, you’ll scarcely come across a piece of land that hasn’t been leveled ten times over, and most Whitethorns are confined to cultivated hedges. I wonder how many forts have been destroyed in my neighborhood. Our lack of understanding of the fairies’ life cycles and physiology makes it pointless to  speculate on why larger builds don’t experience ramifications from the little folk. It’s hard  not to wonder if heavy machinery, giant crews of contractors and big blocks of hundreds  of dwellings haven’t been too much for the fairies to contend with. I hate to think that,  unbeknownst to us, urbanization might have wiped them out. If fairies are still around, it’s  clear that they’re gravely endangered.  

If this is the case, then it makes fairies one of over two million species under threat of  extinction. It’d be such a shame if these creatures, these stories, and the feelings that  they represent, disappeared altogether. I love this tale for giving us such a tangible  example of humans making space for fairies and subsequently managing to co-exist  peacefully. The fairies in this story are model land guardians, and from that we humans  have a lot to learn.  

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Izzy Johns is a forager and storyteller. She teaches foraging under the monicker Rights  For Weeds and manages the Phytology medicine garden in East London. You can find her  work on Substack [rightsforweeds.substack.com] and Instagram [instagram.com/ rightsforweeds] .

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¹As recounted to Eddie Lenihan in 2001 by the couple’s grandson, recorded in ‘Meeting the Other Folk…”

beabadoobee

Against Fluency

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Guilliaume Apollinaire, 1918. Calligram.

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Arcadia Molinas August 13, 2024

Reading is a vice. It is a pleasurable, emotional and intellectual vice. But what distinguishes it from most vices, and relieves it from any association to immoral behaviour, is that it is somatic too, and has the potential to move you. A book can instantly transport you to cities, countries and worlds you’ve never set foot on. A book can take you to new climates, suggest the taste of new foods, introduce you to cultures and confront you with entirely different ways of being. It is a way to move and to travel without ever leaving the comfort of your chair.

Books in translation offer these readerly delights perhaps more readily than their native counterparts. Despite this, the work of translation is vastly overlooked and broadly underappreciated. In book reviews, the critique of the translation itself rarely takes up more than a throwaway line which comments on either the ‘sharpness’ or ‘clumsiness’ of the work. It is uncommon, too, to see the translator’s name on the cover of a book. A good translation, it seems, is meant to feel invisible. But is travelling meant to feel invisible – identical, seamless, homogenous? Or is travelling meant to provoke, cause discomfort, scream its presence in your face? The latter seems to me to be the more somatic, erotic, up in your body experience and thus, more conducive to the moral component of the vice of reading.

French translator Norman Shapiro describes the work of translation as “the attempt to produce a text so transparent that it does not seem to be translated. A good translation is like a pane of glass. You only notice that it’s there when there are little imperfections— scratches, bubbles. Ideally, there shouldn’t be any. It should never call attention to itself.” This view is shared by many: a good translation should show no evidence of the translator, and by consequence, no evidence that there was once another language involved in the first place at all. Fluency, naturalness, is what matters – any presence of the other must be smoothed out. For philosopher Friedreich Schlerimacher however, the matter is something else entirely. For him, “there are only two [methods of translation]. Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him.” He goes on to argue for the virtues of the former, for a translation that is visible, that moves the reader’s body and is seen and felt. It’s a matter of ethics for the philosopher – why and how do we translate? These are not minor questions when considering the stakes of erasing the presence of the other. The repercussions of such actions could reflect and accentuate larger cultural attitudes to difference and diversity as a whole.

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“The higher you climb, the further you travel, the greater the view”

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Guilliaume Apollinaire, 1918. Calligram.

Lawrence Venuti coins Schlerimacher’s two movements, from reader to author and author to reader, as ‘foreignization’ and ‘domestication’ in his book The Translator’s Invisibility. Foreignization is “leaving the author in peace and moving the reader towards him”, which means reflecting the cultural idiosyncrasies of the original language onto the translated/target one. It means making the translation visible. Domestication is the opposite, it irons out any awkwardness and imperfections caused by linguistic and cultural difference, “leaving the reader in peace and moving the author towards him”. It means making the translation invisible, and is the way translation is so often thought about today. Venuti says the aim of this type of translation is to “bring back a cultural other as the same, the recognizable, even the familiar; and this aim always risks a wholesale domestication of the foreign text, often in highly self- conscious projects, where translation serves an appropriation of foreign cultures for domestic agendas, cultural, economic, political.”

The direction of movement in these two strategies makes all the difference. Foreignization makes you move and travel towards the author, while domestication leaves you alone and doesn’t disturb you. There is, Venuti says, a cost of being undisturbed. He writes of the “partly inevitable” violence of translation when thinking about the process of ironing out differences. When foreign cultures are understood through the lens of a language inscribed with its own codes, and which consequently carry their own embedded ways of regarding other cultures, there is a risk of homogenisation of diversity. “Foreignizing translation in English”, Venuti argues, “can be a form of resistance against ethnocentrism and racism, cultural narcissism and imperialism, in the interests of democratic geopolitical relations.” The potential for this type of reading and of translating is by no means insignificant.

To embrace discomfort then, an uncomfortable practice of reading, is a moral endeavour. To read foreignizing works of translation is to expand one’s subjectivity and suspend one’s unified, blinkered understanding of culture and linguistics. Reading itself is a somatic practice, but to read a work in translation that purposefully alienates, is to travel even further, it’s to go abroad and stroll through foreign lands, feel the climate, chew the food. It’s well acknowledged that the higher you climb, the further you travel, the greater the view. And to get the bigger picture is as possible to do as sitting on your favourite chair, opening a book and welcoming alienation.

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Arcadia Molinas is a writer, editor, and translator from Madrid. She currently works as the online editor of Worms Magazine and has published a Spanish translation of Virginia Woolf’s diaries with Funambulista.

Film

Carlos Santana Playlist

Carlos Santana August 12, 2024

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Carlos Santana is an American guitarist from Mexico, best known for his band Santana. Delivered with a level of passion and soul equal to the legendary sonic charge of his guitar, the sound of Carlos Santana is one of the world’s best-known musical signatures. For more than four decades Carlos has been the visionary force behind artistry that transcends musical genres and generational, cultural and geographical boundaries.

The Universal One

The Ace of Disks (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Ace of Disks
Number: 1
Astrology: Earth
Qabalah: Kether of He ה

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Chris Gabriel August 10, 2024

The Ace of Disks is the seed of the earthy suit, from it all the disks grow. This is the foundation or cornerstone of an establishment.It is, in some ways, the most important card in the suit, as nothing that lasts can be built on a weak foundation. 

The image is simple, that of a coin, and flowery growth.

In Rider, we have a divine hand bringing forth a pentacle, a coin bearing the five pointed star. Beneath is a garden and flowery terrace. There is a path leading to distant mountains.

In Thoth, we have a coin bearing a pentagram and a septagram within it. At the center is the personal seal of Crowley, three interlocked circles marked “666” and the Greek around the border reads “To Mega Therion” or “The Great Beast”, this is the autograph of the deck’s creator. Beyond the central coin we have helicopter seeds and verdant imagery.

In Marseille, a flowery coin is depicted with four flowers. Qabalistically, this card is the “Crown of the Princess”: the Princess of the Earth is crowned by a Seed, and crowned by her foundation.

The divine hand of Rider is absent from Marseille, where the hands of God appear only in the Ace of Wands and the Ace of Swords, as those two elements are considered “higher”. The Earth is the lowest element, the most mundane and it is only from this base place that we can reach the highest forces.

It calls to mind Matthew 7:25: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.

The Ace of Disks must be the rock of our further exploration. From this foundational anchor we can remain sturdy in the midst of spiritual chaos.

When we say that a loved one is “our rock”, this is the card.

Yet in Thoth, we find the helicopter seed, a moving seed, a seed that flies! Showing us that this foundation need not be literally set in the ground, a true firmness and foundation can move with us, for it comes from within.

When we pull this card, we are being shown a foundation, which can be material, whether it be a place where we can establish our work or where we are able to spiritually flourish. As for money, think of “seed capital”. 

This card represents both the necessary energy and the space to build.

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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

Balancing on the Earth

Artificiosa Totius Logices Description (1614). Meurisse and Gaultier.

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Tuukka Toivonen August 8, 2024

“Be aware of the contact between your feet and the Earth. Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.” - Thich Nhat Hanh

Volumes have been written about how we humans might enter a more balanced relationship with the Earth. Such contributions tend to adopt a disembodied, impersonal perspective, building on a conceptual language removed from our daily experience. What would we discover if we instead approached the question of balance more literally? What new possibilities and inventions might be revealed if we looked anew at how we seek to balance on the Earth, in an embodied sense? And can such a way of thinking lead to a more resonant connection with the ground one stands, walks and dances upon?

From the moment our lives commence, we begin to manoeuvre our bodies in relation to other beings, to gravity and to the broader physical world that surrounds us, eventually gaining the ability to stand up and walk. As the contemporary German theorist of resonance and societal acceleration Hartmut Rosa suggests, this is precisely where we must start if we are to understand shared human ways of being and relating to the world:

“The most basic and obvious answer to the question ‘How are we situated in the world?’ is simply: on our feet. We stand upon the world. We feel it beneath us. It sustains our weight. The certainty that the ground we stand on will bear us up is among the most fundamental prerequisites of our ontological security. We must be able to depend on it, and we depend on it blindly in the normal course of everyday life. If the ground were to unexpectedly collapse, if the earth opened up beneath us, we would experience this as a shocking event, a traumatic loss of that very security.”¹

Illustration to Emerson’s Nature (c.1838). Christopher Pearse Cranch.

Given that our ability to stand and walk upon supportive ground defines a major part of our existence, it follows that the act of balancing – however unconsciously practised – must also be central to how we exist and situate ourselves within, and in relation to, the world. Without sufficient balancing, there can surely be no consistent experience of ontological security. 

Yet, it seems we have unwittingly lost, or at least narrowed, our ability to balance on the Earth as we have adjusted to contemporary styles of living. Could it be that in this process we might have degraded not only our sense of security and confidence – adding to the many anxieties our societies appear currently steeped in – but also our ability to enter into a genuine relationship with the world through our bodies?

We prefer to walk on smooth pavements rather than textured, uneven forest paths. We like to traverse our cities in high-tech vehicles that remove us from any direct contact with the ground. Some of us regularly ride a bicycle but we rarely develop our balancing skills beyond our initial learning spurts. Entire cultures and infrastructures seem to be designed to shield us from encountering balancing challenges or disturbances. Even the yoga classes we attend – planting our bare feet on tidy studio floors and mats – rarely push us to explore our bodies’ ability to find balance in alternative, subtle ways. As Rosa notes in his remarkable book on resonance, despite their seeming innocuousness, even the shoes enfolding our feet “establish a highly effective ‘buffering’ distance between body and world that allows us to move from a participative to an objectifying, reifying relationship to the world”. 

If the result of all this shielding is that we have weakened our ability to engage in balancing at the embodied level, how might we reclaim and strengthen that ability? We must reach for a sense of balance that is flexible and dynamic more than rigid and static, productive of a lively sense of security as well as relationality. The good news is that life offers abundant opportunities to experiment with diverse ways of balancing on the Earth if we choose to grasp them.

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“The Universe is a limitless circle with a limitless radius. This condensed becomes the one point in the lower abdomen which is the center of the Universe”

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Skateboarding, an early hobby growing up in Southern Finland, taught me some early lessons about the art of balance. First, learning to ride the streets on a wobbly board and mastering a range of jumps and pivots turned balancing into a playful, addictive challenge. Inevitably, I also quickly learned a second lesson: failing to balance could lead to tremendous pain. The feedback from losing one’s footing was immediate and merciless – there were no verbal excuses or buffers that could render impact with the pavement any less punishing. Yet for all these important learnings, I subsequently realized that not only did skateboarding ultimately keep me at a certain distance from the ground (through shoes, boards and asphaltic surfaces) but it also imposed limits on how I could connect with my own body.

By contrast, contemporary improvisational dance offers a form of playful movement that promotes a more nuanced and experimental connection with one’s body. It invites us to explore unfamiliar ways of moving ourselves upon the ground and through the air while responding fluidly to others around us. The neuroscientist and brain health champion Hanna Poikonen of ETH Zurich suggests that it is the way in which those engaged in improvisational dance listen to their internal signals that sets this form of dance apart. By becoming so attuned to their bodies, improv dancers allow embodied sensations to guide their next actions in the moment. This bodily intelligence invites one to explore diverse ways of balancing in an emergent fashion. Practitioners may choose to intentionally confront and experiment with various sources of stiffness, shakiness and difficulty in relation to balance. What emerges (along with improvements to one’s health) is a certain sense of comfort with feeling unbalanced, and from this the profound realization that as living and moving human beings, we are constantly engaged in balancing rather than “in balance”. Perfect balance is neither possible nor desirable, for it would fix us in place, like lifeless statues. Instead, the options available to us are not binary (being in balance vs losing one’s balance) but dynamic and infinite in character: it is always possible for us to discover new, lively ways of balancing. 

Anatomical Flap Book (1667). Remmelin.

Japanese martial arts such as karate and aikido offer a more spiritually tuned approach to balance and movement. Sharing with improvisational dance a strict preference for encountering the ground, floor or tatami barefoot, traditional martial arts place central importance, both philosophically and practically, on a specific area roughly two inches below the bellybutton. Known as tanden or sometimes as hara, this special area inside the lower abdomen is considered key to accessing one’s highest powers through the unification of body, mind and spirit. 

While Japanese martial arts and movement instructors often point out that tanden is located at or near the body’s centre of gravity in a physical sense, it is tanden’s role as a focal point or container for universal energy that is given far more primacy. In the words of the aikido master and Ki Society founder Tohei Koichi (1920-2011), “[t]he Universe is a limitless circle with a limitless radius. This condensed becomes the one point in the lower abdomen which is the center of the Universe”.²  

In practice, it is through mindful breathing that outside energy is thought to enter the body, allowing the practitioner to feel that they exist as part of nature and its ongoing cycles, as observed by Nagatomo Shigenori in Attunement Through the Body (1992).

Remarkably, then, power and balance in martial arts are achieved not only through the efforts of the individual practitioner but through an embodied and flowing sense of connection with the natural world that envelopes them. Here, breath serves as the ongoing link between outer and inner energies, between the individual and the world..Balance is found when both come together through vital ki energy and when that energy is harmonized with movement.

So, it seems that balancing on the Earth is not quite as ordinary or narrow a process as we might have initially suspected. Once you begin to reconnect with your body and its ability to balance in subtly, or dramatically, different ways, potent insights start to emerge. We are never “in balance” but rather always balancing. That act of balancing – which we normally carry out unconsciously – can be made more intentional and vibrant. It can even offer paths to “embodied integration” with the living world and the universe, through the alignment of breath and movement. Through dance and other playful forms, it is entirely possible to become more comfortable with fluidity and lack of stability. Falling out of balance is not always a bad thing, even if it leads to temporary pain. Rather, it is the refusal to fully engage with our bodies, their incredible capacities for motion and the rich textures of the Earth that may leave us with a chronic sense of unsteadiness. 

One secret to making our existence genuinely lively and resonant may be to redefine balancing as a conversation we can have with the Earth with our bodies. As with any dialogue that transcends conventional boundaries, binary distinctions and assumptions, it might prove as nurturing and transformative as the conversations you have with the people you most gravitate towards. 

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Tuukka Toivonen, Ph.D. (Oxon.) is a sociologist interested in ways of being, relating and creating that can help us to reconnect with – and regenerate – the living world. Alongside his academic research, Tuukka works directly with emerging regenerative designers and startups in the creative, material innovation and technology sectors. 

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¹ Rosa, Hartmut (2019). Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. Polity Press, p. 38.
² Tohei, Koichi (2022). Ki Sayings. Ki Society HQ, p.5

Mark McAfee

Lapis Lazuli (Artefact IV)

WUNDERKAMMER

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Artefact No: 4
Description: Ultramarine from Lapis Lazuli
Location: Sare-e-Sang, Badakhshan, Afghanistan
Age: 6000BC to Present

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Ben Timberlake August 6, 2024

Blue is the color of civilization. It is the color of heaven.  

When the first prehistoric artists adorned the cave walls, they used the earth colors: reds,  browns, yellows, blacks. There were no blues, for the earth very rarely produces the color. Early peoples had no word for blue: it doesn’t appear in ancient Chinese stories, Icelandic Sagas, the Koran, or Sumerian myths. In the Odyssey, an epic with no shortage of opportunities to use the word, there are plenty of blacks and whites, a dozen reds, and several greens. As for the sea - Homer describes it as “wine-dark”.  

Philologist Lazarus Geiger analyzed a vast number of ancient texts and found that the words for colors show up in different languages in the same sequence: black and white, next red, then either yellow or green. Blue is always last, arriving with the first cities and the smelting of iron. Homer’s palette, at the end of the Bronze Age, sits neatly within this developmental scheme.  

The Egyptians had a word for blue, for they also had the tools of civilization, long-distance trade, and technology, that allowed them to seek out and harness the color. 6000 years ago, the very first blue they used - the true blue - was ultramarine from Lapis Lazuli (the ‘Stone of Heaven’), found in the Sar-e-Sang mines in northern Afghanistan. It was this blue that adorned the mask of Tutankhamun, and that Cleopatra wore, powdered, as eye-shadow.  

Lapis lazuli was so expensive that the Egyptians were driven to some of the earliest chemistry experiments - heating copper salts, sand and limestone - to create an ersatz  turquoise that was the world’s first synthetic pigment. The technology and recipe spread throughout the ancient world. The Romans had many words for different varieties of blue and combined Egyptian Blue with indigo to use on their frescoes. But none of these chemical creations or combinations could match the Afghan lapis for the brilliance of its blues. 

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“The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him  a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural.”  - Wassily Kandinsky

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The Virgin in Prayer, Giovanni Battista Salvi da Saassoferrato, c.1645.

At the Council of Ephesus in 431AD, ultramarine received official blessing when it was  decided that it was the color of Mary, to venerate her as the Queen of Heaven. Since then it has adorned her robes and that of the angels. Ultramarine was the rarest and most exotic color. Its name - meaning ‘beyond the sea’ - first appeared in the 14th century, given by Italian traders who brought it from across the Mediterranean. Lapis Blue was more expensive than gold and was reserved for only the finest pieces done by the most gifted artists.  

It was the most expensive single cost in the whole of the Sistine Chapel and it is said that  Michelangelo left his painting The Entombment unfinished in protest that his patron wouldn’t pay for ultramarine. Raphael reserved the color for the final coat, preferring to  build the base layers of his blues from Azurite. Vermeer was a master of light but less good  at economics: he spent so much on the ultramarine that he left his wife and 11 children in debt when he died.  

Once again, mankind turned towards chemistry to search for a cheaper blue: in the early  1800s France’s Societé d’Encouragement offered a reward of 6000 Francs to a scientist who  could create a synthetic ultramarine. The result was ‘French Ultramarine’ a hyper-rich color that is still with us to this day. 

But 200 years later there is still a debate as to whether we have lost something. Alexander  Theroux in his essays The Primary Colors wrote “Old-fashioned blue, which had a dash  of yellow in it... now seems often incongruous against newer, staring, overly luminous eye killing shades”.  

Anthropometry: Princess Helena, Yves Klein, 1960.

True ultramarine is perfect because of its flaws. It contains traces of calcite, pyrite, flecks of  mica, that reflect and refract the light in a myriad of ways. Many artists have continued to  prize it for its shifting hues, the heterogeneity of the brushstrokes it creates, the feelings it  stirs in us. As Matisse said, ‘A certain blue penetrates the soul’.  

Yves Klein worshiped the color and used the synthetic version but he owed his inspiration to the real thing. Klein was born in Nice and grew up under the azure blue Provencal skies. At the age of nineteen he lay on the beach with his friends - the artist  Arman, and Claude Pascal, the composer - and they divided up their world: Arman chose  earth, Pascal words, while Klein asked for the sky which he then signed with his fingers. 

It was only when Klein later visited the Scrovegni Chapel and saw the ultramarine skies of  Giotto’s paintings did he understand how to achieve his calling. Klein devoted his brief  life to the color, he even patented International Klein Blue (IKB), a synthesis of his childhood skies and the stone of heaven itself.  

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

Film

Tyler Cowen Playlist

Tyler Cowen August 5, 2024

Here is an idiosyncratic list of some of my favorite classical performances. Some tasks drive you crazy if you think too long about them, and this is one of those — best that I did it quickly!

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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.

Centering In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person

The Three of Cups (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Love, the Three of Cups
Number: 3
Astrology: Mercury in Cancer
Qabalah: Binah of He

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Chris Gabriel August 3, 2024

The Three of Cups is the card of emotional intimacy, and the act of pouring one's heart out. These are the emotional declarations that arise from a night of drinking as the heart overflows.

In Rider, we see three women making a toast, their cups are raised high. Each has a flowing dress and flowing hair, and they seem to be dancing in an orchard. The sky is blue, and they  are smiling.

In Thoth, we see three cups, where each seems to be formed like a cluster of grapes. Lotuses shower water into them, and they flow into one another. The cups are crimson, the lotuses yellow, and the ocean they sit upon is a deep blue. This card is Mercury in Cancer, thus the gold and blue.

In Marseille, we find the same structure as Thoth, one cup atop two, and flowers going between. Through Qabalah we find the phrase “The Understanding of the Queen”

The Understanding of the Queen is Abundance.

The astrological character of this card, Mercury in Cancer, or emotional communication is perfectly symbolized in Rider Waite, it is the card of “Girls Night”, when women get together to drink wine and talk. This is the great catharsis of relieving pressures that build up throughout life when we pour our hearts out into one another's cups and drink.

As this card belongs to the Queen, the idea of speaking one's heart tends to be seen as feminine. Though exemplified and illustrated as being the domain of women, it does not exclude male friendships and the drunken expressions of love that accompany it.

These are the emotions brought out by drink, whether regularly or rarely. The gender divide is essential to this being the Queen’s Understanding, as opposed to the King’s Understanding in the Three of Wands, which is daily virtue.

We should acknowledge that these gender divides and stereotypes are outdated and can be quite silly, but for the purposes of understanding the Tarot it is necessary to explore them.The Three of Wands, the masculine equivalent to this feminine card, is about the masculine drive for simplicity, as opposed to the feminine drive for abundance seen here. The Stoic King might take pride in sleeping on the floor, but the Queen knows a royal bed is more fitting.

Of course, this is not an abundance of stuff, but of emotion. Our feelings are a great store of value; they are not a hindrance or a flaw, but a brilliant source of  connection to our deepest truth. This card shows that the Queen understands how to utilize this wealth of emotion through engagement.

The division of elements and genders is not essentially biological, but spiritual, anyone can experience all aspects of the tarot. 

When pulling the Three of Cups we are asked to engage in emotional catharsis, to see the abundance we have before us, to let our hearts overflow. It can also signify a coming abundance, an event that will bring much emotion with it. Do not shy away from your heart, let it be abundant!

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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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