The Love Poems of Rumi

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.

The Hierophant (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Hierophant or Pope
Number: V
Astrology: Taurus
Qabalah: Vau

Chris Gabriel September 21, 2024

The Hierophant is the materialization of divine wisdom and power. He is the embodiment of spiritual authority. He speaks for God and gives out his edicts to the bishops, and they spread it down the hierarchy.

In Rider, we find a young pope with a false beard sitting on a throne. He is adorned in scarlet. One hand raises a staff, his papal ferula, while the other is held aloft with two fingers to God. He has an ornate papal tiara. Beside him are two pillars, and beneath him are two tonsured clergymen and the Keys of Heaven.

In Thoth, we have a statuesque Hierophant. His bearded face is a mask and he is adorned in orange. One hand raises a Borromean staff, the other points down with two fingers. He wears  a simple mitre on his head and on his chest,a star with the Aeonic Child inside.  Beside him are two elephants and a bull, Taurean symbols. Before him is the “woman girt with a sword” as described in Liber Al, The Book of the Law. All around him are the four elemental Cherubs, and above is a five petaled flower encircled by a serpent and 9 nails.

In Marseille, we have an old pope sitting on his throne in a scarlet cloak. Both his bare and gloved hands are marked by crosses. His gloved hand raises the papal ferula, while the other raises two fingers to God. Beneath him are two tonsured clergymen.

The Hierophant or Pope is the head of the Church. He metes out orders from God and rules through hierarchy. For each church under his rule, he ensures that they function and share his dogma.

As Taurus, this is a card concerning stubborn commitment to the set way. It is also about simplicity and comfort. In this way, fast food, soda, and comfort foods are similar to the Church. Warhol describes it well: “A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good.” This is the Hierophant, he creates a spiritual doctrine made available to all. 

The Hierophant makes that possible through a set of clear methods. He oversees the structured, accessible, universal path to God. His wisdom is standardized, not ephemeral. The Magician and High Priestess are spiritual forces as well, but they don’t follow dogmas in the same way; they have direct, personal routes to the divine. The Church and the Pope, on the other hand, have a grand and strict purpose.

Through the Hierophant, we are given the invitation and rules to the tarot. The old doctrines hold the truths tighter than we’re used to. What Thoth shows freely is hidden deep within Rider and Marseille. The Hierophant is in no rush to save the world, he is comfortable patiently and diligently following the divine rules set millennia before.

When you pull the Hierophant it may be that you must utilize your knowledge, or gain help from someone wise. This can be practical knowledge and spiritual knowledge. 

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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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Film

The Postmodern Condition

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Roy Litchenstein, Sunrise. 1963.

Jean-Francois Lyotard, September 19th, 2024

Commissioned by the government of Quebec, Lyotard undertook a philosophical study on the affects of modern life and capitalist culture on the metaphysical health of the world. He finds an inivetability to a lack of consensus and sees differences and conflict as inherent in the modern world, yet he remains positive that postmodernism retains the modernists ideals of maintaining the hope for a new kind of social existence.

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Science has always been in conflict with narratives. Judged by the yardstick of science, the majority of them prove to be fables. But to the extent that science does not restrict itself to stating useful regularities and seeks the truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game. It then produces a discourse of legitimation with respect to its own status, a discourse called philosophy. I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth. For example, the rule of consensus between the sender and addressee of a statement with truth-value is deemed acceptable if it is cast in terms of a possible unanimity between rational minds: this is the Enlightenment narrative, in which the hero of knowledge works toward a good ethico-political end - universal peace. As can be seen from this example, if a metanarrative implying a philosophy of history is used to legitimate knowledge, questions are raised concerning the validity of the institutions governing the social bond: these must be legitimated as well. Thus justice is consigned to the grand narrative in the same way as truth.

Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements - narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on. Conveyed within each cloud are pragmatic valencies specific to its kind. Each of us lives at the intersection of many of these. However, we do not necessarily establish stable language combinations, and the properties of the ones we do establish are not necessarily communicable.

Thus the society of the future falls less within the province of a Newtonian anthropology (such as stucturalism or systems theory) than a pragmatics of language particles. There are many different language games - a heterogeneity of elements. They only give rise to institutions in patches - local determinism.

The decision makers, however, attempt to manage these clouds of sociality according to input/output matrices, following a logic which implies that their elements are commensurable and that the whole is determinable. They allocate our lives for the growth of power. In matters of social justice and of scientific truth alike, the legitimation of that power is based on its optimizing the system's performance - efficiency. The application of this criterion to all of our games necessarily entails a certain level of terror, whether soft or hard: be operational (that is, commensurable) or disappear.  

The logic of maximum performance is no doubt inconsistent in many ways, particularly with respect to contradiction in the socio-economic field: it demands both less work (to lower production costs) and more (to lessen the social burden of the idle population). But our incredulity is now such that we no longer expect salvation to rise from these inconsistencies, as Marx did.

Still, the postmodern condition is as much a stranger to disenchantment as it is to the blind positivity of delegitimation. Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside? The operativity criterion is technological; it has no relevance for judging what is true or just. Is legitimacy to be found in consensus obtained through discussion, as Jurgen Habermas thinks? Such consensus does violence to the heterogeneity of language games. And invention is always born of dissension. Postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of the authorities; it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the expert's homology, but the inventor's paralogy.  

Here is the question: is a legitimation of the social bond, a just society, feasible in terms of a paradox analogous to that of scientific activity? What would such a paradox be?

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Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924 –1998) was a philosopher, sociologists and literary theorist.

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Jack Mallers

The New Painting

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Jost Amman, Wenzel Jamnitzer. 16th Century.

Guillaume Apollinaire, September 17th, 2024

Guillaume Apollinaire was a poet, playwright, novelist, and art critic who inspired and was admired by the Cubists and Surrealists, movements that he himself coined the terms for. Here, he writes in strong defence of Cubism against the public disdain, and shows how despite the modernity of their style, they are applying ancient laws and ideas that grounds them in tradition. He draws a comparison between Euclidian Geometry and Cubism first in a series of lectures in 1911 and then put them into words here, in 1912.

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The new painters have been sharply criticized for their preoccupation with geometry. And yet, geometric figures are the essence of draftsmanship. Geometry, the science that deals with space, its measurement and relationships, has always been the most basic rule of painting.

Until now, the three dimensions of Euclidean geometry sufficed to still the anxiety provoked in the souls of great artists by a sense of the infinite – anxiety that cannot be called scientific, since art and science are two separate domains.

The new painters do not intend to become geometricians, any more than their predecessors did. But it may be said that geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of writing. Now today's scientists have gone beyond the three dimensions of Euclidean geometry. Painters have, therefore, very naturally been led to a preoccupation with those new dimensions of space that are collectively designated, in the language of modern studios, by the term fourth dimension.

Without entering into mathematical explanations pertaining to another field, and confining myself to plastic representation as I see it, I would say that in the plastic arts the fourth dimension is generated by the three known dimensions: it represents the immensity of space eternalized in all directions at a given moment. It is space itself, or the dimension of infinity; it is what gives objects plasticity. It gives them their just proportion in a given work, where as in Greek art, for example, a kind of mechanical rhythm is constantly destroying proportion.

Greek art had a purely human conception of beauty. It took man as the measure of perfection. The art of the new painters takes the infinite universe as its ideal, and it is to the fourth dimension alone that we owe this new measure of perfection that allows the artist to give objects the proportions appropriate to the degree of plasticity he wishes them to attain.

Wishing to attain the proportions of the ideal and not limiting themselves to humanity, the young painters offer us works that are more cerebral than sensual. They are moving further and further away from the old art of optical illusion and literal proportions, in order to express the grandeur of metaphysical forms.

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Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) was a poet, playwright, novelist and art critic.

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Film

Bob Seger - Brand New Morning (Out of Print)

Matt Sweeney September 16, 2024

Ultra raw loner Seger on acoustic guitar and piano peeling off stunning spooky tunes, with melodies and modes you haven’t heard from him. From 1971. Acid comedown vybes for days. Title track is one of his catchiest and most haunting songs. That voice!!

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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.

The Emotion Thesaurus

Ten of Wands (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Oppression, the Ten of Wands
Number: 10
Astrology: Saturn in Sagittarius
Qabalah: Malkuth of Yod

Chris Gabriel September 14, 2024

The Ten of Wands is the bitter end of Fire’s descent from Heaven. It has fallen from the spiritual heights it thrives in down to the material world. This is a card of weight, labor, and responsibilities that crush the spirit. 

In Rider, we find a man bearing ten large wands, he is bending under the weight of his heavy load. In the distance we see a town, his destination still far off.

In Thoth, two leaden wands crush the eight light blue wands beneath them. It is oppression, Saturn in Sagittarius. As with the Five of Wands, Saturn is smothering the freedom of the fire which is escaping out the sides. This is especially pronounced here, as Sagittarius demands freedom of movement. The two lead wands are modified Eastern Phurbas, ritual dagger-staffs.

In Marseille, we find a similar configuration to Thoth, though the two vertical wands are beneath the crosshatched eight. Flowers are sprouting from the sides, life from the deadened, crystallized fires. As a ten, this card symbolizes Malkuth, the Kingdom, and being Wands, it belongs to the King. Thus it is the King’s Kingdom.

This card is the material reality of hierarchical power where the lofty philosophies and justifications behind oppressive regimes and states rest on the oppression of their people. While the Five of Wands showed us a tyrannical king causing strife in his court, this card is the oppressed peasantry who live under them.

The image that arises is that of the Fasci, a bundle of sticks that are weak on their own but strong together. An ancient Roman symbol taken up by many governments throughout history, but most significantly by Mussolini and his Fascist government. The ideal of strength through unity is one thing, but the question of who is to carry that heavy bundle is another. Saturn is the oppressive state, and Sagittarius is the people. They are anathema. Sagittarius needs to move freely, and Saturn needs to restrict and stabilize to maintain its power. Revolt is inevitable.

Materially, we can see this as a fire being smothered, whether this is at the onset when one adds too much wood to a tiny fire and chokes it of oxygen, or when a fire is raging and one covers it to kill it.

This is certainly not a comfortable card. When it comes up in a reading it can indicate serious pressures, smothering responsibilities, and exhaustion. This is a card of labor, hard work. Rider shows that the destination is in view, that the toils have a clear end, but there is no such promise in Marseille and Thoth, the oppression is simply there, dull and stupid work that must be done.

We can counter this by keeping the inner fire burning and finding outlets where it can run free.

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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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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

Rediscovering Living Time

“The Temple of Time” (1846). Emma Willard.

Tuukka Toivonen September 12, 2024

Amid our species' many disagreements, the steady progression of time seems to be the one thing that everyone can agree upon and hold in common. The ticking of the clock offers a comforting backbeat to our daily comings and goings, promoting synchrony and order where there might otherwise be disorganization or chaos. Our eagerness to keep track of the passing of minutes and hours — as much through casual glances at our screens and other timepieces as intentional planning — is unmatched in its frequency by almost any other habit. There might be few moments quite as jarring as realizing one’s favored timekeeper has ground to a halt, threatening the sense of normalcy and soothing constancy afforded by clock time that our existential security seems to almost entirely rest upon. Less disorientating yet equally puzzling are the moments of flow when we become totally engrossed in soloing on the guitar, conversing with a friend or scaling up the side of a mountain, causing time as we know it to all but vanish.

Yet it is precisely these kinds of — often subtle — ruptures in one’s temporal experience that opens the door to alternative perceptions of time that can ultimately enrich our lives. Such anomalies invite active  curiosity about the many mysteries and unknowns of time. Does it really progress as constantly or exist as abstractly as our attachment to machinic clock time has taught us to believe? Is time as much a co-production and outcome of life itself as it is a pace-setter? And could it be that there are cycles and makers of time that our preoccupation with the apparent precision and linearity of clock time serves to conceal? How would our lives and the way in which we partake in the more-than-human world change and expand if we explored other dimensions of time more perceptively and sensorially?

For many of us, being whisked away to a new time zone presents a type of experience that tends to fracture our sense of temporal reality quite radically — one that speaks directly to the question of how (re-)adjustment to time unfolds. We tend to normalize the sense of temporal shock by quickly adjusting our clocks to local time as soon as (or even before) we land, or by having our digital timepieces automatically adjusted for us. But our jetlagged bodies and biorhythms are not so easily persuaded, and the result is a physiological and mental sense of disorientation and fatigue at inconvenient moments. What we may not realize, however, is  that the symptoms of jetlag emanate from a desynchrony of the multiple cycles we depend upon for digestion, body temperature regulation, different modes of thought, wakefulness and rest. It is therefore not the case that our acclimatization depends purely on our intentional efforts to wrestle with drowsiness — rather, it is that the complex rhythms that constitute us and the numerous symbionts we host (billions of gut microbes included) all must find a way to re-align. Restoring our “normal” sense of time and wellbeing hinges upon invisible processes through which multiple interdependent instruments — the living orchestrations of which comprise us — reach an adequate degree of synchrony and dialogue. What makes this process of readjustment truly astonishing is how it unfolds as an integrated collaboration between the vast intricacies of our biological bodies, our new environments and the way in which our home planet rotates while orbiting the sun.

As for the question of whether time marches on as precisely and exists as abstractly as we have been led to believe, exploring heliogeophysical and ecological perspectives (often neglected amid a preoccupation with physics) can help us to see a more nuanced and potent reality. First, not only do daylight hours continue to vary as the Earth travels around the sun — necessitating bodily and societal adjustments — but it actually takes the Earth slightly more than 365 days to complete one such cycle. Likewise, one rotation of the Earth on its axis does not take exactly twenty-four hours, with the Moon, earthquakes and other occurrences causing subtle fluctuations. Though imperceptible, these variations point to profound lessons about both the nature of our universe and as our own time-keeping practices and assumptions. As the historian of chronobiology and ecological restoration Mark Hall so aptly reminds us, ours is in actuality a world where “[o]rganisms do not live their lives by a metronome” but rather one where, amid constant environmental change, circadian rhythms “require continual fine-tuning” (Hall 2019, p. 385)¹. Such re-calibrations are guided by stimuli both internal and external, encompassing our solar system, our physiology as well as our social rhythms and interactions. Paradoxically enough, these multiple time-shapers that help ground our temporal experience all turn out to be far less precise and absolute than we tend to think and far more alive and idiosyncratic thanour dominant temporal cultures would imply.

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“Instead of forgetting the vibrancy of living time or abandoning it in the shadow of clock time, how might you explore, and indeed celebrate, the polyphonies and polyrhythms that constitute our world and give new meaning to how time is created?”

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Ecological perspectives can further enrich our understanding of time, especially if we turn to a niche group of phenologists who observe and think about the timing of diverse plant and animal species’ life-cycles. As distant as our increasingly urban and technological lives have become from the vibrant more-than-human world, most of us still retain some attachment to seasonal changes and an appreciation for their enmeshment with natural life. We intuitively realize that the appearance of swallows and other migratory birds in the Northern Hemisphere is a sign of spring (just as their return to lands in the Southern Hemisphere is taken as a sign of spring or early summer there). The blooming of certain flowers — and the simultaneous appearance of pollinators — likewise stimulates oursense of the seasons changing. The same is true of loud choruses of cicadas becoming replaced with the chirping of crickets as summer turns into autumn in places such as Japan. What phenologists have done is to bring a systematic approach to such observations of life’s cycles and developed a more refined understanding of how the rhythms of different organisms interact. For instance, flowering timings have most probably evolved with pollinators while the leaves on the same plants seem to time their cycles in relation to the herbivores that consume them. Scholars such as Bastian and Bayliss² have also brought attention to the immense value of traditional and indigenous phenological knowledges, such as calendars attuned to highly localized patterns of plant and animal life. The beauty of such calendars — that include the Japanese shi-ju-ni-ko calendar that tracks not four but forty-two seasons — is that they help bring about a sense of integration between human communities and more-than-human ecologies.

“Picture of Nations; or Perspective Sketch of the Course of Empire”, (1836). Emma Willard.

In my mind, the most profound contribution of phenologists is that they show how time and its experience can be seen as collaboratively, organically constructed by multiple species, through sequences of events, interactions and degrees of synchrony. Here, the ebb and flow of life itself, its subtle orchestrations and movements, are the master time-keeper. Our mechanical timepieces and digital devices suddenly seem to offer only a vague and incomplete assessment of ‘what time it is’. Such an ecological, alternative conception of time has the power to ground our experience once again in the living world, pointing to novel possibilities for co-existence, regeneration and planetary awareness.

When we start unraveling the layers and beliefs that shape our own relationship to time, we begin to notice how entrenched notions of temporality — often linked to a need to feel productive and to conform, minute by minute, to the strictures of linear time — conceal not just how our bodies adapt to temporal disruptions and planetary movements, but an entire world of multiple times and modes of co-existence. I would now like to invite you to take a moment to reflect on how you might approach time as something that is plural, co-shaped and profoundly alive — in other words, as living time. Instead of forgetting the vibrancy of living time or abandoning it in the shadow of clock time, how might you explore, and indeed celebrate, the polyphonies and polyrhythms that constitute our world and give new meaning to how time is created? Is it possible that such an active, practical re-envisioning of time could eventually help bring more flourishing to all of the Earth’s inhabitants?

Let me leave you with a short passage from the ecological anthropologist Anna Tsing’s remarkable book, The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), reflecting on how a full recognition of living time might allow us to generate exactly the kind of curiosity that our times require: 

“Progress is a forward march, drawing other kinds of time into its rhythms. Without that driving beat, we might notice other temporal patterns. Each living thing remakes the world through seasonal pulses of growth, lifetime reproductive patterns, and geographies of expansion. Within a given species, too, there are multiple time-making projects, as organisms enlist each other and coordinate in making landscapes. The curiosity I advocate follows such multiple temporalities, revitalizing description and imagination”. (Anna Tsing 2015, p. 21.)

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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 Hall, M. (2019). Chronophilia; or, Biding Time in a Solar System. Environmental Humanities, 11(2), 373–401. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-7754523
² Bastian, M., & Bayliss Hawitt, R. (2023). Multi-species, ecological and climate change temporalities: Opening a dialogue with phenology. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 6(2), 1074–1097. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221111784

Joe Sabia

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.”

Savitri

Jim Morrison

The Hermit (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: The Hermit
Number: IX
Astrology: Virgo
Qabalah: Yod י‎

Chris Gabriel September 7, 2024

An old man stands with staff in one hand and a raised lantern in the other. He is lighting the dark path ahead. This is a card of hidden potential, vision, and the isolation that is necessary to realize greatness.

In Marseille, we find a wrinkled old man, with a long gray beard and hair. He holds a red staff and his lantern holds a red flame.

In Rider, we find a cloaked old man looking down, also donning a big gray beard. He raises up a lantern that contains a small star.

In Thoth, we have a more complex image, the Hermit here is not visibly human. He carries a geometric lantern with a little Sun and is surrounded by wheat. Before him is a serpent entwined egg, while Cerberus the three headed hell hound is at his feet, and along his leg, crawls a sperm in the style of Hartsoeker.

The Hermit is Virgo, and like the Lovers of Gemini, it is a sign ruled by Mercury. Both signs embody aspects of Mercury the God. Gemini is Mercurius Duplex and Virgo is the disguised Mercury from the Greek flood myth: Hermes the Hermit. Mercury, like Odin, dons a disguise when he needs to learn from the Earth. As Mercurius Duplex he comes to represent the unification of opposites like spirit and matter, masculine and feminine, life and death.

The hermit deals in seeds and seeding and, in this way, he is a magician. His letter Yod is a hand and the seed of all other letters. 

The letter Yod is the seed of all other letters.

Hartsoeker's vision of sperm.

Seeds are potential, within each seed is the promise of an actualized plant. Within sperm, the human seed, is the potential for a human being. The Sperm in Thoth is a recreation of Nicolaas Hartsoeker’s vision of sperm as literally containing a microscopic human.

Just as a good farmer knows when to plant his seeds, the Hermit knows when to seed an idea, a symbol, a spell, or a word. Proper timing and placement is key. This is where the downtrodden gaze in Rider, and the Cerberus in Thoth come into play. The seeds of a Magician are not planted in soil but in the dark underground, in Hades, the Unconscious. 

Alejandro Jodorowsky relates the Hermit’s number 9 to the nine months of pregnancy. The seed is buried and spends its allotted time in the dark and fertile womb.

Sometimes we need to spend time in isolation, in hermitude to be born again, to fertilize our own ideas and dreams.

The Hermit also differs from the Lovers in that the Lovers relates to copulation, while the Hermit is related to masturbation. Hermes was said to have invented masturbation, and his hermit disciples were said to worship him by masturbating. Chaos Magicians believe masturbating to the image or idea of a symbol plants it in the Unconscious.

Consider the idiom ‘sow the seed’; sowing seeds of decay, distrust, love etc. Ideas are the seeds that Mercury is most interested in. A well placed word or expression can drastically alter reality, it can save lives or end them by its utterance.

The Hermit sees the potential in all of these: ideas, seeds, and sperm. All of these that tend to be carelessly discarded are the very stuff of miracles in the hands of one who deals in potentials. He takes them up in his lantern and lights a path in the darkness of the undecided future. 

When pulling this card, we may be faced with a period of boredom and isolation. This can be wasted and suffered through, or it can be a time of growth and development. We can be a seed that grows while hidden, or lay fallow. The choice is ours.

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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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