From Line to Constellation

Eugen Gomringer, 1953. Wind.

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Eugen Gomringer is a poet and literary critic regarded as the father of European concrete poetry. In this 1954 essay, he sensed a change in the way we engaged with language, and began to set out a new understanding of poetry that could not only respond but operate in harmony with this change. This short essay served as his manifesto and would go on to inspire countless other poets to join this new movement. 70 years later, Gomringer’s ideas seem like prophecies as language has increasingly simplified, and the line between text and image that he posited has blurred even further in a visual, digital age. Yet Gomringer’s solutions, his ‘Constellations’, or concrete poems as they became more commonly known, have remained on the fringes of experimental writing.

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Eugen Gomringer December 17, 2024

Our languages are on the road to formal simplification. Abbreviated, restricted forms of language are emerging. The content of a sentence is often conveyed in a single word. Longer statements are often represented by small groups of letters. Moreover, there is a tendency among languages for the many to be replaced by a few which are generally valid. Does this restricted and simplified use of language and writing mean the end of poetry? Certainly not. Restriction in the best sense-concentration and simplification is the very essence of poetry. From this we ought perhaps to conclude that the language of today must have certain things in common with poetry, and that they should sustain each other both in form and substance. In the course of daily life this relationship often passes unnoticed. Headlines, slogans, groups of sounds and letters give rise to forms which could be models for a new poetry just waiting to be taken up for meaningful use. The aim of the new poetry is to give poetry an organic function in society again, and in doing so to restate the position of poet in society. Bearing in mind, then, the simplification both of language and its written form, it is only possible to speak of an organic function for poetry in terms of the given linguistic situation. So the new poem is simple and can be perceived visually as a whole as well as in its parts. It becomes an object to be both seen and used: an object containing thought but made concrete through play-activity (denkgegenstanddenkspiel), its concern is with brevity and conciseness. It is memorable and imprints itself upon the mind as a picture. Its objective element of play is useful to modern man, whom the poet helps through his special gift for this kind of play-activity. Being an expert both in language and the rules of the game, the poet invents new formulations. By its exemplary use of the rules of the game the new poem can have an effect on ordinary language.

The constellation is the simplest possible kind of configuration in poetry which has for its basic unit the word, it encloses a group of words as if it were drawing stars together to form a cluster.

The constellation is an arrangement, and at the same time a play-area of fixed dimensions.

The constellation is ordered by the poet. He determines the play-area, the field or force and suggests its possibilities. the reader, the new reader, grasps the idea of play, and joins in.

In the constellation something is brought into the world. It is a reality in itself and not a poem about something or other. The constellation is an invitation.

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Eugen Gomringer is a Bolivian-Swiss poet, professor, and the father of the European Concrete Poetry movement that he began in the 1950s.

Film

Troyka - Troyka (Out of Print)

Matt Sweeney December 23, 2024

Self-titled LP. Crude, menacing and savagely rocking Canadian raw power trio with unhinged vocal nastiness. Another gem brought forward via Endless Boogie’s Jesper Ecklow. 

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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.

Meditations on the Tarot

Six of Disks

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Name: Success, Six of Disks
Number: 6
Astrology: Moon in Taurus
Qabalah: Tiphereth of He

Chris Gabriel December 14, 2024

The Six of Disks is the bountiful harvest that has been accumulating since the seed of the Ace. It is the maternal feeding and caring that comes from having enough.

In Rider, we see two kneeling beggars with outstretched hands receiving  gold coins from a well dressed man. The beggars are in patchy robes and one’s head is bandaged. Their benefactor holds a scale to weigh out his charity.

In Thoth, we find a hexagon formed by the planets atop a hexagonal star. In the center is the rosy cross. The card is made up of dark blues and whites for the moon, and orange red for Taurus. 

In Marseille, there are six coins around a blossoming flower. Qabalistically, this is the Beauty of the Princess. 

Where the five of disks fell apart, the six is a successful harvest. In the five of disks, Rider showed us the economic disparity between the wealthy and the impoverished, but here we see charity and generosity, noblesse oblige.

This is the generosity of the Mother, as the Moon in Taurus.An exalted placement, we are reminded of breastfeeding, cooking, and caregiving. The maternal caring moon in the sign of the comfortable, loving cow. 

This dynamic is expressed well in the I Ching, in the 42nd hexagram Increase, of which Richard Wilhelm says “A sacrifice of the higher element that produces an increase of the lower is called an out-and-out increase: it indicates the spirit that alone has power to help the world.”

This card is one of sacrifice from the higher for the sake of the lower. Not giving with the expectation of return, but out of true maternal love andthe desire to see growth and flourishing. A good mother does not eat more than her child, for she wants the child to strive.

This generosity is a  rarity in the world, as most power and wealth hordes itself and gives back nothing to the world. This is  Thanksgiving: a home cooked dinner with family and friends, a selfless kindness. This is true love in the earthly dimension. 

Mythologically, we can think of Ymir, the father of Giants, who drank the milk of Audhumla, the primeval cow. Audhumla’s name is a perfect expression of this card, translating to “rich in milk and hornless”. We can also think of the Milky Way in which we all live, one formed, in Egyptian mythology, by the cow goddess Bat, and the milk of Hera, to the Greeks. Our celestial home exists thanks to the milk of a mother.

When we pull this card we can expect comfort and good times. This is a good investment paying off. We may be given something, or be called on to give to others. A loving exchange.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Film

Fragment from “America”

John Margolies, 1987. Road sign near Santa Rosa, New Mexico.

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Jean Baudrillard was amongst the most consequential sociologists and philosophers of the modern age, formulating ideas of cultural consumption, hyperreality, and simulation that came to define our collective understanding of the technological age. In 1986, this titan of French academia published his American travel journals, written while driving across the United States. The work is insightful and biting, laden with humor, cynicism and awe for the country. Here is a fragment of these journals; concerning the joy of driving, the nature of artificiality, and the vast American desert to create a theory of America as land defined by, and powered by, speed.

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Jean Baudrillard December 12, 2024

Speed creates pure objects. It is itself a pure object, since it cancels out the ground and territorial reference-points, since it runs ahead of time to annul time itself, since it moves more quickly than its own cause and obliterates that cause by outstripping it. Speed is the triumph of effect over cause, the triumph of instantaneity over time as depth, the triumph of the surface arid pure objectality over the profundity of desire. Speed creates a space of initiation, which may be lethal; its only rule is to leave no trace behind. Triumph of forgetting over memory, an uncultivated, amnesic intoxication. The superficiality and reversibility of a pure object in the pure geometry of the desert. Driving like this produces a kind of invisibility, transparency, or transversality in things, simply by emptying them out. It is a sort of slow-motion suicide, death by an extenuation of forms - the delectable form of their disappearance. Speed is not a vegetal thing. It is nearer to the mineral, to refraction through a crystal, and it is already the site of a catastrophe, of a squandering of time. Perhaps, though, its fascination is simply that of the void. There is no seduction here, for seduction requires a secret. Speed is simply the rite that initiates us into emptiness: a nostalgic desire for forms to revert to immobility, concealed beneath the very intensification of their mobility. Akin to the nostalgia for living forms that haunts. 

Still, there is a violent contrast here, in this country, between the growing abstractness of a nuclear universe and a primary, visceral, unbounded vitality, springing not from rootedness, but from the lack of roots, a metabolic vitality, in sex and bodies, as well as in work and in buying and selling. Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society. The fascinating thing is to travel through it as though it were the primitive society of the future, a society of complexity, hybridity, and the greatest intermingling, of a ritualism that is ferocious but whose superficial diversity lends it beauty, a society inhabited by a total metasocial fact with unforeseeable consequences, whose immanence is breathtaking, yet lacking a past through which to reflect on this, and therefore fundamentally primitive. . . Its primitivism has passed into the hyperbolic, inhuman character of a universe that is beyond us, that far outstrips its own moral, social, or ecological rationale. Only Puritans could have invented and developed this ecological and biological morality based on preservation - and therefore on discrimination -which is profoundly racial in nature. Everything becomes an overprotected nature reserve, so protected indeed that there is talk today of denaturalizing Yosemite to give it back to Nature, as has happened with the Tasaday in the Philippines. A Puritan obsession with origins in the very place where the ground itself has already gone. An obsession with finding a niche, a contact, precisely at the point where everything unfolds in an astral. 

Edward S. Curtis, 1904. Cañyon de Chelly.

There is a sort of miracle in the insipidity of artificial paradises, so long as they achieve the greatness of an entire (un)culture. In America, space lends a sense of grandeur even to the insipidity of the suburbs and ‘funky towns’. The desert is everywhere, preserving insignificance. A desert where the miracle of the car, of ice and whisky is daily re-enacted: a marvel of easy living mixed with the fatality of the desert. A miracle of obscenity that is genuinely American: a miracle of total availability, of the transparency of all functions in space, though this latter nonetheless remains unfathomable in its vastness and can only be exorcised by speed. 

The Italian miracle: that of stage and scene. 

The American miracle: that of the obscene. 

The profusion of sense, as against the deserts of meaninglessness. 

It is metamorphic forms that are magical. Not the sylvan, vegetal forest, but the petrified, mineralized forest. The salt desert, whiter than snow, flatter than the sea. The effect of monumentality, geometry, and architecture where nothing has been designed or planned. Canyonsland, Split Mountain. Or the opposite: the amorphous reliefless relief of Mud Hills, the voluptuous, fossilized, monotonously undulating lunar relief of ancient lake beds. The white swell of White Sands. It takes this surreality of the elements to eliminate nature’s picturesque qualities, just as it takes the metaphysics of speed to eliminate the natural picturesqueness of travel. 

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“Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.”

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In fact the conception of a trip without any objective and which is, as a result, endless, only develops gradually for me. I reject the picturesque tourist round, the sights, even the landscapes (only their abstraction remains, in the prism of the scorching heat). Nothing is further from pure travelling than tourism or holiday travel. That is why it is best done in the extensive banality of deserts, or in the equally desert-like banality of a metropolis - not at any stage regarded as places of pleasure or culture, but seen televisually as scenery, as scenarios. That is why it is best done in extreme heat, the orgasmic form of bodily deterritorialization. The acceleration of molecules in the heat contributes to a barely perceptible evaporation of meaning. 

It is not the discovery of local customs that counts, but discovering the immorality of the space you have to travel through, and this is on a quite different plane. It is this, together with the sheer distance, and the deliverance from the social, that count. Here in the most moral society there is, space is truly immoral. Here in the most conformist society, the dimensions are immoral. It is this immorality that makes distance light and the journey infinite, that cleanses the muscles of their tiredness. 

Sinclair Lewis, 1908.

Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated. Admittedly, there is the primal shock of the deserts and the dazzle of California, but when this is gone, the secondary brilliance of the journey begins, that of the excessive, pitiless distance, the infinity of anonymous faces and distances, or of certain miraculous geological formations, which ultimately testify to no human will, while keeping intact an image of upheaval. This form of travel admits of no exceptions: when it runs up against a known face, a familiar landscape, or some decipherable message, the spell is broken: the amnesic, ascetic, asymptotic charm of disappearance succumbs to affect and worldly semiology. This sort of travel creates its own peculiar type of event and innervation, so it also has its own special form of fatigue. Like a fibrillation of muscles, striated by the excess of heat and speed, by the excess of things seen or read, of places passed through and forgotten. The defibrillation of the body overloaded with empty signs, functional gestures, the blinding brilliance of the sky, and somnabulistic [sic!] distances, is a very slow process. Things suddenly become lighter, as culture, our culture, becomes more rarefied. And this spectral form of civilization which the Americans have invented, an ephemeral form so close to vanishing point, suddenly seems the best adapted to the probability - the probability only - of the life that lies in store for us. The form that dominates the American West, and doubtless all of American culture, is a seismic form: a fractal, interstitial culture, born of a rift with the Old World, a tactile, fragile, mobile, superficial culture - you have to follow its own rules to grasp how it works: seismic shifting. 

The only question in this journey is: how far can we go in the extermination of meaning, how far can we go in the non-referential desert form without cracking up and, of course, still keep alive the esoteric charm of disappearance? A theoretical question here materialized in the objective conditions of a journey which is no longer a journey and therefore carries with it a fundamental rule: aim for the point of no return. This is the key. And the crucial moment is that brutal instant which reveals that the journey has no end, that there is no longer any reason for it to come to an end. Beyond a certain point, it is movement itself that changes. Movement which moves through space of its own volition changes into an absorption by space itself - end of resistance, end of the scene of the journey as such (exactly as the jet engine is no longer an energy of space penetration, but propels itself by creating a vacuum in front of it that sucks it forward, instead of supporting itself, as in the traditional model, upon the air’s resistance). In this way, the centrifugal, eccentric point is reached where movement produces the vacuum that sucks you in. This moment of vertigo is also the moment of potential collapse. Not so much from the tiredness generated by the distance and the heat, as from the irreversible advance into the desert of time.

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life.

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Jean Baudrillard was a French philosopher, sociologist and cultural theorist. He was born in 1929 and died in 2007.

Ben Greenfield

Wounds

Robert White, Compleat Discourse of Wounds (1678).

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Sofia Luna December 10, 2024

For most of human existence, our wounds signified that we were part of the natural world. They wrote the story of life without separation as we not only blended into, but were an active part of the ecosystem. Last week, noticing a boy having breakfast with his mother rocking a severely bruised eye, it felt like a novelty. In a modern, western world, physical wounds and battle scars have all but disappeared from everyday reality. What, I wondered, are the global repercussions of the sterilisation of our physical plane?

We no longer walk through irregular terrains filled with natural pigments, or scramble over cliffs with battered bodies. We construct buildings to keep nature out and monuments to hold our ambitions together. We walk with slicked back hair, and polished suits through angular concrete landscapes. We refine and decorate our avatars, surgically 'enhance' our geometries, and homogenise the surface of our lives and our bodies the same way we do to our walls. We call this progress. Beneath our skin, though, lies irregularity—festering deep, invisible wounds, not of flesh but of spirit. 

In the gradual fabrication of the modern metropolis, we transferred our bodily wounds to earth. To her soil, her small ferns, to past predators, waters, rivers, and birds—not realising that they too, give us life. We looked away from the damage caused as we dreamt of a human centric world, building structures to keep dangers out. And they did  but the fact that wounds incrementally disappeared from the visual field made it really difficult for us to track what was hazardous to our new existence. 

As our infrastructures mutated, so did our wounds, but our definitions of danger stayed the same. Only in cases of mass destruction or abuse in focused areas are we able to look from afar and say “yes, there is a problem we need to work on!”.That which invisibly infects the collective beyond time and space is really hard to put a finger on, and so is difficult to heal. Consequently, moving from tiger scratches 20,000 years ago to inexplicable spirit aches have left us living "in a space without a map," as Joanna Macy remarked. 

Few of us  could survive in a forest right now, but we need not be that adventurous—a lot of humans can't even deal with free time at home. We require constant stimulation, and have become completely averse to the uncharted. We follow paths that have been clearly traced before in fear of getting lost. Is this a place worth existing in? A lot of people have started to realise it is not and I have witnessed the ample collective inkling that we should recalculate our relationship with the world and ourselves.

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“Wounds are holes, holes are doors, doors into something, openings, where, if we choose to enter them, the person that walks out is not the same who walked in.”

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We have been so isolated from nature that we don't even consider its absence as one of the causes for global unsettlement or the sharp rises in anxiety, loneliness, depression and spiritual voids that so many of us experience. Isn't she Mother Earth? We are the child that has cut their parent off and have been left traumatised. 

We talk about rewilding gardens but it is time to talk about rewilding society. We are hungry for something that was taken from us. When certain religions first appeared, they replaced our connection to the wild with a relationship to something more abstract. Slowly we have been extracted out of the symbiotic relationship we had with our planet, as institutions of belief arranged themselves on top of everything and everyone as the source. Religion replaced nature. It reasoned with the invisible and colonised our imagination for the past millennia. Thank God, time,  and the increasing access to information, that  what was hiding underneath—the incoherence,  the imposed patriarchy, intolerance, and the general abuse of power that was then mimicked by corporations— was exposed. Today, younger generations are unsubscribing from this expired belief system and in that process have started seeking something else. Many of us are returning back to nature, to our nature.

Caravaggio, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1602)

Hosting Shinrin-Yoku experiences (the science backed Japanese practice of Forest Bathing, known to balance the body and mind) one quickly sees how fulfilling, cleansing, healing, energising, and surprisingly simple the practice feels when all you do is walk through a forest, fully present, without the intrusion of technology. This evidence shows how much nature feels like home—how nurturing she is, how much our bodies need her, and yet, how absent she is in modern cities.

I have found that the more I heal my insides, the closer I feel to the natural world, the more natural it feels to live in this world, and the more I unearth my own self and the old memories of the soul. Wounds are holes, holes are doors, doors into something, openings, where, if we choose to enter them, the person that walks out is not the same who walked in. Unhealed wounds propagate, the same way good energy creates more good energy and healed wounds attract healed people. There is no need to try and save the entire world, because the entire world is simply the one You inhabit—you choose what to do with it. 

I write this to speak into reality a transformation, I believe, is happening to many. We are interconnected, and in this floating rock, no one experiences anything alone, the Human Experience is shared. Regardless of the 'never-ending horrors', we are on our way back to nature.  And Nature is not just a tree, a fish and a squirrel. Nature is you, in essence. Nature is beauty, it is The Grand, it is Vast. It is Vital, it is Infinite, it is Eternally Alive. It is Robust, Real, Complex. It is Us. It is also everything we are not right now, and everything we are becoming. 

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Sofia Luna explores and builds tools that facilitate this time's modern cognitive shift. She is a Colombian artist, creative consultant, entrepreneur and imaginator living In The Middle of The Future. 

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.”

The Undiscovered Self

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 Ten of Swords

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Name: Ruin, the Ten of Swords
Number: 10
Astrology: Sun in Gemini
Qabalah: Malkuth of Vau

Chris Gabriel December 7, 2024

The Ten of Swords is the end of all the plots and schemes of the suit of swords. Here all of the lofty ideas are brought down to their material conclusion - ruin.

In Rider, we see a man bled out, struck through by ten swords in an act of excessive violence. His hand points two fingers down. The sun has set, and darkness rolls in. All the swords of the suit are brought down to Earth, the craftsman is killed by his own work.

In Thoth, we have ten swords breaking at their points. Together, they form the Tree of Life. Their handles are, respectively, the sun and moon, a scale, stars, crosses, and compasses. All about them are jagged, deformed geometric figures. Astrologically this is the Sun in Gemini.

In Marseille, we have eight curved swords, and two swords crossing one another from outside the oval. Here the ideas formed throughout the suit come into reality. A positive view of the placement in comparison with Rider and Thoth. Qabalistically this is the Kingdom of the Prince.

This is the material end of high ideas. Rider’s depiction calls to mind Julius Caesar, whose visions of domination and rulership ended in 23 stab wounds. This is expressed perfectly in Ezekiel 28:9: “Wilt thou yet say before him that slayeth thee, I am God? but thou shalt be a man, and no God, in the hand of him that slayeth thee.”

Like the tragic ending of Hamlet, who is ultimately killed by his own mind, his dreams, and an unwillingness to deal with the reality of his opponent’s blade, this is a card concerned with the simple, material ending of death in the face of lofty ambition.. 

For Rider, we can imagine that beyond ten enemies stabbing a man in the back, his own hubris wielded those deathly blades. Just as the Nine of Swords was like the Sword of Damocles, here the thread breaks and the sword falls.

When read positively as in Marseille, we see the painstaking process of bringing ideas into reality  that can leave the artist feeling like the man struck in Rider. The artist’s vision of beauty is never translated into reality, instead they must make compromises to bring something into the world. This is necessary and good for we must materialize and not simply ideate. The negativity of Rider and Thoth hinges upon the bad nature of the ideas brought to fruition but Marseille shows us that a good idea brought to reality is the ultimate good. Only when ideas remain in the mind for too long do they rot and fester.

It calls to mind an allegory from the Upanishads. 

“We are like the spider,” said the king. “We weave our life, and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream.

“This is true for the entire universe. That is why it is said, ‘Having created the creation, the Creator entered into it’.

“This is true for us. We create our world, and then enter into that world. We live in the world that we have created. When our hearts are pure, then we create the beautiful, enlightened life we have wished for.”

When we pull this card, we can expect the end of a project. If executed well, it will be  a great thing. Otherwise, the plots and schemes we’ve formed will come crashing down. Our ideas, good and bad, will here be brought into reality.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Film

The Subtle and The Gross (Alchemy I)

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

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Molly Hankins December 5, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pharrell Williams

Film

Theaters of Authenticity

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Ana Roberts, December 3, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Lectures on the I Ching