The Ace of Swords (Tarot Triptych)

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Name:  Ace of Swords
Number: 1
Astrology: Air
Qabalah: Kether of Vau

Chris Gabriel April 12, 2025

The Ace of Swords is the card of inspiration. It is the air we inhale and the divine ideas which are given to us. Here is the perfect image of a dual crown pierced by a sword.

In Rider, a hand comes forth from a cloud bearing a sword. The sword holds up a crown upon which two laurels sit, one is fuller than the other. The landscape is barren and mountainous. Six yellow yods float about the hilt.

In Thoth, we have Crowley’s own sword, green in color with a hilt made of the waxing and waning moons, between which two spheres sit. Its blade bears the word θέλημα (Thelema, or Will). The crown which it penetrates has 22 rays, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The background is a cloudy night made bright by the sword.

In Marseille, we are shown a hand holding a great red sword piercing a crown. Two distinct branches grow from the crown. Many yods emanate from the sword.

Napoleon said “I found the crown of France in the gutter. I picked it up with the tip of my sword, and cleaned it, and placed it atop my own head.” 

Here,the crown is raised by the sword, the dual drives of nature lifted up by Intelligence. In each representation, the crown is dual, formed by the Yin and Yang of Water and Fire - the elements which precede Air, and are more base in nature. This is also the two lungs, the two hemispheres of the brain, and so on. Fire and Water are universals, but Air is peculiar, ubiquitous but invisible, and we each breathe our own yet we all share. The Ace of Swords we see the beginning of “Individuality” in the deck. 

While God moves the Universe with light and dark, he moves individuals with his breath. The Greek word for “Inspiration” is θεόπνευστος which literally translates to God-breathed. It is through Pneuma, the divine breath, that we are given our destiny. 

The Sword is the image of the divine intellect which pierces the mystery of nature. While fire, earth, and water  are visible, air is invisible, and so the Sword, which cuts through the air, is chosen. With our intellect we can cut up our simple perceptions and make sense of what is happening around us. Through this we begin to categorize and understand, to think, and to create our own ideas, to craft our own swords. In the material world, this is the weapon we lead with to achieve.

The Ace of Swords is like the cartoon light bulb above a head, it is a eureka moment, when God-given ideas are breathed into us. Yet, it can also be a terrible idea, which as a sword, pierces our brain. Macbeth’s indecision is put to an end by his vision of a dagger.

In a mundane deck of playing cards the Ace of Swords becomes the Ace of Spades, the most notorious card in the deck. To all superstitious gamblers, it means death. Alejandro Jodorowsky says that a poker deck is a tarot deck stripped of Divinity; the 22 majors and the 4 faces of the Tetragrammaton. At this level, the Sword is only something to kill with.

When we pull this card we can expect success, we will receive inspiration, and cut through confusion and indecision. But be careful, the sword is double edged and will just as easily divide us if we are not moving with will.

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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

Vibrational Medicine and the Multidimensional Human

Thought-Forms, 1901. Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater.

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Molly Hankins April 10, 2025

The theory of fundamental consciousness, which states that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality as opposed to merely being a byproduct of the brain, carries with it the implication that there may be a direct influence on our physiology. Scientists such as Donald Hoffman, who has popularized this theory over the last several years via his book The Case Against Reality, is cautious about making claims as to its medical implications but as this theory is working its way through mainstream media via The Telepathy Tapes podcast, more and more anecdotal evidence is mounting and more questions are being raised about the role our consciousness plays in our anatomical functionality. 

Nearly 40 years ago, Dr. Richard Gerber published a book called Vibrational Medicine that makes a case for treating physical ailments using non-physical means and speaks to much of the phenomena discussed in The Telepathy Tapes. If you haven’t listened to the podcast yet, it focuses on the personal stories and the scientific study of extraordinary human abilities possessed by members of the non-verbal autistic community, including telepathy. Later episodes explore the growing body of evidence about similar telepathic abilities in other non-speakers, including advanced dementia and terminally ill patients, as well as animals. The concept of an ‘energy body’ is mentioned repeatedly throughout the program by parents and caregivers of non-speakers, and according to Gerber’s research, energy body systems contain the data that coordinate physiological activity.

If we subscribe to the theory that consciousness is fundamental, and therefore creating physical reality, then it must be true that our state of consciousness influences how our bodies function. Gerber references the work of Dr. Itzhak Bentov and Dr. William Tiller, both of whom studied the human energy field and determined that there are several overlapping, higher-dimensional energetic systems working together to direct our physiological experience of reality. They identify four layers of the energy body that overlay the physical, which directly corresponds with that Kabbalistic concept that we have four non-physical levels of consciousness animating our bodies. Each layer is explained below:

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“In order for our physiology to play its beautiful symphony, we must harmonize each octave of our energy body.”

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Nefesh - Physical Body 

This is our lowest level of consciousness, offering awareness of our physical bodies and the physical world. How our physical bodies operate is determined by interactions between the following energy fields. 

Ruach - Etheric Body

This first layer of our energy body contains data from the emotional experiences of our present lifetime. Its influence explains why emotional distress disrupts natural functions like immune system response, hormonal and cellular activity. Gerber refers to the relationship between the etheric body and physical body as an “interference pattern” that determines our overall level of health.

Neshama - Mental Body

The second layer gives us an  intellectual understanding of the essential nature of the human experience. In order to operate efficiently, this consciousness field must evolve over many lifetimes to move beyond   perception with just five senses and open ourselves up to perception beyond what Tiller refers to as “the world of appearances.”

Chaya - Astral Body

This third layer transcends intellectual understanding to include that expanded perspective where we merge our individual consciousness with that of The Creator. This is where the character of our soul lies. According to Gerber, “The astral body is a containment vehicle for the personality beyond the transition of physical death.”

Yechida - Causal Body

The fourth and final layer is the element of our soul  that is still connected to The Creator and, according to Kabbalists, is one of pure light. Bentov regarded this field as a holistic, emotional energy body containing all the experiences of our soul, or what Vedic traditions call the Akashic field. 

In Vibrational Medicine, Gerber uses the analogy of piano keys, likening the layers of our energy bodies to octaves of consciousness. He refers to the lowest keys as Nefesh, or the physical octave of experience. The highest keys are  that of Yechida, or the causal octave. In order for our physiology to play its beautiful symphony, we must harmonize each octave of our energy body. We can accomplish this using meditation, our breath, prayer, tuning forks, mindfulness practices, spending time in nature, or consciously reprogramming ourselves using mantras, affirmations, movement and music. Each method is a different means of repatterning these conscious energy fields to positively influence our experience of reality. 

The Telepathy Tapes have created  a swell of support for consciousness fundamentalists like Donald Hoffman, and started a repatterning of the scientific paradigm. As public support grows and funding opportunities expand, research on these ideas will be brought out of the theoretical fringes and into empirical testing. Our understanding of human biology as a series of interactive multi-dimensional fields may someday be understood and refined into a scientifically proven protocol for so-called vibrational medicine. But we don’t have to wait for science to catch up with our conscious evolution to enjoy the benefits of harmonizing our energy fields with our physical body, we can begin with the techniques discussed above right now. 

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

Gene Simmons

Film

Lift (Museum of Suspense I)

The Extasis of Jean Birelle, Vicente Carducho, 1626–1632, oil on canvas, Cartuja de Santa María de El Paular, Museo de la Trinidad, Rascafría (Madrid); Museo del Prado.

Ale Nodarse April 8, 2025

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When was your belief last suspended? 

A whole museum could be built on suspense. By this I mean a place for pictures devoted to the floating figure. Its halls would be wide and its ceilings high, for there have been many drawn to the sky: gods and demigods, angels of every stripe, fellow humans disposed to makeshift wings. There would be space for them all. 

Just picture the stretch of Icaruses. Over and again, those Greek boys with wax-bound feathers would rise to cast glorious bird-shadows on oceans below. There would be flight after flight after flight. Only then, nearest to the exit, would one Icarus tumble down. He would fall as Pieter Brueghel had once painted him falling — falling, fallen, then swallowed up by an unfeeling sea.¹ And perhaps the words of W. H. Auden would be read upon a pamphlet or recited by a melancholic guide:

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away 
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green 
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, 
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.²

The saints would crowd the walls like starlings. Off they go, a young viewer might imagine, if not for the constraints of canvases and ceilings. Children would have no trouble picturing it. Neither would most adults. Flight has prevailed within dreams for as long as dreams have been recorded — and the prevalence, according to neuroscientists, is on the rise.³ Do saints fly? The question has been asked many times.⁴ Often, it seems, language stands in the way. Perhaps “flight” may be the wrong word. Since saints are not usually birds, many theologians and historians of religion prefer levitation: this, the summa of ecstasies. 

In the Extasis of Jean Birelle (1626–1632) by the Spanish painter Vicente Carducho, a fourteenth-century monk rises above an Islamicate rug.⁵ His hat and shadow fall beneath him. The regularity of gridded ground gives way to sudden lift. But the saint does not quite fly. Instead, the painting sustains a moment of physical and psychological suspense — of doubt. 

The painting speaks not only to the dubiousness of human flight, but to those doubts which surface in our more routine undertakings. Carducho includes another scene to the right of the floating figure. Set beyond a bannister, a white-robed saint robe grasps the hand of a younger man. The saint is Jean, and the scene is a memory. The painter gives witness to an earlier moment in Jean’s biography when he had encouraged a novice, ready to abandon monastic life, to stay the course. This picture within a picture becomes an image of doubt and the moment of its assuaging. 

Certain paintings sustain suspense. The eloquence of Carducho’s painting is in part its drawing together of doubts and its defiance of them. How often, we might ask, has the inconceivable been transformed or at least been made bearable by an outstretched hand? Within the Museum of Suspense, this painting would encourage us to dwell on doubt: to reconcile, rather than abandon, it. To look closely at the canvas, we would draw doubt near. Perhaps then we might regard doubt itself as both necessary and miraculous: as necessary as a loving grasp, as miraculous as mortal flight.

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¹The authorship of Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (Musée des Beaux Arts, Brussels) remains a matter of debate. Most scholars believe that the painting was completed by a follower of Pieter Brueghel the Elder after an original composition, now lost.
²W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts.”
³See Michael Schredl and Edgar Piel, “Prevalence of Flying Dreams,” Perceptual Motor Skills (2007): 657–660.
⁴Carlos Eire, They Flew: A History of the Impossible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025). 
⁵ This scene is one of many (fifty four) representing the history of the Carthusian Order in Spain, completed by Carducho for the Monastery of El Paular in Rascafría, Spain. On this painting and the larger series, see Leticia Ruiz Gómez, La recuperación de El Paular (Madrid, 2013), 185–190.

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Alejandro (Ale) Nodarse Jammal is an artist and art historian. They are a Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art & Architecture at Harvard University and are completing an MFA at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art. They think often about art — its history and its practice — in relationship to observation, memory, language, and ethics.

Tyler Cowen Playlist

Tyler Cowen April 7th, 2025

What is a nation? What indeed is France? Who can answer such a question in mere words? But a music playlist gives you at least some kind of start, and here is mine.

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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.

Film

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 Five of Cups (Tarot Triptych)

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Name:  Disappointment, the Five of Cups
Number: 5
Astrology: Mars in Scorpio
Qabalah: Gevurah of He

Chris Gabriel April 5, 2025

The Five of Cups is the spilling out of all we have accumulated. It is the glass half empty and the fly who drowns in a fine wine. It is the card of trying and failing to get what you want.

In Rider, a man in a black cloak looks down upon three spilled cups, while two still stand behind him. The sky is grey. He cares not for what he has, only what he has lost. He is “crying over spilt milk”.

In Thoth, we have an arrangement of cups reminiscent of the biomechanical art of H.R Giger. They appear almost as an alchemical laboratory, each connected by pipes in the shape of a pentagram. Below them is a sick, stagnant water, and above them is a rust red sky. Two lotuses arise from the lowest cup but are already withering away. Two lily pads droop down above the rest.

In Marseille, we are shown five cups around which flowers grow. A plant below brings forth two flowers, and there is a poppy growing from the central cup. Qabalistically, this is the Severity of the Queen.

This is a card of realization of rough awakenings. The calm comfort of the four of cups is broken, and we are thrust into a harsh reality. This is the misery and regret that follows a heartbreak. 

The cloaked figure in Rider seems to me to be a perfect image of the young poet Arthur Rimbaud. “One evening, I sat Beauty on my knees - and I found her bitter - And I insulted her.” Rimbaud falls from his simple, pleasant life of banquets and goes straight to Hell.

As the Six of Cups is the Goldilocks zone, where things are just right, the Five of Cups is not enough. It is an unsatisfying meal - spoiled food, sour milk, and a rough bed. It is incapable of satisfying us.

As Mars in Scorpio, there is an element of resentment and rage that comes from this dissatisfaction. This is not the sort of anger that leads to revolutions, but petty crimes of passion; scorned lovers who yearn for blood or those who kill out of desire for what they feel they have been denied.

Wilhelm Reich describes how young people who go unloved will develop bizarre illusions about themselves, imagining defects where there are none. Thoth shows well the sort of perverse libidinal machinery that is formed by disappointment and ressentiment (the bitterness that feelings of inferiority breed). 

When drawing this card, we must be careful that our disappointments and jealousies do not grow strong like a poison tree. This card lets us know we will be faced with failures, with not getting what we need and want, but we mustn't strike out. Instead, let the bitterness fade. As Blake says in A Poison Tree:

I was angry with my friend; 
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe: 
I told it not, my wrath did grow. 

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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

Oulipo and The Creativity of Limitation

Liminal Poem for Martin Gardner, 1981. Harry Matthews.

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Louis Boero April 3, 2025

There is no such thing as inspiration, only constraint. This is the maxim, conjured in Paris’s mid-century cafe culture, that launch the most radical literary movement of the 20th century. Oulipo, short for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or "School of Potential Literature," is a literary movement founded in 1960 by mathematician François Le Lionnais and writer Raymond Queneau. At its core is the belief that constraints in writing are not limitations but opportunities, a way to unlock new creative possibilities. Unlike movements that emphasize raw inspiration or spontaneity, Oulipo treats literature as a structured process, where self-imposed rules and formal techniques shape and expand the act of storytelling.

The origins lie in the intersection of literature and mathematics. Le Lionnais and Queneau, both fascinated by patterns, sought to explore how structures could guide artistic creation. Their clearest historical touchstone was the sonnet; constrained by a rigid structure that required 14 lines of iambic pentameter, a rhyme scheme of three quatrains and a couplet, and a narrative turn in the 8th or 9th line, of all formats the sonnet allows its writer the least freedom. And yet, Queneau thought, it has produced an outsized percentage of the most writing in history. Writing, Queneau saw, has long been a process of limitation, it simply had not been explicitly about this. They were not rejecting the past but in discovering hidden formulas within it, reviving forgotten constraints, and inventing new ones. They saw themselves as "rats who build the labyrinth from which they will try to escape”. Literature, for Queneau and Le Lionnais, was not a wild stream to be navigated instinctually but a puzzle, a game, an equation whose unknown variables the writer must solve.

As the group developed, members created increasingly complicated, difficult and absurd constraints, with each producing, if not always successful, increasingly interesting results. One of the best-known Oulipian techniques is the lipogram, a text that avoids a particular letter. Georges Perec, one of the group’s most famous members, wrote La Disparition (A Void), a full-length novel that never uses the letter "e." The omission, far from being a gimmick, becomes thematically significant - the book is a mystery novel, with a detective searching for something missing that he can never find.

Another hallmark of Oulipo is explorative variation, where the constraint is found in subject and total freedom is granted in the language to describe the prescribes subject. This style of writing is exemplified in Queneau’s Exercises in Style. In this work, a simple anecdote about a man on a bus is retold in ninety-nine different ways, demonstrating the endless flexibility of language. The idea that style, tone, and form can radically reshape meaning is central to the Oulipian philosophy. Their constraints are not rigid rules but tools that force the writer to think differently, much like how a poet working within the sonnet form must find creative ways to express an idea within its strict structure.

Beyond individual techniques, Oulipo explores broader mathematical and algorithmic structures. Members have experimented with palindromes, sestinas, Fibonacci sequences, and even invented new poetic forms, such as the “snowball,” where each line grows by one letter at a time. Italo Calvino, another key figure and the writer who broke through to the widest audience, his shadow looming larger than the whole group, integrated Oulipian ideas into his novels, particularly If on a winter’s night a traveler, a work that constantly reframes its own narrative, shifting expectations with each chapter.

Though Oulipo began as a small group of French writers, its influence has spread widely. Digital literature, algorithmic poetry, and interactive fiction all owe a debt to its principles. The concept of constrained writing has found a home in computer-generated texts and artificial intelligence-assisted storytelling, where structured limitations guide unpredictable results.

Unlike other literary movements, Oulipo does not operate through manifestos or ideological declarations. It is not a rejection of tradition but an ongoing investigation into the mechanics of language. Writers working within its framework see constraints as a means of expanding expression rather than narrowing it. The beauty of Oulipo is that it offers an open invitation to any writer willing to experiment. Try writing a story where no word contains the letter "a." Rewrite a passage in a hundred different styles. Construct a poem where each line follows a mathematical sequence. The rules may seem restrictive at first, but within them lies a paradox: the more you limit yourself, the more your creativity grows.

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Louis Boero is a writer and critic.

Aravind Srinivas

Film

Some Thoughts on the Common Toad

Schnieder’s Toad. Iconographia Zoologica, c.1881.

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First published in Tribune, in April of 1946, just one year after the end of the Second World War, George Orwell’s thoughts on the humble toad become an ode to nature, and the enduring beauty of the world in times of hardship. As with almost all of the great English writer’s works, this essay is concerned with ideas of class inequalities within society. Adamantly opposed throughout his life to all forms of totalitarianism, both on the right and left of politics, he was an ardent democratic socialist whose writing was his form of activism. ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’ has Orwell’s mastery of prose on full display, elegantly singing the praises of the amphibian, heralding the joys of spring, and reminding the reader that the lifeblood of existence is in the natural world, and we are more a part of it than the powers that be may want us to believe.

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George Orwell, April 1, 2025

Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the snowdrop, the common toad salutes the coming of spring after his own fashion, which is to emerge from a hole in the ground, where he has lain buried since the previous autumn, and crawl as rapidly as possible towards the nearest suitable patch of water. Something – some kind of shudder in the earth, or perhaps merely a rise of a few degrees in the temperature – has told him that it is time to wake up: though a few toads appear to sleep the clock round and miss out a year from time to time – at any rate, I have more than once dug them up, alive and apparently well, in the middle of the summer.

At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes look abnormally large. This allows one to notice, what one might not at another time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature. It is like gold, or more exactly it is like the golden-coloured semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet rings, and which I think is called a chrysoberyl.

For a few days after getting into the water the toad concentrates on building up his strength by eating small insects. Presently he has swollen to his normal size again, and then he goes through a phase of intense sexiness. All he knows, at least if he is a male toad, is that he wants to get his arms round something, and if you offer him a stick, or even your finger, he will cling to it with surprising strength and take a long time to discover that it is not a female toad. Frequently one comes upon shapeless masses of ten or twenty toads rolling over and over in the water, one clinging to another without distinction of sex. By degrees, however, they sort themselves out into couples, with the male duly sitting on the female’s back. You can now distinguish males from females, because the male is smaller, darker and sits on top, with his arms tightly clasped round the female’s neck. After a day or two the spawn is laid in long strings which wind themselves in and out of the reeds and soon become invisible. A few more weeks, and the water is alive with masses of tiny tadpoles which rapidly grow larger, sprout hind-legs, then forelegs, then shed their tails: and finally, about the middle of the summer, the new generation of toads, smaller than one’s thumb-nail but perfect in every particular, crawl out of the water to begin the game anew.

I mention the spawning of the toads because it is one of the phenomena of Spring which most deeply appeal to me, and because the toad, unlike the skylark and the primrose, has never had much of a boost from poets. But I am aware that many people do not like reptiles or amphibians, and I am not suggesting that in order to enjoy the spring you have to take an interest in toads. There are also the crocus, the missel thrush, the cuckoo, the blackthorn, etc. The point is that the pleasures of spring are available to everybody, and cost nothing. Even in the most sordid street the coming of spring will register itself by some sign or other, if it is only a brighter blue between the chimney pots or the vivid green of an elder sprouting on a blitzed site. Indeed it is remarkable how Nature goes on existing unofficially, as it were, in the very heart of London. I have seen a kestrel flying over the Deptford gasworks, and I have heard a first-rate performance by a blackbird in the Euston Road. There must be some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of birds living inside the four-mile radius, and it is rather a pleasing thought that none of them pays a halfpenny of rent.

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“Is it politically reprehensible… to point out that life is frequently more worth living because of a blackbird’s song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some other natural phenomenon which does not cost money’

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As for Spring, not even the narrow and gloomy streets round the Bank of England are quite able to exclude it. It comes seeping in everywhere, like one of those new poison gases which pass through all filters. The spring is commonly referred to as “a miracle,” and during the past five or six years this worn-out figure of speech has taken on a new lease of life. After the sort of winters we have had to endure recently, the spring does seem miraculous, because it has become gradually harder and harder to believe that it is actually going to happen. Every February since 1940 I have found myself thinking that this time Winter is going to be permanent. But Persephone, like the toads, always rises from the dead at about the same moment. Suddenly, towards the end of March, the miracle happens and the decaying slum in which I live is transfigured. Down in the square the sooty privets have turned bright green, the leaves are thickening on the chestnut trees, the daffodils are out, the wallflowers are budding, the policeman’s tunic looks positively a pleasant shade of blue, the fishmonger greets his customers with a smile, and even the sparrows are quite a different colour, having felt the balminess of the air and nerved themselves to take a bath, their first since last September.

Is it wicked to take a pleasure in Spring and other seasonal changes? To put it more precisely, is it politically reprehensible, while we are all groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under the shackles of the capitalist system, to point out that life is frequently more worth living because of a blackbird’s song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some other natural phenomenon which does not cost money and does not have what the editors of left-wing newspapers call a class angle? There is no doubt that many people think so. I know by experience that a favourable reference to “Nature” in one of my articles is liable to bring me abusive letters, and though the key-word in these letters is usually “sentimental”, two ideas seem to be mixed up in them. One is that any pleasure in the actual process of life encourages a sort of political quietism. People, so the thought runs, ought to be discontented, and it is our job to multiply our wants and not simply to increase our enjoyment of the things we have already. The other idea is that this is the age of machines and that to dislike the machine, or even to want to limit its domination, is backward-looking, reactionary and slightly ridiculous. This is often backed up by the statement that a love of Nature is a foible of urbanised people who have no notion what Nature is really like. Those who really have to deal with the soil, so it is argued, do not love the soil, and do not take the faintest interest in birds or flowers, except from a strictly utilitarian point of view. To love the country one must live in the town, merely taking an occasional week-end ramble at the warmer times of year.

This last idea is demonstrably false. Medieval literature, for instance, including the popular ballads, is full of an almost Georgian enthusiasm for Nature, and the art of agricultural peoples such as the Chinese and Japanese centre always round trees, birds, flowers, rivers, mountains. The other idea seems to me to be wrong in a subtler way. Certainly we ought to be discontented, we ought not simply to find out ways of making the best of a bad job, and yet if we kill all pleasure in the actual process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves? If a man cannot enjoy the return of Spring, why should he be happy in a labour-saving Utopia? What will he do with the leisure that the machine will give him? I have always suspected that if our economic and political problems are ever really solved, life will become simpler instead of more complex, and that the sort of pleasure one gets from finding the first primrose will loom larger than the sort of pleasure one gets from eating an ice to the tune of a Wurlitzer. I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and – to return to my first instance – toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.

At any rate, spring is here, even in London N1, and they can’t stop you enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can’t. So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, Spring is still Spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

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George Orwell (1903-1950) was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic. Best known for his allegorical and dystopian works Animal Farm and 1984, his written oeuvre spans genre and medium but is consistently displays a level of social criticism with a deep emphasis on class struggle around the world.

Film

The Two of Wands (Tarot Triptych)

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Name:  Dominion, the Two of Wands
Number: 2
Astrology: Mars in Aries
Qabalah: Chokmah of Yod

Chris Gabriel March 29, 2025

The Two of Wands is the card of childish will - the desire to take, to hold, and to say yes or no. This card is how we begin to make our way in the world and learn to control our environment.

In Rider, a man in red looks out from a castle wall over an expanse of sea and mountains. Beside him are two wands, and in his hand is a globe. He desires to control the world, to move ships, goods, men, and to expand his influence and power.

In Thoth, we have two large Dorjes: Buddhist wands symbolizing the power of thunder and the strength of the diamond. They are crossed, and from them six flames emit. The card is astrologically given to Mars in Aries.

In Marseille, we have two crossed wands. Four leaves emerge from the center, and two uprooted flowers frame the top and bottom. Qabalistically, the card is the Wisdom of the King.

The Wisdom of the King is Dominion.

Just as the Two of Swords relates to a child’s legs and first steps they take, the Two of Wands is the arms, the hands, and, ultimately, the fists. As the baby of the zodiac,  Aries is the  child who quickly  learns how to get what they want, to reach out and grab it,  and how to push away and reject what they do not want. To be safe and comfortable they need to control their environment. This is the force of Mars in Aries, the childish will applied to everything.

Just as children like to get what they want, so too do Kings. Their simple desires are sated, and their complex desires are worked towards by the people. This is often a desire for larger and larger dominions. 

Alexander the Great conquered out of a pure and childlike will, and wept when he had no land left to conquer, no new toys to play with. Heraclitus and Shakespeare alike recognized the childlike character of the Gods, that their wills were playful and fickle. The world, and the people therein are simply toys to exert the will upon.

The Rider card gives a fantastic image of this, the great globe itself reduced to a toy ball. This is shown perfectly when Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator plays with an inflatable globe. It is the pure, simple, childish will that wants world domination. 

While many great and terrible men have tried this, it is exceedingly rare that any of us will meet people like this. In our lives, this force appears as domineering individuals who want to control what’s around them, be it a neighborhood, a workplace, a house, or, especially, a relationship. We have all met very controlling people, this card shows us this desire for control is innate and childish.

When we pull this card, we can expect to deal with controlling figures, or a conflict of our own. Whether you decide to get out of the way or get your way, consider what it is that you will.

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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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Ascension is Now

Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, c. 1410.

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Molly Hankins March 27, 2025

Countless ancient cultures prophesied a time when the human race would  expand their consciousness and ascend into a higher frequency of existence. Commonly referred to as ascension, the major increase in anomalous activity of solar flares and magnetic fluctuations over the last 18 months are physical indicators that this process is well underway. The spiritual teacher Drunvalo Melchizedek has spent most of his life writing and teaching about how to prepare for this ascension. He understands it as a  shift from living in the head to our hearts and primarily identifying as part of the whole of life instead of as separate individuals. 

While a  more fundamentalist Christian take refers to this as  the rapture or end-times, Drunvalo’s interpretation of ascension is about integrating with different layers of reality via a shift in awareness that occurs internally. Both interpretations point to dramatic shifts in the physical world, but rather than those changes resulting in souls being raptured to heaven, ascension says this shift in consciousness and dimensional integration will result in humans creating heaven on Earth.

As of the date of publication of this article, we are between a lunar full-moon eclipse in Virgo, a practical, detail-oriented Earth sign, and a solar eclipse in Aries, an initiatory fire energy during a new moon. This period marks what Tibetan Buddhists call the Bardo - the period between death and rebirth - and it has a supercharged energy for cleansing destructive patterns. Across personal lives, global events, and scientific activity we notice new patterns are becoming the norm. In 2023 there were 13 X-class solar flares, which is the largest measurable class, well within the average annual range. In 2024 there were 50 and as of February of 2025, we’ve experienced 4.

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“What is happening at the macro planetary scale must also be happening at the micro-scale within us.”

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Oscillations in Earth’s electromagnetic field, known as Schumann resonance, have shown extreme fluctuation particularly since the lunar eclipse on March 14th. There has been a major increase in data blackouts, which means the incoming frequency exceeds the threshold our measuring devices can interpret. Induction coils, made of an iron core surrounded by thousands of insulated copper coils that are sensitive to rapid magnetic field fluctuations,  can seemingly detect energy only within a fixed range of parameters. We are currently living through a new era where our planet’s electromagnetic frequency is beginning to move beyond those measurable parameters more regularly.

These fluctuations are usually attributed by the scientific community to be the result of solar storms, geomagnetic activity and environmental factors, and yet lately we are seeing entirely new patterns of data. Still baffled by the discrepancies between Newtonian, Earthly physics and quantum mechanics, our current model of scientific understanding cannot account for the multidimensional upgrades taking place. Drunvalo’s teachings point to a theory that the fabric of our electromagnetic field is evolving along with our consciousness, experiencing a new range of harmonics beyond what can presently be measured.

In keeping with the famous occult axiom, “As above, so below,” what is happening at the macro planetary scale must also be happening at the micro-scale within us. This period of time between eclipses is what numerologist and astrologist Kaitlyn Kaerhart calls a realignment. In her Aries solar eclipse guide she writes, “Eclipses are wild cards. They open fated doors, close outdated timelines and rearrange reality in ways we don’t usually see coming. Aries is the sign of of selfhood, instinct, initiation and raw courage, and that’s exactly what’s being activated in all of us. This eclipse also falls on the Aries-Libra axis, so it’s not just about you. It’s about you in relation to others.” 

The solar eclipse this week also falls in the fourth week of the month, and according to Kaerhart, four energy is all about embracing a steady rhythm to create stability through structure and lay strong foundations for what’s to come. She recommends meditation, body movement and being in nature as a means of aligning with these changes so they become part of a strong foundation for our ascension of consciousness. As Drunvalo says, “When you are in your heart, nothing needs to be done to bring change. It will happen automatically and with grace.”

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

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