Disturbed Images

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Lamia Priestley March 5, 2026

A roll of belly fat melts into a makeup-caked face; a bag of chips morphs into a family portrait; a butt cheek transforms into a policeman’s bicep. Gross and sickly, loud and pink, Frank Manzano’s collection of video works, Current Value (2023), uses AI imagery to depict the grotesque in everyday scenes of American suburban life—fistfights, plastic surgery, arrests. 

Still from Holistic Consumption Challenge (Current Value), Frank Manzano. (2023).

Rapid cuts between faces result in pile ups of interchangeable characters. An endless treadmill of trash, plastic consumer products, and open mouths, the videos’ choppiness creates what the Chicago-based artist describes as “the human parade”—a crazed illustration of people as stuff. Manzano describes his work as an exploration of “consumerism, massification, the loss of the self.” These themes are felt not just in the works’ subject matter but in the evidence of the mass market AI tools Manzano uses to make many of his images. 

Manzano has a fondness for corpulent characters, big butts, cellulite, stretched thighs and teethy smiles. Outside of his focus on flesh, the videos themselves exert a materiality in their reference to the aesthetics of consumer visual culture and their artefacts. There’s the digital lines of security footage, the jacked up saturation of reality TV, the studio lighting of an 80s sitcom, the low res crunchy feel of camcorder home videos. The images look either consumer-grade (camcorder) or like something used to capture consumers (CCTV). But amongst the visual styles referenced in Manzano’s work, one can distinguish something entirely new, the artefacts of AI images.

To create this pastiche, Manzano uses a combination of his own photos, sourced images and ones he generates with AI image tools like Wombo. On a visual level, the artefacts of AI images—the airbrushed smooth skin, confused edges between fingers, gibberish logos and half-baked eyes—contribute to a feeling of the uncanny in these illustrations of the American underbelly. More than just a formal contribution though, these artefacts place the images into a context. Viewers who, over the past few years, have developed a familiarity with AI generated images online, will recognise them here and have some understanding of the process by which they are created—using a dataset of preexisting images. It’s clear that although Current Value’s images have the trademarks of documentary or recorded reality, many of them aren’t real. 

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“There’s something profane in the limitation of a finite dataset. The images have no hope of transcendence.”

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The disturbing nature of Manzano’s videos is due, not to this irreality, but rather to the images’ self-aware embrace of their artificial generation. The AI artefacts are significant because of what they mean in the context of Manzano’s unaspiring video world. Not only are his subjects debased but so too are the images—a perfect marriage of subject and form.

Origins of Fetishization (Current Value), Frank Manzano. 2023.

The philosopher Hannes Bajohr offers a useful framework for understanding this earthbound quality of AI images in his article Algorithmic Empathy: Toward a Critique of Aesthetic AI (2022). Bajohr advocates for interpreting AI arts on their own terms, looking at how they’re made—their “technical substrate”—to develop their aesthetic critiques. Bajohr draws a parallel between artificial neural networks and the ancient aesthetic principle of mimesis—the attempt to imitate or reproduce reality in the creation of art. He outlines two opposing concepts of imitation as it relates to AI images. The first he attributes to the philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s explanation. It describes imitation as construction, which sees “the approximation of an existing state through the inference of the rules that bring it about.” The second concept of imitation, which better describes AI image making, is “imitatio naturae” (imitation of nature). A classical idea that was repopularised in the Renaissance, “imitatio naturae” sees imitation as a mere repetition of the real without the “procedural insight” of imitation as construction. In the case of AI image making, “nature” would be the dataset, and so that from which all representations are derived. 

This first approach to imitation, that of construction, implies the possibility of depicting something new. Bajohr emphasises that with the knowledge of a thing’s creation—of its building blocks—moving beyond that thing is possible while in “imitatio naturae”, the representation derives directly from the thing itself. Nature, and so the dataset, is the absolute resource. An artificial neural network can’t truly imagine anything beyond its own dataset, never something outside of that which has already been represented.

There’s something profane in the limitation of a finite dataset. The images have no hope of transcendence. Image generators are so far unable to replicate the mysterious process by which a great artist goes about transforming an ordinary landscape into an image that might produce ineffable revelations in its viewers. The artist—studying how light falls, the relationships of colours, the phenomenon of perspective—might inexplicably assemble a few strokes of paint to reveal something much greater than valleys, woods, hills and streams, much greater than nature. 

Manzano’s images are trapped. His subjects lead unambitious lives, marginalised by a cycle of consumerism, greed, lust, violence, and vanity; they're governed by their instincts, unable to escape themselves. So too, AI images exist only in immanence. Image generators simulate master artists’ styles from the past, merely recycling them, destined to make unambitious copies.  

Current Value’s images are provocations. They’re affective, disturbing representations of the gutters of material culture because they themselves belong there, unable to dream themselves out.

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Lamia Priestley is an art historian, writer and researcher working at the intersection of art, fashion and technology. With a background in Italian Renaissance Art, Lamia is currently the Artist Liaison at the digital fashion house DRAUP, where she works with artists to produce generative digital collections.

Eric Roth

Between Nihilism and Salvation

Marc Chagall, Sisyphus. 1975.

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Noah Gabriel Martin March 3, 2026

“The chef has requested you not to read that while you eat his food,” the waiter said, pointing to my copy of Kafka’s The Trial. I must have given him a confused look, because he smiled and said; “so that you don’t lose your appetite.”

It was embarrassing, but pretty much every social interaction embarrassed me at that age, and it thrilled me too. It was the first time any one out in the city had ever noticed, and seemed to approve of, what I read. I wanted desperately to break the silence in the empty diner, to talk with him further, but I was too shy. I ate my lasagna in silence, paid the bill, and left.

Kafka. Pessoa. Dostoyevsky. Beckett. I wallowed in the literature of despair, bleakness, and nihilism, clinging to the jejune certainty that life is pain like a squalid but tolerable shelter from the storm.

Pessimism saved me from the need to loathe myself, because if there was a fault with being itself, maybe I wasn’t to blame for my unhappiness, maybe it wasn’t that there was something wrong with me.

I took comfort in the belief that it’s okay to not be okay. I reassured myself with philosophical arguments that I was right to find existence a joyless wasteland; that I was right not to believe that things could get better. That pessimism protected me from the people who tried to convince me that their cult or fitness fads or baseline belief in the improvability of the human condition could help.

Growing up on the West Coast in the ‘90s, everybody had something to believe in—EST or Eckhart Tolle or Osho or the Paleo diet or the power of positive thinking. Shifting with the seasons, friends and family clung to one saviour after another, each time with renewed hope that they’d finally found a remedy for their ennui or their gastrointestinal disorder or their money problems.

These days, the circles I move in are more down-to-earth. The people around me aren’t seeking the meaning of life or immortality—they’re just concerned with finding a fulfilling job or making their relationships work. And yet, even these very practical and mundane problems easily acquire a significance that leaps out ahead of itself.

“The job will not save you,” Freamon says to McNulty in an episode of The Wire. Too often we forget this advice. We let the quest for meaningful work, work that contributes to society and brings us creative fulfilment, take on a significance that’s greater than it can bear. We allow ourselves to believe that not only will work bring some limited, contingent meaning into our lives, but that it will bring us an escape from the groundlessness of living.

This is what Simone de Beauvoir called “seriousness” - over-identification with our jobs, or our role as a parent, or our ceramic farmhouse kitchen sink, in which we allow ourselves to forget that, as important as children or jobs are to us, they have no meaning apart from what we invest in them. We can, and often would, be better off if we invested meaning in other things as well.

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“The little things can be transformative. Even if they don’t alter the essential character of existence, they can change the way existence feels…”

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That’s not to say that your work doesn’t matter, that your family doesn’t matter - they really do (your trendy kitchen sink, however, doesn’t matter). It’s just that we put too much weight on the things we’ve already committed to to save us from the need to constantly create and recreate meaning and purpose. You allow yourself to believe that it’s just an absolute fact that your children matter, not that you’ve chosen to shape your life around that particular source of meaning.

It’s easy for us to carry on trying to find fulfillment in work or relationships or interior decorating because fulfillment is elusive - it’s always a promotion or a new coat of paint away, and that lets us believe that we haven’t reached it yet because we’re falling short. But that’s not it. We haven’t reached it yet because it’s not there to be found. Meaning-making is an infinite task.

I used to be proud that my pessimism sheltered me from the hope so often preyed upon by religious-leaders, middle-managers and marketers; the hope that the solution to the problem of how to live well, an ultimate solution, is somewhere to be found. But this limited me: by being dead-set on avoiding this error, I rushed head-long into its opposite - the belief that just because there is no solution to having problems at all, there are no solutions to this problem or that problem, or that they’re not worth solving. 

Despite what the romantics say, love cannot conquer death. But it’s still pretty great. And even though it brings pain, with each hurt we can learn to do it better and make it more enduring. Dancing cannot save us from the fundamental groundlessness of all meaning, but it can make it feel good to have a body and be alive. The little things can be transformative. Even if they don’t alter the essential character of existence, they can change the way existence feels; make it exciting and full of possibilities and significance.

The temptation to give up trying to make things better because ultimately we’re going to die, and ultimately all life will be extinguished at the heat death of the universe, and ultimately nothing really matters, is just as much an error as the temptation to believe we can find ultimate answers. You don’t need to solve these problems in order for that poem you’re writing, or that long lazy Saturday afternoon, or that campaign you’re working on, to be worthwhile.

In fact, to seek salvation and to give in to nihilism are both responses to the same error: the error of only being satisfied by final answers. In either case, it’s a refusal to be content with the kinds of meaning and joy that can be discovered and created in this life, a life that is not only impermanent, but lacks anything beyond itself to give it purpose.

It is exactly because everything that makes life worth living remains incomplete that we can let go of the need for seriousness. Because there’s no final answer, we can let ourselves play.

Albert Camus says, “we must imagine Sisyphus happy”, because being’s inescapable absurdity gives us the chance to fill it with experimentation and inventiveness and feeling; in short, to live!

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Dr. Noah Gabriel Martin lectures in philosophy at the University of Winchester and runs the College of Modern Anxiety, a social enterprise that promotes lifelong learning for liberation. He recently began to study dance, which has taught him a lot about being an absolute beginner.

Film

17 Following - The I Ching

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Chris Gabriel February 28, 2026

Judgement

Following is the origin of pure bountiful harvests.

Lines

1
A changing of the guard. Going through the door and making a deal.

2
Cling to the little boy, lose the old man.

3
Cling to the old man, lose the little boy. Followers find what they seek.

4
A growing following. With faith in the Way that’s bright, what could go wrong?

5
Faith in the Great.

6
Grasp it, hold on to it. The King makes sacrifices at the Western Mountain.

Qabalah
Chesed to Gevurah: The Path of Teth. Lust or Strength. The Path between Mercy and Severity.

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This hexagram shows the happiness found  in submitting to strength, thunder moving the lake. The ideogram contains a flag, walking, and a soldier: an image of following. While the picture of thunder in a lake is difficult to conjure, you may know it by another name, Will o’ the Wisp -  a strange moving light seen near swamps and bodies of water. Naturally, people follow them. What they are led to is a matter of debate, are they drawn to buried treasures, to baptism, or to their doom?

1 When powers change, one must discern where to go next and align oneself accordingly. Where is power moving, and how can one follow it?

2 When something new comes into power, it will destroy the old. This is the revolutionary destruction of the Ancien régime and Italian Futurism’s desire to destroy history. 

3 When something old returns to power, the new is destroyed. This is the Reactionary restoration of Monarchies and the Fascist desire to return to a Golden Age. As for the followers finding what they seek, we can take this quite directly, Lacan says it best: You are hysterics who demand a new master. You will get one!

4 Whichever flavor power takes, it will amass a following. So long as followers have faith in it, it continues to grow.

5 Following is submitting, it is putting one’s faith in a human leader who represents a great ideal, and accordingly appears great themselves.

6 When the leader and their followers achieve their aim, they take hold of power and do not let go. They establish new rituals and all follow.

The key element to consider in this dynamic is that of pleasure and joy, the Lake in the hexagram. It’s easy to see the strength and power of Thunder and make it the primary image but the reality is that submission and obedience are pleasurable, especially in mass. This is the great insight of Wilhelm Reich, who recognized that frustrated, impotent individuals find libidinal release through mass movements. By joining a collective movement, one’s own inadequacies and problems are lost. 

A good way to consider the Will o’ the Wisp is in relation to the word “Fascination”, which shares a root with Fascism: Fascinus, the magical phallus god of the Romans. His beautiful phallus would enchant and bewitch those who saw it, and would dispel the envious evil eye. In many ways, political movements come down to exactly this, the masses enchanted by a fascinating charismatic leader. They follow their fascination wherever it will move them. As Peggy March sang: I love him, and where he goes I’ll follow.

Following is not necessarily political: Mohammed, Christ, and Buddha did not isolate themselves, they went about amassing a following. The great victory they offered their followers, however, was in the next life, not in this one.

Let us then be careful of who we follow, and the followings we ourselves may attract.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, THOUGHTS

Greg Brockman (Part 2)

On the Mechanics of Creation

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Molly Hankins February 26, 2026

When scientist and author Itzhak Bentov passed away in 1979 he was in the midst of finishing up a self-illustrated comic strip, which he called the ‘Co[s]mic S[t]rip’. Eventually published by his widow Mirtala, the comic became a book called A Brief Tour of Higher Consciousness that describes in elegantly simple detail Bentov’s theory on the origin and mechanics of creation, received intuitively during meditation. The theory is best summed up by his predecessor of over 600 years, a 13th century German mystic named Meister Eckhart quoted in the prologue of the book: “The eye by which I see God is the same eye by which God sees me.”

Bentov rarely used the word God, preferring terms like ‘the Creator,’ ‘Universal Mind’ or ‘the Absolute.’ Residing in ‘the fertile void’, this Universal Mind exists in a field of pure potential - it is the original source of consciousness at rest until it decides it wants to create. Anything created from that source is thus inherently made of the same informational code as the Absolute itself. He wrote, “We have to keep in mind that Creation is a big hologram. In other words, every little unit cell in the big structure, whether it is a universe, a cosmos or a super-cosmos or a super-duper-cosmos, contains the information about the whole big structure. The smaller the unit cell, the fuzzier the information; nevertheless, it is there.”

While a grain of sand may have far less consciousness and capacity for creation than an enlightened master, both contain the same divine source code. The  ‘fuzziness’found in that bit of sand is best understood as very simple code relative to the more sophisticated program running a human who’s achieved enlightenment. Bentov didn’t live long enough to be exposed to simulation theory, but much of what describes fits in with the idea of the universe as a computer program or video game, designed to generate new experiences. The Absolute is the master-programmer, akin to an acorn seed containing the genetic pattern of a whole oak tree, only instead of a single tree, it contains the blueprint for all there is. 

When the Creator becomes active and wants experience, creation begins. Rather than a singular big bang, Bentov subscribes to the idea of a ‘continuous bang’ universe, where the first of many white holes emit a jet of radiation to form a toroidal field around the Creator and matter then forms as it comes from the white hole, first as light. A Biblical interpretation names sound as the prime emanation, because the Creator had to first vibrate the sound of what was to be created before it would manifest. As the book of Genesis says, “Let there be light.” In a continuous bang universe, a white hole and black hole sit back to back in the center of the torus surrounding the Creator, eternally birthing and destroying all there is.

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“What is vibrating from the void will manifest and what is not vibrating will not, but it shall still contain the seed for all that could be.”

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The idea of vibration as the prime emanation is referred to by Bentov as ‘wiggly consciousness,’ and he contends that everything in existence is made up of a combination of vibration and the fertile void, just like the Creator. When he wrote, “The table, the flowers, the scent of the flowers, and our bodies are all made of rapidly vibrating consciousness,” he’s articulating the same concept as Donald Hoffman’s case against local realism. Hoffman, an author and evolutionary biologist, believes that what we experience as local reality is just a sort of user interface generated by our brains in order to make sense of the sea of wiggly particles we’re immersed in. “Fortunately, our senses disregard all these facts and assemble lovely faces, houses and flowers from hunks of void for us to enjoy. But we know that our senses are deceiving us. The gruesome facts still remain. We are hunks of vibrating, wiggly void!”

What is vibrating from the void will manifest and what is not vibrating will not, but it shall still contain the seed for all that could be. Bentov also points out that the fertile void of pure consciousness is not a private void, but one that connects all there is. “Everybody and everything is made up of this vibrating void, whether you like it or not. Your thinking processes spread out and affect all Creation; there is no privacy, and at this point, it is too late to complain,” he wrote. 

The phenomenon of quantum entanglement occurs when two or more particles, such as a pair of photons, become entangled, they remain connected and influence each others’ states even when separated by large distances. According to the book, this process is a mirror of how the Universal Mind creates its experience of ‘other’ by first polarizing into what we understand to be opposites. To activate the creation of all there is, these two poles move away from each other, to opposite ends of the toroidal field surrounding the Creator that looks like a cosmic egg. “Once separated, they want to come together again, because opposite polarities attract each other,” Bentov wrote. “Then the positive end extends with a thunderous sound, the first sound of Creation, it reaches the negative end, whose protospace then begins to flow along the sides of the ovoid, like a wave, outlining the area where space-time and matter will eventually be.”

Bentov also offers an answer for the inevitable question of the meaning of life itself: The point, he tells us, is that the Creator inevitably wants to go beyond the unmanifest rest of the void, craving experience and self-knowledge, but there’s no one and nothing to play with in the unmanifested void! And so vibration begins, followed by polarity, ultimately leading to the creation of all there is. According to this model, we are all fractals of the Universal Mind playing a game of hide-and-seek from our true God-selves. We are so deeply immersed in the world of form that we’ve forgotten our true selves, and what many people call mystical experiences are what Bentov describes as the Absolute saying, “Boo! I’m you!”

He goes even further than this, claiming that the Creator seeks to create more creators who are evolved enough to be responsible for creating their own universes. Achieving enlightenment puts a soul in the running to be promoted from a piece of Creation to Creator-status. Bentov ends the book with a quote from Shankara, an Indian sage who lived in around 800 A.D., to sum up his thesis: “On the vast canvas of the Self, the picture of the manifold worlds, is painted by the Self itself. And the Supreme Self, seeing but itself, enjoys great delight.”

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

Film

Greg Brockman (Part 1)

The Symbolic Task and The White-Haired Man

The Holy Mountain, Alejandro Jodorowsky. 1973.

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Derek Simpson February 24, 2026

“I’m going to give you an act of psychomagic. It won’t address your consciousness but your unconscious.”

A white-haired man offers this gentle proposal to a white-haired woman seeking remedy for her depression. He instructs her to fill a bottle with tap water. “In order to get out of the condition you’re in, and in order to be the master you are because that’s what you are, you’re going to have to start giving…”

They take a  one-block-walk to the Jardin des Plantes, he matches her reluctant pace. In due time, the man pauses their stride, planting his feet along the side of the cement walkway. “Look at this.” He points up at an ancient, wondrous tree poised from within the Earth, frozen in a timeless stretch. “It’s at least 300 years old.” The woman approaches this perfect giant to address it directly. “At first I’m afraid with your big roots, I’m afraid that you… that you…” her arms writhe over an invisible body, miming the hold that the unknown has on her “that you hold me too tightly. I’m afraid. But when I look up it’s fine. I see how beautiful you are.”

The man hands her the bottle, encouraging her to feed her new ally some water and to look up while she does. Sunlight pushes through these woven branches to reach her as the connectedness she previously could not feel is once again present and intuitively understood —she’s been reminded. This man, now beaming, urges her to repeat this ritual with her majestic new friend for the next 20 days explaining that the tree and her are now one, that they share a life.

Our white-haired man is Alejandro Jodorowsky, the creator of psychomagic: a technique for therapy that filters select practices of folk healing through Freud’s theories of the unconscious mind. Put simply, a psychomagic act is a symbolic task to be performed faithfully; your own personal shamanic assignment.

The one sacred rule for a psychomagic act is as follows: if it is prescribed it must be completed. You can, of course, give it a healthy dose of contemplative time before taking action —some clients have even waited years to perform their act. Considering the uncomfortable nature of some of these prescriptions, which regularly include instructions like “act out your own birth with a maternal and paternal participant” or “paint a self portrait with your own blood”, it’s understandable that a client might exhaust any and all other options first. But inevitably we find that in order to heal ourselves, in Jodorowsky’s own words, “we have to do something we’ve never done before - and the harder the better.”

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“Jodorowsky respects the intellect but he also understands that in our attempts to heal ourselves, our intellect may only bring us so far.”

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Jodorowsky is a noted disruptor, and  commonly referenced among lovers of the counter-culture for his groundbreaking contributions to the world of film.. He has long been testing common assumptions on what heights we can and should aspire to in our art-making. Where David Lynch famously traded his paintbrush for a camera and saw clear potential for the motion picture to become the moving painting, Jodorowsky saw an even greater potential for the medium: to heal the ancestral wounds of humanity. It’s clear, in retrospect, that his earliest works for the screen, Fando Y Lis, El Topo, and The Holy Mountain, all hold the seeds of psychomagic. Each of these films attempts to aggravate the viewer’s unconscious mind. He hopes to inspire permanent release from mass mental imprisonment. With his more recent autobiographical pictures, The Dance of Reality and Endless Poetry, the intention is streamlined. These two films are Jodorowsky’s attempts to heal his own ancestral wounds; they are two distinct acts of psychomagic, self-prescribed.

One moment from 2013’s The Dance of Reality shows Jodorowsky as a boy. He stands atop a cliff ready to jump. The young protagonist is suffering constant abuse by the hands of his own father and is regularly ostracized by those his own age. In the moment he begins to lean forward, our white-haired man emerges from behind to pull him back onto the cliff. In this scene, our director plays his own intuition. He realigns his young self by speaking a series of soft truths, ending in a whisper—“Something is dreaming us. Embrace the Illusion. Live.”

In order to fully embrace the illusion, we must surrender all intellectual reasoning: this is the central tenet of psychomagic. Jodorowsky respects the intellect but he also understands that in our attempts to heal ourselves, our intellect may only bring us so far. Our baggage will become alchemized instead through poetic action. Is that not, after all, what we are all looking for?

If we truly want to heal ourselves, then why is this powerful idea yet to be widely acknowledged? We could cast psychomagic aside out of discomfort or we could say that its wide-eyed discoverer is ahead of his time, but maybe there’s a middle way, a more empowering option. We could instead make ourselves vulnerable, admitting that we don’t actually know what we need in order to heal our deepest pains. Once we’ve come to accept that, we could maybe even muster the courage to open ourselves up to something new, to do something we’ve never done before.

When the white-haired woman was first explaining her depressive predicament to Jodorowsky, she also expressed her doubts. At one point she boils it down to a simple restraint “I don’t understand.” Jodorowsky responds with grace “So let your unconscious understand. I’m not holding a philosophical speech, I’m to perform an act of psychomagic to speak to the unconscious. Psychoanalysis uses words. Psychomagic uses acts. We’re going to perform a psychomagic act.”

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Psychomagic: A Healing Art. Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Satori Films, 2019.

Jodorowsky, Alejandro. Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy. Inner Traditions, 2010.

Dragó, Fernando Sánchez. “Alejandro Jodorowsky: Psychomagic (English subtitles) (Full Interview)” Youtube, Uploaded by Maganopigadus, 27 Jul. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_mTFg7u6VA.

The Dance of Reality. Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Le Soleil Films, Caméra One, 2013.

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Derek Simpson is a listener, a mystic, a designer, and an artist.

LISTEN, CONNECT

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.”

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.

16 Excitement - The I Ching

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Chris Gabriel February 21, 2026

Judgment

Excitement makes princes move armies.

Lines

1
The sound of excitement.

2
Always hard as a rock.

3
Wide eyed excitement blinds, regrets come too late.

4
The cause for excitement is great. Gather friends like a hairpin gathers hair.

5
Always sick, never dying.

6
Dark excitement comes and spills out.

Qabalah

Binah to Gevurah: The Path of Cheth. The Chariot.
The energy of Gevurah excites the stable Binah.

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This hexagram depicts excitement as lightning striking the earth, the calm excited by the storm. The ideogram is a “giving elephant”, the animal’s great thunderous crashes and trumpeting. In man, this is enthusiasm and arousal: the forces that get us up and moving.

The Judgment shows the general idea of the hexagram - excitement is that which emboldens leaders and rallies forces. 

1 We can read this literally As the hexagram directly relates to music, this is Wagnerian opera emboldening the aristocracy and the war drum that keeps troops marching.

2 An innuendo for an excited man or animal. The muscles tense as energy readies itself to be unleashed. 

3 One can think of the bad decisions made while sexually aroused, or enraged. It is when we are operating on our base natural drives that we make the worst decisions. Our passions override our reason.

4 With a good cause it’s very easy to excite people, exciting language and aesthetics energize.

5 While our drives can often kill us, they can also keep us going far past our reasonable time. Think of an elderly person kept alive by anger and bitterness. Similarly, bats maintain an unusually high body temperature, which allows them to go unharmed by the countless viruses they can be infected with while still able to infect others..

6 When enough excitement builds up, it is bound to release itself and explode. Yeats describes it perfectly in the Second Coming:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

This is the case of the hexagram - arousal and passion build up, moving from a part of the body, to the individual, and then the crowd. As Nietzsche puts it:

“Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.”

While excitement inevitably spreads, the key is to control it. To not be overtaken with it, but to use it. While many have recognized the likeness between a rock star and a dictator, one whose words and songs move crowds to outrageous action, music can be a good “release valve” for this sort of collective Dionysian madness, a controlled mass insanity. 

This controlling of the energies is precisely the subject of the Tarot card given to this hexagram’s path of Cheth, the Chariot. Cheth itself is the fence or barriers, literally a tool for containing excitement. The Charioteer also controls and directs the energy of his beasts to further himself.

Let us then develop our excitement consciously, move ourselves toward aims we truly desire, and not be moved by the energies swirling around us.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, THOUGHTS

Chris Pavlovski

Thank You, Francis! (1923)

Optophone I, Francis Picabia. c.1922.

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Francis Picabia had an insatiable appetite for art. A true ‘artist’s artist’, he shapeshifted throughout the 20th century, joining and abandoning different movements with reckless abandon. Picabia became a leader of Cubism, a pioneer in Abstraction, a foundational figure in Pop Art, a figure head of Dada, and a primary Surrealist - his paintings could not be contained and his background of wealth meant that he did not need concern himself with money, only creation. In this essay, written when he was already an established figure, he lays out his philosophy of restlessness: an artist must not be concerned with anything other than exploration.

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Francis Picabia February 17, 2026

One must become acquainted with everybody except oneself; one must not know which sex one belongs to; I do not care whether I am male or female, I do not admire men more than I do women. Having no virtue, I am assured of not suffering from them. Many people seek the road which can lead them to their ideal: I have no ideal; the person who parades his ideal is only an arriviste. Undoubtedly, I am also an arriviste, but my lack of scruples is an invention for myself, a subjectivity. Objectively it would consist of awarding myself the légion d’honneur, of wishing to become a minister or of plotting to get into the Institute! Well, for me, all that is shit!

What I like is to invent, to imagine, to make myself a new man every moment, then forget him, forget everything. We should be equipped with a special eraser, gradually effacing our works and the memory of them. Our brain should be nothing but a blackboard, or white, or better, a mirror in which we would see ourselves for a moment, only to turn our back on it two minutes later. My ambition is to be a man sterile for others; the man who set himself up as a school disgusts me, he gives his gonorrhea to artists for nothing and sells it as clearly as possible to amateurs. Actually, writers, painters, and other idiots have passed on the word to fight against the ‘monsters’, monsters who, naturally, do not exist, who are pure inventions, of man.

Artists are afraid; they whisper in each other’s ears about a boogey man which might well prevent them from playing their dirty little tricks! No age, I believe, has been more imbecilic than ours. These gentlemen would have us believe that nothing is happening anymore; the train reversing its engines, it seems, is very pretty to look at, cows are no longer enough! The travelers to this backward Decanville are named: Matisse, Morandi, Braque, Picasso, Léger, de Segonzac, etc., etc. … What is funniest of all is that they accept, as stationmaster, Louis Vauxcelles, whose great black napkin contains only a foetus!

Since the war, a ponderous and half-witted sentiment of morality rules the entire world. The moralists never discern the moral facts of appearances, the Church for them is a morality like the morality of drinking water, or of not daring to wash one’s ass in front of a parrot! All that is arbitrary; people with morals are badly informed, and those who are informed know that the others will not inform themselves.

There is no such thing as a moral problem; morality like modesty is one of the greatest stupidities. The asshole of morality should take the form of a chamber-pot, that’s all the objectivity I ask of it.

This contagious disease called morality has succeeded in contaminating all of the so-called artistic milieux; writers and painters become serious people, and soon we shall have a minister of painting and literature; I don’t doubt that there will be still more frightful assininities. The poets no longer know what to say, so some are becoming Catholics, others believers; these men manufacture their little scribblings as Félix Potin does his cold chicken preserves; people say that Dada is the end of romanticism, that I am a clown, and they cry long live classicism which will save the pure souls and their ambitions, the simple souls so dear to those afflicted by dreams of grandeur!

However, I do not abandon the hope that nothing is finished yet, I am here, and so are several friends who have a love of life, a life we do not know and which interests us for that very reason.

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Francis Picabia (1879 – 1953) was a French avant-garde painter, writer, filmmaker, magazine publisher, poet, and typographist. He is considered one of the most significant and kaleidoscopic artists of his generation.

Larry Levan Playlist

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Larry Levan was an influential American DJ who defined what modern dance clubs are today. He is most widely renowned for his long-time residency at Paradise Garage, also known as “Gay-Rage”, a former nightclub at 84 King Street in Manhattan, NY.

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15 Modesty - The I Ching

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Chris Gabriel February 14, 2026

Judgment

Modesty is prosperity. The Sage achieves his ends.

Lines

1
The Sage is modestly modest, he can cross the river.

2
The sound of modesty.

3
The toils of the modest Sage have an end.

4
Humble modesty.

5
Not rich, he calls on his neighbors, and they raise an army.

6
The sound of modesty directs the army to the city.

Qabalah

Malkuth to Netzach: The Path of Qoph. The Moon.

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In this hexagram, we see the high making itself low. The image is that of a mountain buried under the earth. This is the colossal pyramids covered by the sands of time, a beautiful statue covered in dirt. It is also the nature of wisdom, for the ideogram shows us modesty as rationed words - someone who does not make a show of themselves, but hides their immense power.

1 A wise person is not so modest as to do  nothing, they simply move when the time is right.

2 The wise sage, while not making a show of himself, emits a powerful aura. Spiritual energy can palpably arise from an individual, be it with a simple gesture, or a word of advice. 

3 While a wise person will work hard, they do not work for the sake of working: they have clear goals and do nothing that does not further them.

4 Often, an ascetic makes a show of their own modesty. Many are proud of their apparent virtues, while true wisdom is humble even in their virtue.

5 A wise person is capable of rousing the many to achieve their own goals, without the promise of payment.

6 It is good to be led by a wise general. This line can also go back to the image of the buried pyramid, radar waves penetrating the ground and discovering the contours of what lay beneath.

When we do not choose or engage in modesty, we will be forcibly made humble. This is the irony of pride: no matter how high one makes oneself, we will fall. Shelley shows us best in his poem Ozymandias: 

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

As Hamlet puts it, “Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay”. This truth is why the Pharaohs of Egypt and the Emperors of China would depict themselves humbly as children and orphans on their tombs and documents. By humbling oneself, one assures a greater longevity.

Though the next hexagram, excitement, shows the squeaky wheel getting oil, the quiet, humble wheel is the least likely to get thrown away.

As the hexagram is given to Qoph, the letter of the Moon card in Tarot, we can see the act of veiling, hiding, and occulting at play. Dreams speak in a veiled way, just like spies communicate in an occulted fashion. Even when they are not understood, a symbol can influence a great deal unconsciously, and when understood, its power is enormous.

Therefore, let us humble ourselves, be modest, and let our work and power speak for itself.

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

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