Queen of Cups (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Queen of Cups
Number: 2
Astrology: Cancer, Water of Water
Qabalah: He of He

Chris Gabriel July 26, 2025

The Queen of Cups is the wateriest card in the deck and the quintessence of the element. She is the Mother enthroned, holding her precious womblike grail. She is both guarded and receptive.

In Rider, we have a blonde Queen in a diaphanous gown that melds with the water at her feet. Her throne is adorned by cherubs and shells, and set upon a stony beach. The Cup she holds is closed and complex in its design. Like the Ark of the Covenant it is sealed and guarded by angels. It is topped by a cross and she looks intensely at it.

In Thoth, the Queen is barely visible; her skin is blue, and her face is obscured by the water which flows about her. She holds a lotus in one hand, and in the other, a large shelllike cup from which a little crustaceans peeks out. She is petting an Ibis. The pool she stands in has two lotuses. 

In Marseille, the Queen is blonde, she looks upon her sealed cup and holds a wavy dagger, ready to defend what is hers.

As the Queen of Cups is given to Cancer,  we see the contradictory nature of the card: a cup is meant to be open, to receive water and wine, but the crab of the zodiac is armored and defensive, so her cup is closed off. 

She is protecting what is hers. The Mother who is fiercely protective of her children, or in a negative aspect, a smothering, over protective, and controlling matriarch. She is a lover who sits ready with her dagger to ward off those who would enter her heart or womb. 

An image that arises in Thoth is that of the woman who “loses herself” in love, whether romantic or maternal. Her identity and individuality is secondary to her role. These are universal problems: how do we exist as individuals when surrounded by others? When does defensiveness veer into alienation? How do we let the right people in and keep the wrong people out?

These are the same issues that concern the Chariot, though on a smaller scale. He protects the nation, but the Queen of Cups, another form of Cancer, protects herself and her family. These are the same energies operating on different wavelengths.

Each Queen depicted seems to have a different solution. Rider holds her Cup tightly with both hands - she keeps it sealed, and under constant surveillance. Marseille holds it with one hand, but is ready with a dagger in the other to keep it safe. Thoth hides and disguises herself, she keeps it open, but with a guardian. 

Each solution comes with its own problem, but they all lead the queen to become a “homebody”, a crab happy to live in the same pool forever. Their attention is fixed so strongly upon what is theirs and how to keep it safe that they fail to explore. This is clear when we compare with the opposite card, the Capricornian Queen of Disks, who wants to rise and gain greater power over more space.

When we pull this card, we may be called on to protect what is ours, to mother and care for someone. It may also directly indicate a Cancer that we know.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, THOUGHTS

The Sea and the Wind That Blows

Sailing a Dory, Winslow Homer. 1880.

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A meditation on ageing and an elegy for passion, as E.B. White approached his twilight years in 1963 he looked back on his defining love in this piece first published in ‘Ford Times’. What begins as a dream of boats becomes a study of memory, solitude, and the strange pull of the water. Written as a way to say goodbye as he retire from his hobby, White questions whether he can even leave behind that which seems to define him - his strange, lifelong entanglement with the sea.

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E. B. White July 24, 2025

Waking or sleeping, I dream of boats - usually of rather small boats under a slight press of sail. When I think how great a part of my life has been spent dreaming the hours away and how much of this total dream life has concerned small craft, I wonder about the state of my health, for I am told that it is not a good sign to be always voyaging into unreality, driven by imaginary breezes.

I have noticed that most men, when they enter a barber shop and must wait their turn, drop into a chair and pick up a magazine. I simply sit down and pick up the thread of my sea wandering, which began more than fifty years ago and is not quite ended. There is hardly a waiting room in the East that has not served as my cockpit, whether I was waiting to board a train or to see a dentist. And I am usually still trimming sheets when the train starts or the drill begins to whine. If a man must be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most. A small sailing craft is not only beautiful, it is seductive and full of strange promise and the hint of trouble. If it happens to be an auxiliary cruising boat, it is without question the most compact and ingenious arrangement for living ever devised by the restless mind of man - a home that is stable without being stationary, shaped less like a box than like a fish or a bird or a girl, and in which the homeowner can remove his daily affairs as far from shore as he has the nerve to take them, close-hauled or running free -parlor, bedroom, and bath, suspended and alive.

Men who ache allover for tidiness and compactness in their lives often find relief for their pain in the cabin of a thirty-foot sailboat at anchor in a sheltered cove. Here the sprawling panoply of The Home is compressed in orderly miniature and liquid delirium, suspended between the bottom of the sea and the top of the sky, ready to move on in the morning by the miracle of canvas and the witchcraft of rope. It is small wonder that men hold boats in the secret place of their mind, almost from the cradle to the grave.

Along with my dream of boats has gone the ownership of boats, a long succession of them upon the surface of the sea, many of them makeshift and crank.

Since childhood I have managed to have some sort of sailing craft and to raise a sail in fear. Now, in my sixties, I still own a boat, still raise my sail in fear in answer to the summons of the unforgiving sea.

Why does the sea attract me in the way it does: Whence comes this compulsion to hoist a sail, actually or in dream? My first encounter with the sea was a case of hate at first sight. I was taken, at the age of four, to a bathing beach in New Rochelle. Everything about the experience frightened and repelled me: the taste of salt in my mouth, the foul chill of the wooden bathhouse, the littered sand, the stench of the tide flats. I came away hating and fearing the sea. Later, I found that what I had feared and hated, I now feared and loved.

I returned to the sea of necessity, because it would support a boat; and although I knew little of boats, I could not get them out of my thoughts. I became a pelagic boy. The sea became my unspoken challenge: the wind, the tide, the fog, the ledge, the bell, the gull that cried help, the never-ending threat and bluff of weather.

Once having permitted the wind to enter the belly of my sail, I was not able to quit the helm; it was as though I had seized hold of a high-tension wire and could not let go.

I liked to sail alone. The sea was the same as a girl to me I did not want anyone else along.

Lacking instruction, I invented ways of getting things done, and usually ended by doing them in a rather queer fashion, and so did not learn to sail properly, and still cannot sail well, although I have been at it all my life. I was twenty before I discovered that charts existed; all my navigating up to that time was done with the wariness and the ignorance of the early explorers. I was thirty before I learned to hang a coiled halyard on its cleat as it should be done. Until then I simply coiled it down on deck and dumped the coil. I was always in trouble and always returned, seeking more trouble. Sailing became a compulsion: there lay the boat, swinging to her mooring, there blew the wind; I had no choice hut to go. My earliest boats were so small that when the wind failed, or when I failed, I could switch to manual control-I could paddle or row home. But then I graduated to boats that only the wind was strong enough to move. When I first dropped off my mooring in such a boat, I was an hour getting up the nerve to cast off the pennant. Even now, with a thousand little voyages notched in my belt, I still I feel a memorial chill on casting off, as the gulls jeer and the empty mainsail claps.

The Cat Boat, Edward Hopper. 1922.

Of late years, I have noticed that my sailing has increasingly become a compulsive activity rather than a source of pleasure. There lies the boat, there blows the morning breeze-it is a point of honor, now, to go. I am like an alcoholic who cannot put his bottle out of his life. With me, I cannot not sail. Yet I know well enough that I have lost touch with the wind and, in fact, do not like the wind any more.

It jiggles me up, the wind does, and what I really love are windless days, when all is peace. There is a great question in my mind whether a man who is against wind should longer try to sail a boat. But this is an intellectual response-the old yearning is still in me, belonging to the past, to youth, and so I am torn between past and present, a common disease of later life.

When does a man quit the sea? How dizzy, how bumbling must he be? Does he quit while he's ahead, or wait till he makes some major mistake, like falling overboard or being flattened by an accidental jibe? This past winter I spent hours arguing the question with myself. Finally, deciding that I had come to the end of the road, I wrote a note to the boatyard, putting my boat up for sale. I said I was "coming off the water." But as I typed the sentence, I doubted that I meant a word of it.

If no buyer turns up, I know what will happen: I will instruct the yard to put her in again-"just till somebody comes along." And then there will be the old uneasiness, the old uncertainty, as the mild southeast breeze ruffles the cove, a gentle, steady, morning breeze, bringing the taint of the distant wet world, the smell that takes a man back to the very beginning of time, linking him to all that has gone before. There will lie the sloop, there will blow the wind, once more I will get under way. And as I reach across to the black can off the Point, dodging the trap buoys and toggles, the shags gathered on the ledge will note my passage. "There goes the old boy again," they will say. "One more rounding of his little Horn, one more conquest of his Roaring Forties." And with the tiller in my hand, I'll feel again the wind imparting life to a boat, will smell again the old menace, the one that imparts life to me: the cruel beauty of the salt world, the barnacle's tiny knives, the sharp spine of the urchin, the stinger of the sun jelly, the claw of the crab.

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E.B. White (1899–1985) was an American essayist, poet, and author best known for Charlotte’s Web and his nearly 60 year career as a writer, then contributing editor, for The New Yorker, from its founding until his death.

How Old Is The Sky? A Brief History Across Philosophies

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Sander Priston July 22, 2025

Despite the ancient sounding ring to this rather abstract question, the first sign of an attempted answer in Western philosophy came only with the Moderns. Not the Stoics with their eternal return, nor the Christians with their metaphysical hesitations, it wasn’t until the 17th and 18th Centuries that two very different philosophers emerged with two very different answers to the question.

The first came from a bishop named James Ussherwho in 1650 published Annales Veteris Testamenti -a chronology of the world using the Bible as a historical record. In this, he declared that the creation of the world — including the heavens and sky — occurred on

Sunday, 23 October, 4004 BC, at around 6:00 PM.

It is a strangely precise estimate for a first try, and implied the sky was roughly 6,000 years old in his time. This young sky abides by the Biblical notion that the earth and its heavens were invented for humanity’s sake.

65 years later, a natural philosopher watching molten iron cool in a furnace proposed a radically different answer. Edmond Halley, who famously predicted the date a comet would return decades before it did, used the salinity of the oceans and the rate of cooling of celestial bodies to estimate the sky's age. 

In a 1714–1716 issue of the Philosophical Transactions, Edmond Halley presented what we now call the ‘salt clock’ method—using the rate of salt accumulation in the oceans to estimate the age of the Earth—and by implication, the atmosphere and sky. He declared that, “The sky is 75,000 years old. At least.”

Though Halley fell short of a definitive number like Ussher’s, he was among the first to suggest that a measurable, natural process could give us an empirical age of the cosmos. This kicked off the inquiry which led us to our most up-to-date estimate of ~13.8 billion years, reached through a combination of Cosmic microwave background radiation measurements (from missions like Planck and WMAP), Hubble’s law (expansion rate of the universe), and standard cosmological models (like ΛCDM).

Together, Ussher and Halley represent a major philosophical clash at the dawn of modern science. Ussher’s precise, scripture-based chronology reflected a worldview where the sky was young and created for humanity, while Halley’s naturalistic measurements hinted at a vast, ancient universe waiting to be understood through observation and reason.

Looking beyond Western thought, however, we find many interesting and creative attempts by philosophers at dating the age of the sky. In Hindu Cosmology, for example, the sky is 155.52 trillion years old.

In the Puranas and Mahabharata, important Hindu religious texts, time is structured into immense cosmic cycles. A kalpa (a "day of Brahma") is 4.32 billion years. A full cycle (including nights, years, lifetimes of Brahma) adds up to trillions of years. The current sky is said to be in the 51st year of Brahma, which places the age of this cycle of the universe at around 155.52 trillion years. The sky then has an age but no clear origin.

Madame Blavatsky, the 19th-century Russian-born mystic and founder of Theosophy, drew heavily on ancient Hindu cosmology and esoteric traditions to propose her own occultist answer, centered on the concept of “Manvantaras” — vast cosmic cycles. These cycles are measured in millions to billions of years, though Blavatsky’s calculations are symbolic and allegorical rather than scientific.

In her major work, The Secret Doctrine (1888), Blavatsky described Earth’s spiritual and physical evolution as unfolding through seven Root Races, or stages in humanity’s development, each corresponding metaphorically to vast astrological ages governed by star-beings. The Hindu-inspired cycles she describes imply a sky that is billions of years old, with a Mahayuga (Great Age) lasting 4.32 million years and a Day of Brahma lasting 4.32 billion years (1,000 Mahayugas).

Some Chinese Daoist alchemical texts, especially those concerned with immortality and the “Great Year” (da nian), describe time as cyclical in units of 129,600 years — tied to astronomical and numerological systems. The Taiyi Shengshui (The One Gave Birth to Water) and works like Huainanzi talk of sky and earth co-arising from primal qi, but some traditions suggest skies are reborn every great cycle. So the sky has a reset button, and its age is the circumference of a cosmic breath: 129,600 years.

In Zoroastrian cosmology, the universe is laid out across a 12,000-year timeline, divided into 4 epochs of 3,000 years. The sky (or firmament) was created in the second epoch, after the spiritual world but before humanity. So the sky is roughly 9,000 years old in this system – it was built in Year 3,000 and will collapse by Year 12,000.

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“The sky, to our eyes, may rise, set, storm, and clear  but this is theater, not ontology. The real sky — if such a thing exists — cannot age, because it does not become. It simply is.”

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Our question, then, was considered across ancient cultures so why did no  answer appear in Western thought prior to the Modern Period? For the Ancients, the reason is likely that they didn’t separate the sky from the cosmos. Asking “how old is the sky?” was like asking “How old is the stage before the play?” Time was something the sky measures, not something the sky experiences. As the realm of gods, stars, or divine harmony, giving it a number would be like putting a birthday on Zeus.

We see this in Plato, for whom the sky is not in time — time is in the sky; it is the first clock. Its age is synonymous with the very concept of age. For the Stoics, the sky has died a thousand times and will live again (ekpyrosis). It has no age because it is incapable of ceasing to be. It is a loop, not a line.

In many mythologies, the sky is not a natural object, but a deliberate covering — a veil stretched taut by the gods to conceal the raw machinery of existence. In Babylonian myth, Marduk slays the chaos-dragon Tiamat and stretches her body across the heavens to form the sky — a grim, cosmic tarp made of vanquished disorder. In Genesis, the firmament is created to divide the waters above from the waters below — a protective dome that makes human life possible. The sky is a curtain drawn for our benefit.

Gnostic texts, like On the Origin of the World and Apocryphon of John, consider the sky a deception – a rotating dome ruled by false gods (archons) who trap souls below it. The sky’s age is the length of our captivity — its number is how long we’ve been asleep.

Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516), a cryptographer-monk-mystic, wrote about celestial intelligences controlling the world in 800-year periods, rotating like gears — a secret calendar with no age, but a coded rhythm

Some of the most interesting philosophies of the sky come from pre-Socratic philosophers. Their fragmentary insights, handed down in cryptic scraps, do not ask for an age, but rather  what the sky is, and how it comes to be. They all answered our question in their own way — not with numbers, but with metaphors of fire, breath, rhythm, and ruin.

For Parmenides, the sky had no age. All that exists is Being, and Being does not change. Time, movement, growth, decay — these are illusions conjured by unreliable senses. If we trust only reason, we must conclude that what is, always was and always will be. There is no birth or death,  past or future. Only the eternal, seamless Now. If the sky is, then it has no age, because age presumes change — a before and after. But there is no before and after in truth.

The sky, to our eyes, may rise, set, storm, and clear  but this is theater, not ontology. The real sky — if such a thing exists — cannot age, because it does not become. It simply is. And if the sky as we perceive it is part of the grand illusion of Becoming, then the question of its age is a nonsense question — like asking for the temperature of a mirage.

Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 500 BCE), known as the “weeping philosopher,” suggested a cosmos of ever-living fire. For him, the world — including the heavens — was not created, nor static, but constantly in flux:

“The cosmos, the same for all, was not made by gods or men, but always was and is and will be: an ever-living fire.”

For Heraclitus, to ask for the age of the sky is like asking the age of a flame. The fire exists because it burns. It is always old and always new. If there is time, it’s cyclical — the sky is not a container but a process: always kindling, always extinguishing, always returning.

Anaximenes of Miletus (c. 6th century BCE) conceived of the sky as breath. Air (aēr), he proposed, was the source of everything. The stars and sky condensed from rarefied air; the world breathing in and out.

“Just as our soul, being air, holds us together, so breath and air encompass the whole world.”

The sky was  of organic origin, made of the same stuff as soul. Its “age” is not historical but elemental. If breath is continuous, then the sky is not old in years, but eternally emerging, an exhalation of the cosmos.

For Anaximander, a shadowy figure who may have drawn the first map of the earth, the sky is a wound in the boundless. He imagined the universe emerging from the apeiron, indefinite and boundless. Worlds rise and fall from it in cycles, like bubbles in water. He conceived of celestial bodies as wheels of fire, partially obscured by mist, with visible light shining through holes — the stars and sun are leaks in the firmament.

“Things perish into those things out of which they came to be, according to necessity.”

Anaximander gives us a sky with not one beginning and an end, but many. Skies emerge and dissolve in cycles like peeling skins off an onion, each cosmos reveals another behind it.

Pythagorean cosmology understood the heavens as music — spheres turning in mathematically perfect harmony. Planets were believed to emit tones as they moved, inaudible to human ears: the “music of the spheres.” Here, the sky is not aged like an object but measured like a chord. It is timeless in the way a song is: you may experience part of it, but it exists all at once, in ideal form. 

Today, our scientific understanding of the sky’s billion year existence tends to conjure up dread about our human insignificance. But history teaches us the enormity of varying reactions to the belief that the sky is ancient. As our own living philosopher Thomas Nagel pithily puts it, ridiculing existentialism, “suppose we lived forever; would not a life that is absurd if it lasts seventy years be infinitely absurd even if it lasted through eternity?”

Our internet-age nihilism is expertly mocked by Nagel, whose optimistically objective “view from nowhere” just looks like an overcast Tuesday. The sky can be meaningful, he insists, even when drab. Sure it may be indifferent to us, but if it’s going to hang over us all our lives then we may as well recognise the meaning it has had for others and project a bit of our own selves onto it. Maybe time to get offline and engage in a more meaningful, non-digital kind of looking up.

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Sander Priston is a busking philosopher, journalist, and musician.

The Tower (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: The Tower, the House of God
Number: XVI
Astrology: Mars
Qabalah: Pe, the Mouth

Chris Gabriel July 19, 2025

In the Tower we find the dual nature of energy perfectly expressed as creation and destruction. What Man makes, God shall destroy, what God makes, Man shall destroy. This is the Tower of Babel and the endlessly repeating Fall of Man. In each, divine fire destroys the high tower, and the inhabitants plummet below. 

In Rider, a black sky is torn by a lightning strike. A bolt has thrown off the golden crown from atop a high stone tower with three windows. Flames devour what remains. Two royals fall below and little yellow yods rain from the clouds.

In Thoth, we have a rather cubist image; a tower warping down, the maw of Hell spitting out flames while an unblinking eye in the sky looks on as figures jump from the high tower. In the sky dwell a dove and a serpent (the lion headed snake god Ialdabaoth, the evil god of the world according to Gnostic Christians).

In Marseille, it is an almost playful scene, a feathery ray rips the crown off the tower, while two figures fall, their hands just touching the earth. Colorful balls fall along the three-windowed tower.

These are three very different depictions: one playful, one tragic, one horrific. Each is valid. Marseille strongly calls to mind the insight of Heraclitus; that God is but a child playing with toys. We have seen this juvenile God playfully make dolls kiss in the Lovers, but here we see the divine child knock down the blocks he’s been stacking. 

Mankind cannot accept its own ephemeral nature. It desperately tries to create lasting works, to erect expressions of itself, contradictory to the natural flux of God. The Tower is simply God laughing at these vain attempts. We try to escape our nature in lofty ideas, but God kindly brings us back down to the earth.

As Mars, this card is the complement to the Empress’ Venus. The Empress maternally cultivates, protects, and grows while the Tower razes, attacks, and undoes. In this way, they are perfectly balanced. The Dove and the Serpent. 

This duality is prominent in Christianity, the spiritual basis of Marseille, and in Thelema, the basis of Thoth.

Love is the law, love under will. Nor let the fools mistake love; for there are love and love. There is the dove, and there is the serpent. Choose ye well!

-Book of the Law I:57

Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves. 

-Matthew 10:16

This card answers one of the greatest difficulties of believers: why do bad things happen?

Simply because God wills it, because it amuses God, so says Nietzsche in Genealogy of Morals:

It is certain, at any rate, that the Greeks still knew of no tastier spice to offer their gods to season their happiness than the pleasures of cruelty. With what eyes do you think Homer made his gods look down upon the destinies of men? What was at bottom the ultimate meaning of Trojan Wars and other such tragic terrors? There can be no doubt whatever: they were intended as festival plays for the gods.

It is our own fear that manufactures the desire for a “Good” (according to our human morals) God, rather than accepting God as such. The Tarot is meant to be a complete image of God, a cosmogram. As such, it contains both the infinite love and infinite violence of a whole universe. 

In the human sphere, this card is often directly sexual. When social facades crumble, the natural drives express themselves, either with the passion of sex, or violence. This can indicate that your well laid plans will go awry and the unexpected will occur. When we are aligned with the universe, this tends to be a pleasant surprise rather than a wretched accident. 

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, THOUGHTS

Divine Warriors and Villains (Pronoia Pt. 3)

Kalīlah wa-Dimnah, ca. 1525–50.

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Molly Hankins July 17, 2025

We all have different roles to play in the great human drama advancing the plot of our evolution. A pronoia-informed perspective invites us to consider the possibility that characters we fear or dislike might be playing critical parts in our stories. Pronoia author Rob Breszney’s worldview is that of a benevolent, conscious universe, one conspiring to facilitate evolutionary opportunities for our highest good and sometimes greatest delight. Those we perceive as enemies are often our greatest teachers and Breszney believes we owe them a debt of gratitude for “sharpening our wits and and sculpting our souls.” How could the universal conspiracy to give us exactly what our souls need operate without the plot twists facilitated by seemingly bad actors?

Breszney writes, “Imagine the people you fear and dislike as pivotal characters in a fascinating and ultimately redemptive plot that will take years or even lifetimes to elaborate.” By offering gratitude to those characters, we can neutralize our innate, egoic reaction to them and instead grease the wheels of evolution by welcoming their teachings. Kabbalah recommends responding to any stimulus that elicits a negative reaction by consciously pausing, followed by saying, “What a gift!” It can be said  out loud or simply to yourself, but it’s an essential part of rewiring our perspective away from paranoia and towards pronoia. With practice it becomes muscle memory, and a means of washing our own brains to default to pronoia.

Those souls willing to play the villain are actually doing a great service,sacrificing their ego to play the part. By asking ourselves why someone is in our life story and what archetype they’re playing, we zoom out from the minutia of human drama and start to see such patterns as part of a greater cycle of life. Perhaps this moment of disidentification is all we need to be able to move with, “...the shifting conditions of the Wild Divine’s ever-fresh creation,” instead of fighting the flow. Practicing pronoia simply means training our perception to perceive life as giving us exactly what we need, exactly when we need it. To perceive our enemies as old, soul friends playing a tough part in our story is to both neutralize the emotional effect they have on us and to send them love. 

Without villains, how can the hero become the warrior?? Breszney recommends always thanking our adversaries for the crucial roles they’ve played in our lives and believes we owe extra gratitude to those we feel have slowed us down. By causing blockage or delay in our journey these people are actually preventing things from happening too fast, which is often impossible to perceive as it’s happening. “Imagine that the evolution of your life or our culture is like a pregnancy: it needs to reach its full term,” he wrote. Life has its own timing and when we sync up with it we can feel it. This is the  flow-state, and it’s often punctuated by an uptick in synchronicities and what the untrained eye might call coincidences. 

Cultivating flow and authentic presence is a feature of the warrior archetype, which according to Tibetan texts, has four features of dignity. 

1. Relaxed confidence (often mistranslated as “meekness”)

2. Relentless joy (perkiness)

3. Outrageousness (which can help us overcome both fear and hope)

4. Inscrutability (inability to be pinned down by a label that would only limit the warrior)

Many of us may play the villain in the story of another without meaning to or even realizing it, a reminder that our souls play every part, often in the same lifetime. By consciously cultivating the above features of dignity through focused attention, we wash our brains to act more in the interest of our higher, heroic warrior nature. Even if we’re playing the villain and stooping to our lower, animal nature in the process. however, we can still live in what Breszney calls “alignment with the infinity of the moment.” To be aligned with the infinity of the moment is to revel in pronoia as a practice. 

He writes, “Even if some of us are temporarily in the midst of trial or tribulation, human evolution is proceeding exactly as it should, even if we can’t see the big picture of the puzzle that would clarify how all the pieces fit together perfectly.” Pronoia is not about absolute truth, which us humans don’t fully get to know anyway. It is  about utility. Believing the universe is conspiring in our favor is useful because it’s empowering and accounts for the influence we have on reality just by perceiving it. As the book ends Breszney leaves readers with the assignment to imagine everything in the world belongs to us and take good care of it, the way we want others to. 

“And make sure you also enjoy the level of fun that comes with such mastery,” he encourages us. “Glide through life as if all of creation is yearning to honor and entertain you.” 

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

She Unnames Them

The Creation of Eve, William Blake. 1808.

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First published in 1985, Ursula Le Guin’s now classic short story is a masterpiece of concise, flash fiction. Taking Genesis 2:19-20 - “So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name” - as her starting point, Le Guin reframes the story with Eve, not Adam as the protagonist. Woman was named, just as the animals were, and this Bible verse implicitly suggests a hierarchy of power between the sexes. Le Guin gives the autonomy back to Eve, and allows her to give that same gift to the animals by ridding them of the names they never chose.

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Ursula Le Guin July 15, 2025

Most of them accepted namelessness with the perfect indifference with which they had so long accepted and ignored their names. Whales and dolphins, seals and sea otters consented with particular alacrity, sliding into anonymity as into their element. A faction of yaks, however, protested. They said that "yak" sounded right, and that almost everyone who knew they existed called them that. Unlike the ubiquitous creatures such as rats and fleas, who had been called by hundreds or thousands of different names since Babel, the yaks could truly say, they said, that they had a name. They discussed the matter all summer. The councils of elderly females finally agreed that though the name might be useful to others it was so redundant from the yak point of view that they never spoke it themselves and hence might as well dispense with it. After they presented the argument in this light to their bulls, a full consensus was delayed only by the onset of severe early blizzards. Soon after the beginning of the thaw, their agreement was reached and the designation "yak" was returned to the donor. 

Among the domestic animals, few horses had cared what anybody called them since the failure of Dean Swift's attempt to name them from their own vocabulary. Cattle, sheep, swine, asses, mules, and goats, along with chickens, geese, and turkeys, all agreed enthusiastically to give their names back to the people to whom, as they put it, they belonged. 

A couple of problems did come up with pets. The cats, of course, steadfastly denied ever having had any name other than those self - given, unspoken, ineffably personal names which, as the poet named Eliot said, they spend long hours daily contemplating, though none of the contemplators has ever admitted that what they contemplate is their names and some onlookers have wondered if the object of that meditative gaze might not in fact be the Perfect, or Platonic, Mouse. In any case, it is a moot point now. It was with the dogs, and with some parrots, lovebirds, ravens, and mynahs, that the trouble arose. These verbally talented individuals insisted that their names were important to them, and flatly refused to part with them. 

But as soon as they understood that the issue was precisely one of individual choice, and that anybody who wanted to be called Rover, or Froufrou, or Polly, or even Birdie in the personal sense, was perfectly free to do so, not one of them had the least objection to parting with the lowercase (or, as regards German creatures, uppercase) generic appellations "poodle," "parrot," "dog," or "bird," and all the Linnaean qualifiers that had trailed along behind them for two hundred years like tin cans tied to a tail. 

The insects parted with their names in vast clouds and swarms of ephemeral syllables buzzing and stinging and humming and flitting and crawling and tunnelling away. 

As for the fish of the sea, their names dispersed from them in silence throughout the oceans like faint, dark blurs of cuttlefish ink, and drifted off on the currents without a trace. 

None were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawl across my way or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for a while in the day. They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear. And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire to feel or rub or caress one another’s scales or skin or feathers or fur, taste one another’s blood or flesh, keep one another warm -- that attraction was now all one with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food. 

This was more or less the effect I had been after. It was somewhat more powerful than I had anticipated, but I could not now, in all conscience, make an exception for myself. I resolutely put anxiety away, went to Adam, and said, "You and your father lent me this, gave it to me, actually. It's been really useful, but it doesn't exactly seem to fit very well lately. But thanks very much! It's really been very useful." It is hard to give back a gift without sounding peevish or ungrateful, and I did not want to leave him with that impression of me. He was not paying much attention, as it happened, and said only, "Put it down over there, O.K.?" and went on with what he was doing. 

One of my reasons for doing what I did was that talk was getting us nowhere, but all the same I felt a little let down. I had been prepared to defend my decision. And I thought that perhaps when he did notice he might be upset and want to talk. I put some things away and fiddled around a little, but he continued to do what he was doing and to take no notice of anything else. At last I said, "Well, goodbye, dear. I hope the garden key turns up." 

He was fitting parts together, and said, without looking around, "O.K., fine, dear. When’s dinner?" "I'm not sure," I said. I'm going now. With the… " I hesitated, and finally said, "With them, you know," and went on out. In fact, I had only just then realized how hard it would have been to explain myself. I could not chatter away as I used to do, taking it all for granted. My words must be as slow, as new, as single, as tentative as the steps I took going down the path away from the house, between the dark--branched, tall dancers motionless against the winter shining.

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Ursula K. Le Guin ( 1929 – 2018) was an American author, best known for her science fiction works The Hainish Cycle and The Earthsea Cycle. Over the course of her life, she wrote more than twenty novels and more than a hundred shrot stories, as well as seminal works of literary criticism.

King of Wands / Prince of Wands (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: King or Prince of Wands
Number: 1 or 3
Astrology: Leo, Fire of Fire or Air of Fire
Qabalah: Yod of Yod or Vau of Yod

Chris Gabriel July 12, 2025

The King of Wands is the highest of the face cards, the “King of Kings” with the biggest weapon in the deck. He holds fantastic power yet looks into the distance, hungry for more.

In Rider, the King is red haired with a crown of golden flames. He wears red, green, and yellow robes and sits in a high throne emblazoned with Lions and Salamanders, while a little Salamander stands beside him. His wand reaches from the ground to well above his head.

In Thoth, the Prince is naked, save for his radiant crown topped by a winged lion’s head. His chest is marked with Crowley’s phallic sigil. He holds a Phoenix wand in one hand and the reins of the Lion pulling his chariot in the other. The whole card is full of flames.

In Marseille, we have a blonde king in full armour. He is seated restlessly upon his throne, ready to pounce at any moment. His wand sits at his heel and reaches his head. He looks off into the distance, ready to conquer.

While Aquarius symbolizes “the people”, Leo is the King atop them. The fire of this card is doubled: the fire of Wands, and the fire of Kings. Leo, where the Sun takes joy, is embodied here. The Lion is the king of the jungle, his golden mane is like the radiant sun. 

When I see the distant gaze of the King in Marseille, I think of Alexander weeping for there were no more worlds to conquer. I think of Napoleon, who felt the sacred fire of ambition in himself and sought for more than men had since Caesar. We must not think of the King as being almighty, high and satisfied, but rather, terribly hungry. The King of Wands achieved his position, not by desiring to rule any one thing, but by desiring to rule more.

The Page of Wands looks up to the height of his Wand; he desires to measure up, to be a knight, or with ambition,  a King one day, but these sorts of desires do not make for greatness. Alexander did not wish to be a God, but already believed he was one and demanded worship. The Spartans rightly replied “If Alexander wishes to be a God, let him be.” At the other end of the King are “delusions of grandeur”. Many mad men believe themselves to be Napoleon, but it was Napoleon’s own delusions that made him such. Therein is the secret of the King of Wands. A will strong enough to make truth out of delusion.

When we pull this card, we can expect to encounter a strong, dominating character, maybe directly a Leo. It may also be that we must take on a leadership position. One must hold fast to their will to keep from being conquered or to keep from becoming a tyrant.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, THOUGHTS

Patterns of Authority: Sound is Spatial (II)

“Carnegie Music Hall.” Lewis and Clark Trail Experience, 2025.

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Robin Sparkes July 10, 2025

The social construction of space provides a vital lens through which to examine how architectural acoustics function as tools within a system of regulation. Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space provides a comprehensive framework for understanding how spaces are socially constructed and used to maintain power. He writes, "Space is not a thing but rather a set of relations between things, a product of social interactions" (Lefebvre). This perspective resonates with architectural acoustics, as the design of spaces influences how sound is produced, transmitted, and experienced. 

The spatial organization of a concert hall amplifies certain frequencies to enhance auditory experiences, while urban planning decisions often prioritize industrial sounds over human comfort. Carnegie Hall was designed by architect William Burnet Tuthill. Opened in 1891 in New York City,  itis renowned for its exceptional acoustics due its sound duration for different pitches, where low and high frequencies resonate evenly throughout the room. The Hall’s initial programming for classical music, aimed at the upper class, exemplifies how spatial configurations not only influence acoustic experiences but reflect social value and hierarchy. The  elliptical shape, smooth interior surfaces, slightly extended stage, and domed ceiling ensure that both soft and loud tones are projected with equal clarity throughout the venue. 

Tuthill’s design choices align with the Renaissance pursuit of harmonic proportions, creating both visual and auditory harmony. Lefebvre argues that space is not merely a physical container but a product of social interactions and relations. In this light, Carnegie Hall’s design both reflects and reinforces the social hierarchies and cultural values of its time.. Examining its architectural and acoustic design through Lefebvre's spatial theory reveals how such spaces function as instruments that both reflect and shape societal values and hierarchies.

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Patterns in Space

Acoustemology, a concept developed by Steven Feld in his studies of the Kaluli people, challenges the traditional visual-centric understanding of space. Feld demonstrates how soundscapes—the sonic equivalent of landscapes—reveal spatial patterns and societal structures. For the Kaluli, Feld notes in Sound and Sentiment, waterfalls, bird calls, and echoes create an auditory map of their environment, connecting space and culture. His work illustrates that patterns in space are as much auditory as they are physical, shaping how people inhabit and conceptualize their environments. In Kaluli ceremonies, vocal sounds and echoes connect people to ancestral spirits, reinforcing systems of authority and belief. Colonial impositions of Western soundscapes - such as church bells and industrial noise -disrupted indigenous acoustic environments, symbolizing new forms of dominance. Feld asserts, "Acoustic patterns have historically been used to assert authority, such as through ceremonies or colonial soundscapes."(Feld) These patterns reinforce cultural memory and social structure through sound. Feld’s work affirms that listening is a vital mode of spatial understanding, where soundscapes actively construct meaning and sustain authority.

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“Acoustic design has long been a means through which power is exerted in space: from the controlling of sound to enforce silence, to the amplification of particular voices in ways that resonate with authority and command”

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In The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, Jonathan Sterne examines how sound technologies reflect and shape societal norms. His notion of the "auditory field" highlights the modern shift from communal soundscapes to private auditory experiences, such as through headphones or soundproofing. Sterne asserts, "The design of spaces and their acoustic properties are deeply intertwined with the values and priorities of the superstructure." This perspective aligns with architectural practices that use sound control—like noise barriers or acoustic panels—to shape spatial interactions and experiences. 

Feld, Steven. “Acoustemology.” Environmental Humanities Center, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2025.

Moneo’s insights on typology link spatial patterns to cultural memory. He argues that architectural forms—like basilicas, amphitheaters, and courtyards—serve as anchors that organize social and cultural practices. Moneo writes, "The persistence of typology is a testament to its role in shaping collective experiences of space and time."(Moneo) Jonathan Sterne’s work complements this by exploring how modern sound technologies amplify authority. Public address systems, for instance, centralize power by privileging certain voices over others, often in architecturally designed spaces like stadiums or political arenas. Sterne writes, "The control of sound—its production, amplification, and dissemination—reinforces social and political hierarchies."(Sterne) Architectural acoustics consistently serve as tools of authority, shaping who is heard and how.

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Modern Implications of Acoustic Authority

Urban planning and architectural acoustics often prioritize certain soundscapes while marginalizing others, reflecting broader societal hierarchies. Thompson observes that "the acoustics of power is not only about who is heard but also about how sound is shaped to convey dominance, unity, or submission in spatial terms".These spaces embody the intersection of sound and power, where architectural design mediates authority through acoustic patterns.

Moneo’s focus on typology provides a framework for understanding these dynamics. By analyzing how typological forms—such as auditoriums or legislative chambers—evolve over time, Moneo reveals how architectural design continues to shape authority and cultural identity. He writes, "The evolution of typology reflects shifting power structures, as new forms emerge to accommodate changes in societal organization and technological advancement."(Moneo) The systematic use of architectural acoustics in modern architecture reveals its intrinsic connection to the superstructure, as physical spaces embody and shape societal ideologies. Examining patterns in space and acoustic authority show how architecture expresses power, aligning human spaces with social orders. "Acoustic design has long been a means through which power is exerted in space: from the controlling of sound to enforce silence, to the amplification of particular voices in ways that resonate with authority and command" (Thompson). Understanding architecture’s historical and theoretical dimensions provides the tools to unpack how it reinforces  power structures. As modern architectural practices continue to evolve, the integration of sound, space, and typology remains a vital tool for navigating and shaping the superstructure of society.

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Robin Sparkes, is a spatial designer, studying the kinesthetic experience of architecture. Her design, research, and writing practice traverses the relationship between the body, temporality, and the acoustics of space.

Floating (Museum of Suspense III)

Peter Paul Rubens, Hero and Leander, c. 1604, oil on canvas, Yale University Art Gallery

Ale Nodarse July 8, 2025

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Certain images bring you back to them. Peter Paul Rubens’s Hero and Leander (c. 1604, Yale University Art Gallery) is one such image. It is, after all, a painting about return. Or rather about return’s denial.

On the surface, it is a mythological image: a tragic scene of Ovidian lovers. A boy named Leander crosses a sea — the Grecian Hellespont — to reach his beloved Hero. He swims only at night, guided by the stars and Hero’s lamplight. But one night, a storm unfolds. Hero’s light is obscured and Leander loses his way. He drowns. 

In Rubens’s picture, the protagonist continues to float, his body outstretched. He is carried by the waves and the nymphs who ripple within them — graceful bodies which murmur “ebb” and “flow” in a language theirs alone. Perhaps it is telling that when the Neapolitan poet Giambattista Marino saw Rubens’s canvas, he admonished the nymphs. “Where, where do you sea-nymphs carry [him]?” the poet cried.¹ How often has nature (or the divine, of which Rubens’s nymphs are part) appeared to us unsympathetic? 

Rubens, a masterful conjurer of figures and fables alike, condenses the Ovidian narrative into a single cinematic frame. In the fable, Leander’s lifeless body would be brought by waves to Hero’s shore; upon her discovery of him, Hero would throw herself from the tower which once lit her beloved’s way. In the painting, Leander remains within the picture’s center. He is an eye stilled within the storm. Whereas Hero, but a dash of red cloth at the picture’s margin, falls. To be more precise, she is still falling. 

Everything remains in a state of suspense, including the composition of the painting itself. Glancing above Leander’s body, past the throws of nymph and storm, one finds the horizon line. There, in the distance, the storm has subsided. That horizon remains out of reach, and the aperture  upon which it opens appears destined to close. The whole painting centers on this closure. To return to the painting is, analogically, to return to life as if from the brink of death. 

Three centuries after Rubens, the poet Leigh Hunt gave voice to Leander’s floating thoughts, to those questions which emerge when life and death approach one another. In Hunt’s 1819 poem, time dilates as Leander turns between the eternal and the everyday:

Then dreadful thoughts of death, of waves heaped on him.
And friends, and parting daylight, rush upon him.
He thinks of prayers to Neptune and his daughters.
And Venus, Hero’s queen, sprung from the waters;
And then of Hero only, — how she fares.²

When faced with a final glimpse, with the limited horizon, to whom do our own thoughts return? 

I return to the painting in part because it stretches beyond myth and beyond the lives of the fabled lover and beloved. Set within the Museum of Suspense, its poignancy resides in the force of possibility as well as doubt. It presses beyond the individual life to ask us how we, in confronting our own mortality, might better turn to the lives of others. 

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¹ “Dove dove portare / Ninfe del mar […] / Il feretro funesto / Del misero d’Abido.” Giambattista Marino, “Leandro morto trà le braccia delle Nereidi Di Pietro Paolo Rubens,” La Galeria (The Gallery), 1620. More precisely, the poet refers to a cask as opposed to the body inside.  
²Leigh Hunt, “Hero and Leander,” in The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt (London, 1849).

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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.

The Lovers (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: The Lovers or the Lover
Number: VI
Astrology: Gemini
Qabalah: Zain, the Sword

Chris Gabriel July 5, 2025

The Lovers is a card of both unification and division, opposition and polarity. Each version features two lovers and, between them, Eros the God of Love. This is the image of the idiom “Opposites attract”.

In Rider, the Lovers are Adam and Eve in the Garden, still naked for they are not yet fallen. An angel emerges from clouds before the Sun, ordaining their love. Adam stands by the Tree of Life, Eve by the Tree of Knowledge, where the Serpent is laying in wait. A mountain rises in the distance.

In Thoth, we have a significantly more complex image. The Emperor and Empress come together holding hands. The Empress holds a cup marked with a dove, the Emperor holds a spear. He wears a crown of gold and has dark skin, she wears a crown of silver and has light skin. Unlike the other versions of the card, Thoth features a more extensive doubling: below them are their children, Cain and Abel. One carries flowers, the other a club, Abel touches his mothers cup, Cain touches his father’s spear. Above them, another doubling: Eve and Lilith. Beside them, a red lion and a white eagle. All stand atop a winged egg about which a serpent is coiled. In the center is a giant cloaked Hermes, hands raised as if he were puppeteering the figures below, and at his head flies the blind cupid. This is the Chemical Wedding.

In Marseille, we have three standing figures, two bear laurels, and have their hands on the middle figure. Jodorowsky rightly focuses on the profound ambiguity of the situation; are the two in laurels being married by the middle figure? Or is one unhappy with the other taking the blond for a lover? Is it something even stranger than that? This card differs from the other two in title, as it is simply “The Lover”, a singular figure. The Lover could just as well be Eros above them, flying before the Sun, ready to let his arrow loose into the situation below.

Much of the brilliance of Tarot comes down to the interaction of the four elements in the form of the suits, and the Lovers offers the most vibrant image of this. In every other card featuring the four, they are static, sitting in the corners, in their own way, but in the Lovers, they are active and chemically interacting.

In Rider, the four elements are Adam and Eve, Angel and Devil. In Thoth they are the Emperor and Empress, Cain and Abel. In Marseille it is the wreathed two, Cupid and youth. In each we have one pair of lovers, and one pair of enemies. 

One can see this as the dual and the duel, the two forms of Gemini.

Is Love random and contentious as Marseille posits? Is it a divine union ordained by God as in Rider? Or is it an interaction of elements, a simple biological “chemistry”? It is all of these of course - Love is the greatest mystery and power of them all.

For most people, the experience of love is the closest to “magic” that they will experience; strange coincidences, unexplainable feelings, and exploration of the other. Even in atheistic science, it is the spontaneous attraction and unification of disparate elements that forms the universe.

This article comes at a particularly meaningful time for me. I was recently at the beautiful wedding of my dear friends Eric and Eva and at the chapel I truly saw this card, the real ritual of marriage when two become one right before our eyes.  During the party, I saw a family walking to the hotel. Their little boy walked up to a beautiful antique car, a 1965 Rolls Royce, and promptly threw a golf ball at it. This is of course, what Love is all about, in that moment he was just like Cupid. Love is not kind, and often we hurt the ones we love. Heraclitus recognized that the world is a product of God, a divine child, playing with toys. Cupid is like a child making two dolls kiss, something you can see really clearly in Thoth. 

When we pull this card, it may be directly about love, a relationship or a friendship, but it can also be about the resolution to a division. Alternatively, the two ‘lovers’ can be duelling, so one can be met with argument and opposition.

Dedicated to Eric and Eva

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, THOUGHTS

Good, Evil and Gnostic Fun (Pronoia Pt. 2)

B. Picart, 1713.

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Molly Hankins July 3, 2025

Pronoia, coined by Rob Brezney in his 2005 book of the same name, describes an underlying feature of the universe that’s always conspiring in our souls’ favor. Practicing this worldview as a gnostic art, claims Brezney, empowers what many occultists refer to as “the primal will to good.” He quotes the gnostic school founder Paul Foster Case of “Builders of the Adytum”  about mirth being a means to overcome evil: “Laughter is prophylactic. It purifies subconsciousness and dissolves mental complexes.” 

Both Brezney and Case share the pronaic worldview that “washing our hearts with laughter” is the most powerful prescription in the face of evil. But what is evil? And how do we define good for that matter? Scientist and author Itzak Bentov wrote that evil represents what works against evolution while good works in favor of evolution. Evolution, here, being developmental progress. The rhythm of evolution is eternal change, and to go with that flow is to be an agent of the ‘primal will to good’. In the course of acting as such an agent, Pronoia recommends we use deep belly laughs to flush out the toxins of violent images, political propaganda and advertisements constantly invading most of our psyches. 

By adopting the perspective that the universe is conspiring in our souls’ favor, no matter what’s happening, we attract steady streams of amusing experiences to keep us laughing. “Pronoia is a gnostic art,” Brezney writes, “Everyone is potentially a visionary capable of revealing more of its mysteries.” We can only realize that potential if we have sufficient energy, and laughter replenishes our energy levels while dissolving the negative mental programming we get from overexposure to evil. Brezney decries Western Hermeticism’s lack of jokes, which he believes is a fundamental failure to take advantage of evil’s primary weakness. 

In a portion of the book entitled ‘Evil Fears Laughter’, he shares that taking ourselves too seriously is the most effective recruiting tool evil has. The sacred act of laughing disempowers purveyors of evil deeds and cuts a path to freedom for others to follow. Brezney encourages us to, “Pray to be granted a healing sample of comedic genius,” as we traverse from lifetime to lifetime. 

Guilt and fear, he tells us, are the only effective anti-pronoia agents in existence because they’re the only forces that could stop us from daring to laugh in the face of evil. To combat these invasive thought Brezney recommends a few creative exercises to help us lighten up and open our hearts. “Carry out a whirlygig,” he writes, defining whirlygig as the act of exploring a city with the intention of attracting lessons you didn’t know you needed. Afterwards he instructs readers to write an essay titled ‘People, Places and Things I Didn’t Know I Loved,’ as well as an ode to something ordinary. 

Every little example of pronoia he dishes out in the book feels like it has the same effect Paul Foster Case describes, that of purifying our subconscious and dissolving negative mental complexes through joyful contemplation and action. Case, like many occultists, believed that sound preceded all forms of matter, including particles of light. If we adopt that perspective and run it through a pronaic lens, perhaps the sound of laughter positively affects not only our minds, but matter itself. 

Perhaps laughing at evil disempowers it while empowering the ‘primal will to good’, not just philosophically but at some unseen, subatomic level like Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenetic field theory suggests. These information fields impose patterns, so patterning our reality with the vibration of joy must produce more joy. Sheldrake says, “Morphic fields are fields of habit, and they've been set up through habits of thought, through habits of activity, and through habits of speech. Most of our culture is habitual.” Whether it’s going on a whirlygig, laughing in the face of evil, or writing a love letter to something ordinary, habits of pronoia are superpowers.

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

What I Think and Feel at 25

‘The Beautiful and the Damned' first edition illustration by W. E. Hill

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In 1922, when this article was first published, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life was in a moment of enormous change. He was newly married to Zelda, and his second novel ‘This Beautiful and the Damned’ had been published just months before before to enormous acclaim, rocketing the young writer to fame and praise as the certified voice of the Jazz Age. Of course, Fitzgerald would go on to live up to this early reputation but at the tender age of 25, as he details in this short essay for ‘The American Magazine”, that future seemed far from inevitable. In classic wit, remarkable insight, and searing exploration of society and relationship Fitzgerald makes a case for youth in an world run by the old, and paints a vivid portrait of a genius grappling with his place and purpose.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald July 1, 2025

The man stopped me on the street. He was ancient, but not a mariner. He had a long beard and a glittering eye. I think he was a friend of the family's, or something. 

"Say, Fitzgerald," he said, "say! Will you tell me this: What in the blinkety blank-blank has a-has a man of your age got to go saying these pessimistic things for? What's the idea?" I tried to laugh him off. He told me that he and my grandfather had been boys together. After that, I had no wish to corrupt him. So I tried to laugh him off. 

"Ha-ha-ha!" I said determinedly. "Ha-ha-ha!" And then I added, "Ha-ha! Well, I'll see you later." With this I attempted to pass him by, but he seized my arm firmly and showed symptoms of spending the afternoon in my company. 

"When I was a boy he began, and then he drew the picture that people always draw of what excellent, happy, care-free souls they were at twenty-five. That is, he told me all the things he liked to think he thought in the misty past. 

I allowed him to continue. I even made polite grunts at intervals to express my astonishment. For I will be doing it myself some day. I will concoct for my juniors a Scott Fitzgerald that, it's safe to say, none of my contemporaries would at present recognize. But they will be old themselves then; and they will respect my concoction as I shall respect theirs... “

And now," the happy ancient was concluding; "you are young, you have good health, you have made money, you are exceptionally happily married, you have achieved considerable success while you are still young enough to enjoy it - will you tell an innocent old man just why you write those" 

I succumbed. I would tell him. I began: "Well, you see, sir, it seems to me that as a man gets older he grows more vulner-" 

But I got no further. As soon as I began to talk he hurriedly shook my hand an departed. He did not want to listen. He did not care why I thought what I thought. He had simply felt the need of giving a little speech, and I had been the victim. His receding form disappeared with a slight wobble around the next corner. "All right, you old bore," I muttered; “don’t listen, then. You wouldn’t understand, anyhow.” I took an awful kick at a curbstone, as a sort of proxy, and continued my walk. 

Now, that's' the first incident. The second was when a man came to me not long ago from a big newspaper syndicate, and said: "Mr. Fitzgerald, there's a rumor around New York that you and-ah-you and Mrs. Fitzgerald are going to commit suicide at thirty because you hate and dread middle-age. I want to give you some publicity in this matter by getting it up as a story for the feature sections of five hundred and fourteen Sunday newspapers. In one corner of the page will be—“

"Don't!" I cried, "I know: In one corner will stand the doomed couple, she with an arsenic sundae, he with an Oriental dagger. Both of them will have their eyes fixed on a large clock, on the face of which will be a skull and crossbones. In the other corner will be a big calendar with the date marked in red." 

"That's it!" cried the syndicate man enthusiastically. "You've grasped the idea. Now, what we" "Listen here!" I said severely. "There is nothing in that rumor. Nothing whatever. When I'm thirty I won't be this me - I'll be somebody else. I'll have a different body, because it said so in a book I read once, and I'll have a different attitude on everything. I'll even be married to a different person-" 

“Ah!" he interrupted, with an eager light in his eye, and produced a notebook."That's very interesting." 

"No, no, no!" I cried hastily. "I mean my wife will be different." 

"I see. You plan a divorce." 

"No! I mean—" 

"Well, it's all the same. Now, what we want, in order to fill out this story, is a lot of remarks about petting-parties. Do you think the-ah-petting-party is a serious menace to the Constitution? And, just to link it up, can we say that your suicide will be largely on account of past petting-parties?" 

"See here!" I interrupted in despair."Try to understand. I don't know what petting-parties have to do with the question. I have always dreaded age, because it invariably increases the vulner—“

But, as in the case of the family friend, I got no further. The syndicate man grasped my hand firmly. He shook it. Then he muttered something about interviewing a chorus girl who was reported to have an anklet of solid platinum, and hurried off. 

That's the second incident. You see, I had managed to tell two different men that "age increased the vulner-" But they had not been interested. The old man had talked about himself and the syndicate man had talked about petting-parties. When I began to talk about the "vulner-" they both had sudden engagements. 

So, with one hand on the Eighteenth Amendment and the other hand on the serious part of the Constitution, I have taken an oath that I will tell somebody my story. 

*

As a man grows older it stands to reason that his vulnerability increases. Three years ago, for instance, I could be hurt in only one way-through myself. If my best friend's wife had her hair torn off by an electric washing-machine, I was grieved, of course. I would make my friend a long speech full of "old mans," and finish up with a paragraph from Washington's Farewell Address; but when I'd finished I could go to a good restaurant and enjoy my dinner as usual. If my second cousin's husband had an artery severed while having his nails manicured, I will not deny that it was a matter of considerable regret to me. But when 1 heard the news I did not faint and have to be taken home in a passing laundry wagon. 

In fact I was pretty much invulnerable. I put up a conventional wail whenever a ship was sunk or a train got wrecked; but I don't suppose, if the whole city of Chicago had been wiped out, I'd have lost a night's sleep over it-unless something led me to believe that St. Paul was the next city on the list. Even then I could have moved my luggage over to Minneapolis and rested pretty comfortably all night. 

But that was three years ago when I was still a young man. I was only twenty two. When I said anything the book reviewers didn't like, they could say, "Gosh! That certainly is callow!" And that finished me. Label it "callow,"and that was enough. 

Well, now I'm twenty-five I'm not callow any longer-at least not so that I can notice it when I look in an ordinary mirror. Instead, I'm vulnerable. I'm vulnerable in every way. 

For the benefit of revenue agents and moving-picture directors who may be reading this magazine I will explain that vulnerable means easily wounded. Well, that's it. I'm more easily wounded. I can not only be wounded in the chest, the feelings, the teeth, the bank account; but I can be wounded in the dog. Do I make myself clear? In the dog. 

No, that isn't a new part of the body just discovered by the Rockefeller Institute. I mean a real dog. I mean if anyone gives my family dog to the dog-catcher he's hurting me almost as much as he's hurting the dog. He's hurting me in the dog. And if our doctor says to me tomorrow, "That child of yours isn't going to be a blonde after all," well, he's wounded me in a way I couldn't have been wounded in before, because I never before had a child to be wounded in. And if my daughter grows up and when she's sixteen elopes with some fellow from Zion City who believes the world is flat-I wouldn't write this except that she's only six months old and can't quite read yet, so it won't put any ideas in her head why, then I'll be wounded again. 

About being wounded through your wife I will not enter into, as it is a delicate subject. I will not say anything about my case. But I have private reasons for knowing that if anybody said to your wife one day that it was a shame she would wear yellow when it made her look so peaked, you would suffer violently, within six hours afterward, for what that person said. 

"Attack him through his wife!" "Kidnap his child!" "Tie a tin can to his dog's tail!" How often do we hear those slogans in life, not to mention in the movies. And how they make me wince! Three years ago, you could have yelled them outside my window all through a summer night, and I wouldn't have batted an eye. The only thing that would have aroused me would have been: "Wait a minute. I think I can pot him from here." 

I used to have about ten square feet of skin vulnerable to chills and fevers. Now I have about twenty. I have not personally enlarged-the twenty feet includes the skin of my family-but I might as well have, because if a chill or fever strikes any bit of that twenty feet of skin I begin to shiver. 

And so I ooze gently into middle age; for the true middle-age is not the acquirement of years, but the acquirement of a family. The incomes of the childless have wonderful elasticity. Two people require a room and a bath; couple with child require the millionaire's suite on the sunny side of the hotel. 

*

So let me start the religious part of this article by saying that if the Editor thought he was going to get something young and happy-yes, and callow-I have got to refer him to my daughter, if she will ive dictation. If anybody thinks that I am callow they ought to see her-she's so callow it makes me laugh. It even makes her laugh, too, to think how callow she is. If any literary critics saw her they'd have a nervous breakdown right on the spot. But, on the other hand, anybody writing to me, an editor or anybody else, is writing to a middle-aged man. 

Well, I'm twenty-five, and I have to admit that I'm pretty well satisfied with some of that time. That is to say, the first five years seemed to go all right-but the last twenty! They have been a matter of violently contrasted extremes. In fact, this has struck me so forcibly that from time to time I have kept charts, trying to figure out the years when I was closest to happy. Then I get mad and tear up the charts. 

Skipping that long list of mistakes which passes for my boyhood I will say that I went away to preparatory school at fifteen, and that my two years there were wasted, were years of utter and profitless unhappiness. I was unhappy because I was cast into a situation where everybody thought I ought to behave just as they behaved-and I didn't have the courage to shut up and go my own way, anyhow. 

For example, there was a rather dull boy at school named Percy, whose approval, I felt, for some unfathomable reason, I must have. So, for the sake of this negligible cipher, I started out to let as much of my mind as I had under mild cultivation sink back into a state of heavy underbrush. I spent hours in a damp gymnasium fooling around with a muggy basket-ball and working myself into a damp, muggy rage, when I wanted, instead, to go walking in the country. 

And all this to please Percy. He thought it was the thing to do. If you didn't go through the damp business every day you were "morbid."That was his favorite word, and it had me frightened. I didn't want to be morbid. So I became muggy instead. 

Besides, Percy was dull in classes; so I used to pretend to be dull also. When I wrote stories I wrote them secretly, and felt like a criminal. If I gave birth to any idea that did not appeal to Percy’s pleasant, vacant mind I discarded the idea once and felt like apologising. 

---

“ If you don't know much - well, nobody else knows much more. And nobody knows half as much about your own interests as you know.”

---

Of course Percy never got into college. He went to work and I have scarcely seen him since, though I under- stand that he has since become an undertaker of considerable standing. The time I spent with him was wasted; but, worse than that, I did not enjoy the wasting of it. At least, he had nothing to give me, and I had not the faintest reasons for caring what he thought or said. But when I discovered this it was too late. 

The worst of it is that this same business went on until I was twenty-two. That is, I'd be perfectly happy doing just what I wanted to do, when somebody would begin shaking his head and saying: "Now see here, Fitzgerald, you mustn't go on doing that. It's-it's morbid." 

And I was always properly awed by the word "morbid," so I quit what I wanted to do and what it was good for me to do, and did what some other fellow wanted me to do. Every once in a while, though, I used to tell somebody to go to the devil; otherwise I never would have done anything at all. 

In officers' training camp during 1917 I started to write a novel. I would begin work at it every Saturday afternoon at one and work like mad until midnight. Then I would work at it from six Sunday morning until six Sunday night, when I had to report back to barracks. I was thoroughly enjoying myself. After a month three friends came to me with scowling faces: 

"See here, Fitzgerald, you ought to use the week-ends in getting some good rest and recreation. The way you use them is -is morbid!" 

That word convinced me. It sent the usual shiver down my spine. The next week end I laid the novel aside, went into town with the others and danced all night at a party. But I began to worry about my novel. I worried so much that I returned to camp, not rested, but utterly miserable. I was morbid then. But I never went to town again. I finished the novel. It was rejected; but a year later 1 rewrote it and it was published under the title, "This Side of Paradise." 

But before I rewrote it I had a list of "morbids," chalked up against people that, placed end to end, would have reached to the nearest lunatic asylum. It was morbid: 

1st. To get engaged without enough money to marry 
2nd. To leave the advertising business after three months 
3rd. To want to write at all 
4th. To think I could 
5th. To write about "silly little boys and girls that nobody wants to read about" 

And so on, until a year later, when I found to my surprise that everybody had been only kidding-they had believed all their lives that writing was the only thing for me, and had hardly been able to keep from telling me all the time. 

But I am really not old enough to begin drawing morals out of my own life to elevate the young. I will save that pastime until I am sixty; and then, as I have said, I will concoct a Scott Fitzgerald who will make Benjamin Franklin look like a lucky devil who loafed into prominence. Even in the above account I have man aged to sketch the outline of a small-but neat halo. I take it all back. I am twenty five years old. I wish I had ten million dollars, and never had to do another lick of work as long as I live. 

But as I do have to keep at it, I might as well declare that the chief thing I've learned so far is: If you don't know much - well, nobody else knows much more. And nobody knows half as much about your own interests as you know. 

*

If you believe in anything very strongly-including yourself-and if you go after that thing alone, you end up in jail, in heaven, in the headlines, or in the largest house in the block, according to what you started after. If you don't believe in anything very strongly-including yourself you go along, and enough money is made out of you to buy an automobile for some other fellow's son, and you marry if you've got time, and if you do you have a lot of children, whether you have time or not, and finally you get tired and you die. 

If you're in the second of those two classes you have the most fun before you're twenty-five. If you're in the first, you have it afterward. You see, if you're in the first class you'll frequent!y be called a darn fool-or worse. That was as true in Philadelphia about 1727 as it is to-day. Anybody knows that a kid that walked around town munching a loaf of bread and not caring what anvbody thought was a darn fool. It stands to reason! But there are a lot of darn fools who get their pictures in the schoolbooks -with their names under the pictures. And the sensible fellows, the ones that had time to laugh, well, their pictures are in there, too. But their names aren't-and the laughs look sort of frozen on their faces. 

The particular sort of darn fool I mean ought to remember that he's least a darn fool when he's being called a darn fool. The main thing is to be your own kind of a darn fool. (The above advice is of course only for darn fools under twenty-five. It may be all wrong for darn fools over twenty-five.) 

I don't know why it is that when I start to write about being twenty-five I suddenly begin to write about darn fools. I do not see any connection. Now, if I were asked to write about darn fools, I would write about people who have their front teeth filled with gold, because a friend of mine did that the other day, and after being mistaken for a jewelry store three times in one hour he came up and asked me if I thought it showed too much. As I am a kind man, I told him I would not have noticed it if the sun hadn't been so strong on it. I asked him why he had it done. 

"Well," he said, "the dentist told me a porcelain filling never lasted more than ten years." 

"Ten years! Why, you may be dead in ten years.” 

"That's true." 

"Of course it'll be nice that all the time you're in your coffin you'll never have to worry about your teeth." 

And it occurred to me that about half the people in the world are always having their front teeth filled with gold. That is, they're figuring on twenty years from now. Well, when you're young it's all right figuring your success a long ways ahead if you don't make it too long. But as for your pleasure-your front teeth!-it's better to figure on to-day.

*

And that's the second thing I learned while getting vulnerable and middle aged. Let me recapitulate: 

1st. I think that compared to what you know about your own business nobody else knows anything. And if anybody knows more about it than you do, then it's his business and you're his man, not your own. And as soon as your business becomes your business you'll know more about it than anybody else. 
2nd. Never have your front teeth filled with gold. 

And now I will stop pretending to be a pleasant young fellow and disclose my real nature. I will prove to you, if you have not found it out already, that I have a mean streak and nobody would like to have me for a son. 

I do not like old people. They are always talking about their "experience"- and very few of them have any. In fact, most of them go on making the same mistakes at fifty and believing in the same white list of approved twenty-carat lies that they did at seventeen. And it all starts with my old friend vulnerability. 

Take a woman of thirty. She is considered lucky if she has allied herself to a multitude of things; her husband, her children, her home, her servant. If she has three homes, eight children, and fourteen servants, she is considered luckier still. (This, of course, does not generally apply to more husbands). 

Now, when she was young she worried only about herself; but now she must be worried by any trouble occurring to any of these people or things. She is ten times as vulnerable. Moreover, she can never break one of these ties or relieve herself of one of these burdens except at the cost of great pain and sorrow to herself. They are the things that break her, and yet they are the most precious things in life. 

In consequence, everything which doesn't go to make her secure, or at least to give her a sense of security, startles and annoys her. She acquires only the useless knowledge found in cheap movies, cheap novels, and the cheap memoirs of titled foreigners. 

By this time her husband also has become suspicious of anything gay or new. He seldom addresses her, except in a series of profound grunts, or to ask whether she has sent his shirts out to the laundry. At the family dinner on Sunday he occasionally gives her some fascinating statistics on party politics, some opinions from that morning's newspaper editorial. 

But after thirty, both husband and wife know in their hearts that the game is up. Without a few cocktails, social intercourse becomes a torment. It is no longer spontaneous; it is a convention by which they agree to shut their eyes to the fact that the other men and women they know are tired and dull and fat, and yet must be put up with as politely as they themselves are put up with in their turn. 

I have seen many happy young couples -but I have seldom seen a happy home after husband and wife are thirty. Most homes can be divided into four classes: 

1st. Where the husband is a pretty conceited guy who thinks that a dinky insurance business is a lot harder than raising babies, and that everybody ought to kow-tow to him at home. He is the kind whose sons usually get away from home as soon as they can walk. 
2nd. When the wife has got a sharp tongue and the martyr complex, and thinks she's the only woman in the world that ever had a child.
3rd. Where the children are always being reminded how nice it was of the parents to bring them into the world, and how they ought to respect their parents for being born in 1870 instead of 1902. 
4th. Where everything is for the children. Where the parents pay much more for the children's education than they can afford, and spoil them unreasonably. This usually ends by the children being ashamed of the parents. 

*

And yet I think that marriage is the most satisfactory institution we have. I'm simply stating my belief that when Life has used us for its purposes it takes away all our attractive qualities and gives us, instead, ponderous but shallow convictions of our own wisdom and "experience." 

Needless to say, as old people run the world, an enormous camouflage has been built up to hide the fact that only young people are attractive or important. 

Having got in wrong with many of the readers of this article, I will now proceed to close. If you don't agree with me on any minor points you have a right to say: "Gosh! He certainly is callow!" and turn to something else. Personally I do not consider that I am callow, because I do not see how anybody of my age could be callow. For instance, I was reading an article in this magazine a few months ago by a fellow named Ring Lardner that says he is thirty-five, and it seemed to me how young and happy and care free he was in comparison with me. 

Maybe he is vulnerable, too. He did not say so. Maybe when you get to be thirty five you do not know any more how vulnerable you are. All I can say is that if he ever gets to be twenty-five again, which is very unlikely, maybe he will agree with me. The older I grow the more I get so I don't know anything. If I had been asked to do this article about five years ago it might have been worth reading.

---

F. Scott Fitzgerald ( 1896 – 1940) was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term that he himself popularized. Revered and respected in his lifetime, since his death Fitzgerald place has been cemented as one of the great American writers of the 20th century.

The Seven of Cups (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Debauch, the Seven of Cups
Number: 7
Astrology: Venus in Scorpio
Qabalah: Netzach of He

Chris Gabriel June 28, 2025

The cups of pleasure which we have been filling throughout the suit overflow here. If five was not enough, and six was just right, then seven is too much. This is an overindulgence in sensory pleasure.

In Rider, we have a backlit figure in awe of the phantasmagoria before him. Seven fantastic cups emerge from a cloud, within them are various images: a head, a veiled person, a snake, a castle on a hill, jewels, a skull cup where a laurel sits, and a dragon. This is visual overstimulation, relatively uncommon in 1909 when this deck was first published, but a daily occurrence today. This is the algorithmic feed and a walk through the city, bright colors, temptations, and madness.

In Thoth, we have seven cups arranged in the form of the lower half of the tree of life. They overflow with sickly green viscous water. The lotus system which moves this water is drooping down. The card is given to the badly placed Venus in Scorpio. The Six of Cups, Pleasure, was a perfect match for our desires, this Debauch is too much. The green fluid of this card is the vomit that comes from too much drink, and the discharge of a Venereal disease. (Venereal literally means of Venus).

In Marseille, we have the least negative form of the card. A column of three cups stands between four cups  in the corners. Qabalistically it is the Beauty of the Queen, and represents Love in and for the World. The vast sensory inputs of the world are treated with kindness and care here. 

In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu writes:

Five colors blind the eye
Five notes deafen the ear
Five flavors dull the mouth
The Great Hunt drives men's hearts wild
What’s difficult to get brings harm
The Wise trust their guts, not their senses

This card embodies this wisdom, the overstimulation of the senses leaves us burnt out, depressed, and numb. In dieting, there is a concept called “Intuitive Eating”, the idea that one can eat when they feel hungry, and stop when they are full. This ability is akin to telepathy in terms of how easily it can be achieved! In reality, many tend to eat like animals. Dogs, cats, horses, goats, and many others, when given an endless supply of food will eat themselves to death. 

The sensory pleasures cannot be truly satisfied until one learns what fullness is, just as a great deal of war goes on because the powerful cannot themselves bear the boredom of peace. As this card is Venus in Scorpio, this is especially relevant to romance. This is a “toxic” love, one that we can’t get enough of. Even when one knows they are in a bad romance, it is far too enticing to see it to the bitter end.

When we pull this card, we may indeed be given a feast for our senses, and have it! Take your fill and will of Love. Just be ready for the hangover of the morning after.

---

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, THOUGHTS

Patterns of Authority: Sound is Spatial (I)

Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia Universalis. 1650.

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Robin Sparkes June 26, 2025

Architecture provides a framework to understand how spatial design shapes and expresses socio-political power. Physical structures carry ideologies. The built environment directs movement, frames perception, and conditions behavior. Sound plays a central role in this dynamic. The way sound travels through space organizes social interaction and reinforces authority. Architectural acoustics become instruments of control, structuring who is heard, how voices carry, and where silence falls.

Space shapes perception. It provides the conditions through which experience unfolds. Before meaning is formed, spatial relationships already guide how bodies move, how attention is focused, and how presence is felt. Architecture organizes these conditions. It defines proximity, enclosure, elevation, and direction. These spatial arrangements establish the grammar of interaction.

When sound emerges, it activates the logic of space. The shape and material of a building influence how a voice carries, how it lingers, and how it reaches others. Sound travels according to the forms it encounters—reflecting, absorbing, amplifying. In this way, acoustics shape social access. They determine who commands attention, who listens, and who remains outside the field of awareness. Power operates through arrangement, constructing systems of order, repetition, and hierarchy. Architecture gives form to these systems. Raised thresholds, central positions, enclosed chambers—all delineate roles and distribute authority. Sound follows these lines, reinforcing their influence.

By tracing the interaction between spatial design and sound, we can understand how architecture conditions us. This interplay generates authority, amplifies its presence, and sustains its influence. Acoustics, as an integral part of architecture, are closely tied to the geometric forms that govern how sound moves through space. Material and geometry influence both the physical and sensory experience of architecture. Here, sound becomes a tool of authority.

By examining how architectural acoustics mediate the intersection of spatial design and ideology, we can begin to see how the manipulation of sound in the built environment reflects and reinforces political power dynamics. “Acoustic space is where sound and space converge, creating a dynamic relationship between what is heard, how it is heard, and the environment in which it is heard”, says Oliveros. We hear through architecture—a medium that frames social hierarchies and directs human behavior.

From Eyes to Ears
Understanding the influence of architectural acoustics is essential for revealing how power dynamics are constructed and reinforced through the ‘unseen’ forces of sound, shaping human interaction and perception. Juhani Pallasmaa, in The Eyes of the Skin, critiques the dominance of vision—Plato’s ocularcentrism. Pallasmaa argues that prioritizing sight over other senses diminishes the full experiential depth of architecture, especially the auditory. He writes, “Architecture is the art of reconciliation between ourselves and the world, and this mediation takes place through the senses”.

The acoustic dimensions of space contribute to the embodied power of resonance. Acoustics frame space, as sound is inherently relational and immersive, shaping how individuals and communities engage within built environments.

Architecture as a Means of Understanding the Superstructure
The relationship between sensory experience and societal structures helps us understand architecture’s role in shaping power. Karl Marx’s concept of the superstructure offers a framework for seeing how architecture mediates sensory experiences and supports ideological authority. Marx identified the superstructure as comprising cultural, political, and ideological systems that arise from—and reinforce—the economic base.

Architecture, as a cultural artifact, reflects the ideologies of the ruling class, shaping and legitimizing authority in physical space. In this context, buildings become instruments of power, with design choices aligned with dominant state ideologies. Marx’s framework highlights how architectural spaces, through both function and form, reinforce social hierarchies and facilitate control. Repeating typologies reveal how architecture is embedded within the superstructure, reinforcing values through spatial design.

Marx noted that “the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class”. We see these values in the spaces we move through and speak within.

---

“Architecture was more than functional or aesthetic—it revealed divine truths through geometry and sound.”

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Power, Space, and Surveillance
Michel Foucault’s analysis of power and spatial control in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison offers a critical lens for examining the socio-political implications of centralized acoustic design. Foucault introduces the panopticon as a model of disciplinary power, where spatial arrangement enforces constant surveillance and internalized authority. He writes, “The Panopticon is a [surveilling] machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogenous effects of power” (Foucault). This spatial configuration becomes both a literal and symbolic expression of how power operates.

Foucault’s Panopticon.

When applied to acoustics, the panopticon’s principles reveal how sound systems—like public address speakers or soundproofed hierarchies—reinforce authority by shaping auditory experience. Centrally planned spaces often elevate an authoritative figure, amplifying their presence and power through spatial arrangement and sound projection.

Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation describes how individuals are “hailed” into ideological systems that shape their behavior and perceptions. In Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Althusser writes, “Ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects” (Althusser). The acoustics of a courtroom or temple draw attention to the singular voice of the judge or priest. These spaces acoustically and spatially “hail” individuals, embedding them into systems of authority and control.

Together, Foucault’s and Althusser's theories reveal how architectural acoustics serve as mechanisms of social and ideological conditioning. This conditioning is both theoretical and embodied—through doors we enter, windows we open, and corridors that guide our behavior. These are choreographed interactions. Simply by existing in space, we are interpelled into expected patterns of conduct.

Architecture, Power, and Resistance
Architecture, through its spatial and acoustic properties, serves as both a tool of control and a potential medium for resistance. Rafael Moneo, in On Typology, argues that architectural forms embody cultural and historical continuities. He writes, “Typology is not a neutral concept; it is a reflection of the ways societies organize their space and their values” (Moneo). By studying recurring forms—typologies—we can see how social ideologies are embedded in design.

Moneo shows how typological structures can also help us understand, critique, and reform power. The superstructure, through typological morphology, becomes a system of spatial ideology. Typological discourse, then, becomes a framework not just for reinforcing systems but for transforming them.

Renaissance Theories of Harmonic Proportion and Acoustic Design
Renaissance architects’ use of harmonic proportions—drawn from musical theory—offers another lens for exploring the relationship between space and sound. Rudolf Wittkower explains how architects like Andrea Palladio used musical ratios to govern building proportions and acoustics. “The application of harmonic ratios derived from music lent buildings a rhythm that could be perceived visually and aurally, creating a multisensory experience of order” (Wittkower).

Palladio believed that well-proportioned spaces could foster moral and spiritual well-being. Geometry affected how sound resonated—how frequencies lingered or faded. Wittkower notes that Palladio’s adherence to harmony was not just aesthetic but moral. “He believed that a well-proportioned building could inspire the virtues of order and balance in its inhabitants” (Wittkower).

Research in psychoacoustics supports this, showing that specific frequencies influence mood, cognition, and even physical health. “Different frequencies stimulate different neural circuits, influencing mood, cognition, and even physical health” (Levitin). Yet access to resonant, harmonious spaces is often determined by wealth—proximity to nature, for instance, or insulation from urban noise. Architecture and environment together create acoustic ecologies that shape how bodies and minds feel space.

Leon Battista Alberti also tied proportion and design to moral and spiritual ideals. His centrally planned churches aimed to align spatial design with divine principles. Wittkower writes, “Alberti regarded beauty as an inherent quality of proportion, believing that mathematical harmony in design could elevate the human spirit” (Wittkower). His designs optimized acoustics, making space both sacred and socially organized.

Catholic churches especially demonstrate this. Their central layouts amplify voice and song, reinforcing the church’s authority both spiritually and socially. “Typology acts as a dialogue between tradition and innovation, enabling architects to adapt historical forms to contemporary needs without losing their symbolic resonance” (Moneo). Moneo’s view shows how Renaissance principles—especially in acoustics—continue to shape architectural practice today.

In Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (1646), Athanasius Kircher argued that architecture was more than functional or aesthetic—it revealed divine truths through geometry and sound. He described buildings as “microcosms” that align earthly structures with celestial harmony. Cathedrals, rooted in sacred geometry, were instruments to channel divine grace.

Kircher’s work explored how acoustics could be engineered—through ideas like the “acoustic wall,” a reflective surface that amplified sound. His organ designs also show how architecture could be integrated with musical instruments to shape auditory experience. For Kircher, buildings didn’t just shelter—they resonated, actively producing harmonious soundscapes.

His vision aligns with Renaissance ideals, as Wittkower describes in Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. Renaissance architects believed their job was not to invent new forms, but to discover and express eternal harmonies. Wittkower writes, “The Renaissance architect did not see his task in creating something new, but in discovering the eternal validity”.

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Robin Sparkes, is a spatial designer, studying the kinesthetic experience of architecture. Her design, research, and writing practice traverses the relationship between the body, temporality, and the acoustics of space.

Some Thoughts on Relationships (Enneagram V)

Le Lit, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. 1893.

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“In my experience there are two things we have in common:
we all want to belong, and we all want our lives to have meaning.
But finding belonging and meaning are dependent on our ability 
to build and maintain relationships ___ with people who are like us,
and often with those who are not.”
The Path Between Us

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Suzanne Stabile June 24, 2025

It is my hope in writing this article that readers will find time to reflect on at least some of the ideas I’m sharing from my life experience to date.  I want to spark conversations with this contribution to Tetragrammaton for there are some things we just need to talk about.  It doesn’t matter where, how, or who with, but I’m pretty sure we all need to start talking in earnest about relationships.

At seventy-four, I’m old enough to begin looking back and evaluating the many seasons of my life.  Because I “came of age” in the 1960’s, my life has been partially defined by:

The Viet Nam War
The Civil Rights Movement
The Women’s Movement
Hippies, Mini Skirts, Love Beads and Woodstock
The Assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

For several months, I’ve been perusing my old journals and thinking about how these experiences affected my life in what I now understand to be both positive and negative ways.  It seems important to note that the events of the 1960’s were, in many ways, unexpected and unprecedented.  And yet, what we experienced, and the way we responded to our new reality, never included the kind of polarization we are experiencing now.  

Despite the suggestion that in our modern age we are constantly “communicating” and “connecting”, I’m convinced that we find ourselves in a Relationship Crisis.  We are polarized in too many parts of our lives and more tribal than we’ve been in my lifetime.  Our standard response to most issues is increasingly dualistic: “I’m right and you’re wrong.” Simply stated, dualistic thinking is by its nature, a question of “either/or”, which choice is the right one and which is not?   

Another way of assessing our choices is possible, if only we embrace a nondualistic approach.  At its most basic level, non-duality is represented by “both/and” thinking.  “My choice is good and so is yours.”  We could go with either one, knowing we made a good decision.”  Of course, there are choices that involve each person’s life experience and perhaps their belief systems. and sacrificing integrity is never necessary.  The key, however, is found in respecting the life experience and integrity of every other person, while allowing room for difference without distance.

I’ve had the privilege of teaching the Enneagram for most of the past four decades.  Serious study of this ancient wisdom has offered me the opportunity to understand why I do what I do, and to a limited degree, why others do what they do. It has afforded me the time, space, and place to explore the basic differences in how we, as individuals, see the world.  

I’ve heard so many times, “We’re all pretty much the same when you get right down to it.”  That is just not true.  Enneagram wisdom teaches us that we all belong to one of nine groups of people, each one defined by how we interpret, make sense of, and respond to information from the universe.  Of course there are unending examples of nuance, and millions of possible choices to be made but at the same time, predictable, habitual, and ultimately mechanical patterns of behavior have served us well since we were children. 

It’s a challenge to change those patterns of behavior.  When talking about personality, willpower is a myth that is fueled by emotion, and it will not help us in addressing our methods for dealing with the world.  We cannot clench our fists and grit our teeth in order to make meaningful changes in our personalities.

Two of the best things you can do to make changes that would enhance your relationships are the practices of self-observation and allowing.

1. Practice observing yourself nonjudgmentally.  It won’t be easy.  But when we judge ourselves, we defend ourselves and then we are deeper in personality than when we started.  Just observe your behavior, gently acknowledge it, and move on.

2. Practice allowing parts of your personality that don’t serve you well to simply fall away.   Try to avoid feeling frustrated or angry, and after you acknowledge the behavior that you are trying to change just let it go.  The result won’t be immediate, but after time you will find that a new way of responding to similar situations will emerge.

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“Every expectation is resentment waiting to happen”

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For deeper thought and conversation:

Choose one of the statements below that you think describes you. Think about it, maybe even journal about it a little and then consider discussing your insights with someone else.  Each of these ways of being in the world can be problematic in relationships.

• Do you take responsibility for making situations better for others?

• Do you believe you can affect the world without being affected by it?

• Are you accustomed to being focused inward, depending on your own strength to get you through.

There is nothing easy about relationships.  There are no short cuts.  They require lots of awareness, energy and hard work.  My best advice on the subject is this:

• Do your personal work and be the healthiest person you can be. 

• Then find someone else who is doing the same.

 I happen to be relational by nature.  I always have been.  But there are two sides to everything, and this “gift” is no exception because relationships are messy and unpredictable.  If I’m not discerning about the people I choose to be in relationships, with I can easily end up committing too much time to too many people, often resulting in taking for granted the people I love the most.

I’ve confessed this many times to my husband, my children, my therapist, my spiritual director, and my pastor.  So I’m sharing it not in search of grace, though that would be nice, but because it is part of a bigger teaching about relationships.  

One of the most valuable things I’ve learned from people who are in the Recovery Community is this: “Every expectation is resentment waiting to happen.”  Expectations are at the core of most of our relationships, whether they have been agreed upon or assumed.  Our failure to talk about them clearly and openly causes harm that could potentially be avoided with honest conversation.  

For deeper thought, journaling or perhaps conversation, consider this quote:

“Inability or unwillingness to appropriately deal with feelings
Is problematic.  When others can’t be honest about what they feel and
what they need, the delayed emotional responses are usually expressed
as anger, shame, fear, or perhaps resentment, all of which are
damaging to a relationship.”¹

What we do is seldom more important than how or why we do it.  I find myself more challenged by the “why” but for others, it can be the  “how.”  Both are, perhaps, determined by personal motivation.  Maybe, like me, you are motivated by a deep desire to be wanted.  My husband Joe’s motivation most of the time is to believe his presence matters.  Our children, in discussion with their spouses, have discovered that within their community of eight, their motivations include: believing their presence matters, avoiding betrayal, knowing they will be taken care of, wanting to be understood, a deep desire to hear that they are good, and being able to trust that they are safe.

For deeper thought, journaling or perhaps conversation:

• If you were asked to name one motivation that you believe is most consistent in your sharing life with others what would it be?

• Would you say that your motivation in relationships is more about connection and belonging, or about being right?  

These ideas are clearly not exhaustive.  In fact, they are a mere beginning of all that I believe we need to talk about concerning relationships.  Our responses to life are determined in part by how we make sense of what we see, and how we decide to respond.  It’s different for all of us.  

What we consider to be strengths in our relationships in our twenties can easily become weaknesses in our thirties and forties and beyond, if we aren’t willing to engage in deep, self-reflective inner work.

I sincerely believe a relationship crisis is at hand.  We can either decide to work toward healthier and more respectful relationships, or we can continue to contribute to the dualistic and polarizing nature of who we are becoming both individually and collectively.

We will always fall short in relationships, challenged to name and work through disappointment.  Even though this is more difficult for some of us than for others, I hope we will all find a way to begin offering and receiving forgiveness.  It’s just part of the deal.

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¹The Path Between Us

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Suzanne Stabile is a speaker, teacher, and internationally recognized Enneagram master teacher who has taught thousands of people over the last thirty years. She is the author of ‘The Path Between Us’, and coauthor, with Ian Morgan Cron, of ‘The Road Back to You’. She is also the creator and host of The Enneagram Journey podcast. Along with her husband, Rev. Joseph Stabile, she is cofounder of Life in the Trinity Ministry, a nonprofit, nondenominational ministry committed to the spiritual growth and formation of adults.

The Seven of Disks (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Failure, Seven of Disks
Number: 7
Astrology: Saturn in Taurus
Qabalah: Netzach of He

Chris Gabriel June 21, 2025

The Seven of Disks is a card of waiting, of boredom, tedious labour, and perseverance. If the Six of Disks has given us a great gift of say a field or a house, this is the time where we “watch the grass grow” and the “paint dry”.

In Rider, we see a farmer leaning on his staff, looking sadly upon his growing crop. The sky is grey. He yearns for brilliant flourishing flowers, but must wait.

In Thoth, we have a more depressing image: dead plants covered in seven leaden coins. Four bear the face of Saturn, and three the Bull of Taurus. Saturn in Taurus is a long suffering placement, the efforts it undertakes can take years and years to come to fruition. This position requires constant effort without seeing results.

In Marseille, we have four coins about the corners of the card, with a central three forming an upright triangle. A flower grows from within the three. Qabalisitically, this is Netzach in He, the Beauty of the Princess.

“Rome was not built in a day” is an obvious, but painful truth. The materialization of our dreams and desires is not always a simple task. We  wait in a dark night,  knowing not when or if the Sun will rise, but we must keep going and have faith that it will pay off.

I am reminded of Churchill’s famous speech:

“We shall prove ourselves once more able to defend our island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do.”

This willingness to go on indefinitely is the dignified character of the Seven of Disks, the negative element is that of dejection and failure in the face of time.

Up to this point in the suit, each card has been focused on growing and developing the seeds of the future. This is perhaps the darkest point in the suit, when all of that hard work seems to be for nothing. This is not only the waiting for full growth, but the blight and pestilence which can affect what we have grown. Perhaps we have raised a large crop of wheat, only to find it blighted, overgrown with fungus. This is the sort of failure we face here.

When pulling this card, we must strengthen our resolve through any given setback, delay or difficulty. We must continue to have faith in a seemingly fruitless effort. The suit goes on to profit a great deal, this is just one difficult step toward a brilliant goal.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, THOUGHTS

'Stalking The Wild Pendulum' Of Vibratory Attunement

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Molly Hankins June 19, 2025

For many spiritual leaders, raising our vibration is synonymous with accessing higher levels of consciousness, but scientist and author Itzhak Bentov explains how this actually works in his book Stalking The Wild Pendulum. Bentov is a fascinating character - a Czech-born national named Tobias with no academic background who immigrated to British-controlled Palestine in the mid-1940s and became a mechanical engineer and inventor, changing his name after joining what would soon become the IDF Science Corp. His inventions range from rocket science components and medical devices to low-carb spaghetti, but his research into the mechanics of consciousness became his most memorable legacy.

Bentov believed that every living being has one material and one nonmaterial organizing system, and that no organized energy is ever lost. Just as our physical body is reabsorbed by the Earthly elements at the time of death, so too is our “organized energy body of information” reabsorbed by the organized information body of the cosmos. According to Bentov, these two systems produce a measurable frequency signal called the electro-static field, a vibration that can be measured by static meters. The strength of this signal depends on the vitality of the subject being measured; a person, plant or animal in poor physical health or depressed spirits will have a weaker signal than a healthy, happy subject. He claims stronger signals entrain vibrating bodies in their proximity. Entrainment occurs when two oscillating systems synchronize their rhythms, meaning a high-frequency electro-static field will raise the vibration of other beings in its field.

Meditative states entrain our physical bodies with the Earth’s vibration, strengthening and stabilizing the signal. As Maharishi Mahesh Yogi said, “If world peace is to be established, peace in the individual must be established first. Transcendental Meditation directly brings peace in the individual life.” Maharishi, who trained as a physicist, began teaching Transcendental Meditation in the 1950s and popularized it at a global scale after teaching The Beatles in the late 1960s. Stalking The Wild Pendulum provides a scientific basis for the idea that in order to bring peace to the world, we have to establish peace within ourselves first. Bentov’s work claims that when we become entrained with the Earth’s vibration, all of our vital functions become attuned to each other, synchronizing at seven cycles per second. 

He gives another example of this phenomena using two grandfather clocks, each wound slightly differently so that the two swinging pendulums are out of sync. The faster moving pendulum, meaning the one with the higher frequency, will entrain the slower one, thereby increasing its speed and bringing the two resonance. In the first sentence of the book’s introduction, Bentov tells us that Stalking The Wild Pendulum is a product of late-night conversations with friends and colleagues calling future scientists to action. Instead of conclusively proving anything to the reader, his work invites us to apply the famous axiom of “as above so below” to draw our own conclusions from the parallels he points to between what he calls micro-realities, such as the behavior of two grandfather clock pendulums, and macro-realities, such as collective human behavior.

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“We change reality as we change our level of consciousness”

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Most of us have our own subjective experiences of interpersonal vibratory attunement. If we’re in a room with someone who is joyful, the mirror neurons in our brains make us feel joyful. The same applies to negative emotions.  However, the logical conclusion from Bentov’s findings is that whoevers electrostatic signal is stronger and higher vibrating will ultimately raise the frequency of the other by being in their presence. Dr. David R. Hawkins created an emotional scale diagram showing specific electrostatic frequencies corresponding with different emotional states. Studies building on his work have since shown that shame has the lowest frequency and authenticity has the highest. 

Our emotional states also correspond with what Bentov refers to as higher or lower consciousness. Higher consciousness, such as authenticity, has a wider range of possible responses to any given stimulus than lower consciousness, such as shame. He writes, “The higher we move along the scale of evolution, the higher the degree of free will, and the higher our ability to control or create our own environment.” It is not until our consciousness has expanded over different lives that we begin to build up our ability to exercise free will. As shared in the beginning of this essay, Bentov believed in both material and non-material organized systems of information energy, both of which evolve over time by way of experience. 

By cultivating a stable, high-vibrating frequency via meditation, expanding our repertoire of personal experience, managing our emotional state and living authentically, we’re able to entrain others in our powerfully positive signal. This is the most important work that can be done on our planet now. Bentov said the terms “levels of consciousness” and “realities” were interchangeable -  we change reality as we change our level of consciousness, and  there is a critical mass element to this as Maharishi also claimed. The magic number, according to many yogic and spiritual traditions, is 144,000 people meditating enough to entrain their own signal with that of Earth, thereby entraining the signals of the rest of the global population. 

Bentov goes a step further. He claims that when beings of higher consciousness focus their attention on beings of lower consciousness, the capabilities of lower consciousness-beings expand. Again, the level of consciousness refers only to how broad the range of possible responses are to any given stimulus - it’s not a value judgment. He writes, “As long as we are just sitting and producing idle thoughts, the thought energy is diffuse, and it eventually spreads out, weakens and disappears. However, when we consciously concentrate and send coherent thoughts, that thought energy or thought form will impinge on the person for whom the thought was meant.” Balancing our work between optimizing the health of our physical and non-physical organized information bodies will give us the energy to stabilize our signal and empower our thought forms to positively impact other beings. 

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

Maeshowe, Sound, and Viking Runes (Artefact II)

WUNDERKAMMER #2

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Artefact No: 2
Location: Maeshow, Orkney Islands, Scotland
Age: 5,000 years 

Ben Timberlake June 17, 2025

Maeshowe is a Neolithic chambered burial complex on the Orkney Islands, an archipelago to the north of Scotland that is a floating world of midnight suns and brutal, dark winters. The tomb overlooks the Lochs of Harry and Stenness. On the narrow spit of land that separates the two lochs is The Ring of Brodgar, an ancient stone circle. It is nothing to look at from the outside - bored sheep munching salty grass on a small mound — but inside is one of the finest prehistoric monuments in the world. 

The tomb’s structure is cruciform: a long passageway some 15m long, a central chamber, with  three side-chambers. The main passageway is orientated to the southwest. Building began on the  site around 2800BC. It is a work of monumental perfection: each wall of the long passageway is  formed of single slabs up to three tons in weight; each corner of the main chamber has four vast  standing stones; and the floors, walls and ceilings of the side-chambers are made from single  stones. Smaller, long, thin slabs make up the rest of the masonry. They are fitted with unfussy but  masterful precision in the local sandstone. It is even more impressive when you realize that these  stones were cut and shaped thousands of years before the invention of metal tools. It is estimated  to have taken 100,000 hours of labor to construct.  

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The interior chamber of Maeshowe, illuminated by the sun of the Winter Solstice.

Maeshowe sits within one of the richest prehistoric landscapes in Europe. The four principal sites  are two stone circles - the Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness - Maeshowe and the  perfectly preserved Neolithic village of Skara Brae. These sites are within a further constellation of  a dozen Neolithic and Bronze Age mounds, and other solitary standing stones.  

Aligned within this landscape like a vast sundial, Maeshowe is sighted so as to tell the time just once a year, at midwinter. For a couple of weeks at either side of the winter solstice the sun sets to the southwest and the rays of the run enter down the long passage and illuminate the wall at  the back of the end chamber. And this midwinter sun, at the zenith of its year, sets perfectly above the Barnhouse Stone some 700m away. The spectacle can be viewed live online every year.

Maeshowe and its sister sites are open to the public and well worth a visit. Because of their  remote location they get a fraction of the visitor numbers similar sites receive. There is something  deeply penitential about a visit there. The long passage is only a meter and a half tall and  archaeologists believe it was designed this way to force people to bow and submit as they walked  towards the center of the complex. 

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The Barnhouse Stone, on the left, aligns perfectly with the entrance to Maeshow, the mound on the right, so that on the day of midwinter, the sun sets above the stone and into the entrance to Maestowe.

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“The frequency for Maeshowe was a drum being beaten at 2hz creating an infrasonic frequency that, although  inaudible to us, could be felt as a physical or psychological sensations such as dizziness, raised heartbeat, and flying sensations. And that’s before we factor in the drugs.”

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As much as Maeshowe is a place of the dead, it is also a temple to sound. Dr Aaron Watson, an  honorary fellow from Exeter University, spent a number of years researching the effects of sound  at different prehistoric sites. He found that specific pitches of vocal chants and different types of drumming could produce strange, amplified sound effects known as ‘standing waves’. These are very distinct areas of high and low intensity which seem to bear no relation to the source of the  sound. In the case of Maeshowe, a drummer in the central chamber could be muted to those  standing nearby but the sound would be vastly magnified in the side chambers. The acoustics are  so powerful that the Neolithic builders must have known what they were doing when they built the structure. A recessed niche in one of the tunnel walls allowed a large stone to be dragged into the passageway blocking the passage and amplifying the sound.  

Even more impressively was the possibility that Maeshowe displayed elements of the Helmholtz  Effect - a phenomenon of air resonance in a cavity - but on a much larger scale. The frequency for Maeshowe was a drum being beaten at 2hz creating an infrasonic frequency that, although  inaudible to us, could be felt as a physical or psychological sensations such as dizziness, raised heartbeat, and flying sensations. And that’s before we factor in the drugs. These European  prehistoric societies made ample use of regular magic mushrooms and the red-and-white spotted  Fly Agaric. To the Neolithic visitors the acoustics effects of Maeshowe alone must have been  powerful but to combined with hallucinations it must have been one of the most profound and life changing experiences of their lives. 

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Viking runes carved into the walls of Maeshowe.

The tomb was rediscovered in 1861. I write ‘rediscovered’ because when the Victorian antiquarians began to clear soil and debris from the inner chambers, they came across evidence that they were not the first ones there since prehistoric times: the walls were adorned with Viking runes.  

We have a very good idea who these Vikings were thanks to the Orkneyinga Saga, a medieval  narrative history document woven through and embellished with myths. There appear to be two  sets of culprits. Firstly, in 1151, a group of Viking Crusaders led by Earl Rognvald on their way to the Holy Land. Then, a couple years later - Christmas 1153 to be precise - a band of Viking  looters on a raid led by Earl Harald.  

The Norse traditionally held such ancient places with dread and it is not known what drove them to risk their mortal souls and enter the mound: a terrible storm is mentioned, but it may have been the legends of treasure too. The saga records that two of the Earl Rognvald’s men went mad with fear of the mythical Hogboon, from Old Norse hiagbui, or mound-dweller. 

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There are some 30 runes in Maeshowe, the largest collection outside Scandinavia. Here is a  sample:  

Crusaders broke into Maeshowe. Lif the earl's cook carved these runes. To the north-west is a great treasure hidden. It was long ago that a great treasure was hidden here. Happy is he that might find that great treasure.  

Ofram, the son of Sigurd carved these runes.  

Haermund Hardaxe carved these runes.  

Thatir the weary Viking came here.  

Ingigerth is the most beautiful of all women (carved beside a picture of a slavering dog). 

Thorni fucked. Helgi carved.  

All too often historians and archaeologists concern themselves with official inscriptions left by kings and emperors and other fevered egos but I don’t think that anything quite says ‘Look on my works ye mighty and despair’ than a Viking warrior getting laid and then recording it on the rock of ages with his axe.

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

Death (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Death or Nameless
Number: XIII
Astrology: Scorpio
Qabalah: Nun, a Fish

Chris Gabriel June 14, 2025

Death is undoubtedly the most feared card in the deck. He is a skeleton looking down at the bodies and souls of the dead below. While this card pertains to mortality itself, we shall see that death is far more than the failure of our bodies.

In Rider, Death is depicted Biblically, as the horseman on the pale steed. 

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.

Revelation 6:8

The skeletal rider is clad in black armor with a red plume atop his helmet. He holds aloft a black flag emblazoned with a white rose, a symbol of purity. His horse is pale white with red eyes. Before him a bishop prays, a child kneels, his mother swoons, and a king lays dead, his crown fallen. Behind them is an island, a ship, and, on the horizon, the Sun, that sets between the two towers featured in the Moon.

In Thoth, Death is a black skeleton wearing the Atef crown of Osiris. He weaves the karmic tapestry of souls before him with his scythe. Above him is the phantom of an Eagle, below there is a serpent and a scorpion, all symbols of Scorpio, and  a fish to symbolize Nun. This is the Grim Reaper.

In Marseille, we have a notably nameless card, the only one in the deck. Here Death is a skeletal Grim Reaper in a field of hands, feet, bones, and two decapitated heads. One is crowned, the other is shaggy.

A primary image that arises is that of the dead king, a symbol which Diogenes the Cynic expresses best. Alexander, having heard that Diogenes was the wisest man in the world, came to hear his wisdom. When he arrived, Diogenes was digging through the waste of his trash can home. Alexander asked him what he was doing, to which he replied “I am trying to distinguish the bones of your father from those of a slave.”

As Shakespeare says, “Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service—two dishes, but to one table. That’s the end.”

Death is the great equalizer: beneath masks and costumes, beautiful and ugly flesh, lays a pale skeleton. The skull is a profound truth, and death’s head has always been used to terrify. Nearly every ancient culture revered it, pirates raised it as their flag, even today American police officers wear it on their uniforms.

Death in occultism, however, is more akin to the death of Paul, who says “I die daily”. The Scorpion willingly kills itself when surrounded by flames. This card invites us to “Die”, transform our body through terrifying alchemical processes and, like the white flower, be made purer. Our essence is distilled through this continual cycle of life and death. The given number of 13, an unlucky number, signifies this very thing. After the 12 hours, the 12 months, the 12 signs of the Zodiac, what comes next? What comes after the end?

When we pull this card, we must not be afraid. Instead, willingly put an end to what is limiting you,nand to the stilted, decaying structures that you cling to. People spend their whole lives avoiding change and, in doing so, die long before their body. When we decide to shed our skin like the serpent, we can have absolute confidence that we are becoming a stronger, greater version of ourselves.

When we outgrow our old life, we must die and be born again.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, THOUGHTS

Footnotes to Plato (c.428-347BC)

Rafael's School of Athens, 1511.

Nicko Mroczkowski May 9, 2024

Ancient Greece was the cradle of Western civilisation. Art, agriculture, and commerce had progressed to the point of creating, apparently for the first time, a culture of intellectuals. Many of the things that we now call ‘institutions’ – democracy, the legal process, the education system – had their start in this period. It was even here that ‘Europe’ got its name.

In this flourishing new culture, thinkers began to try and understand the world in a more organised way. From this, Western philosophy was born, and science came along with it. These thinkers asked themselves: what is the world made of, and how does it work? This was not a new question, most likely every culture before had asked it in some way, but what made the Ancient Greeks unique was their systematic approach. Because they also asked a secondary question, which, arguably, is still the starting point of any scientific inquiry: what is the correct way to talk about what something is? 

L. Vosterman, after Rubens. c. 1620.

Each of the very first philosophers answered this question with one thing: ‘substance’, or stuff. They believed that the right way to understand the world is in terms of a single type of matter, which is present in different proportions in everything that exists. Thales of Miletus, perhaps the earliest Greek philosopher, believed that all things come from water; solid matter, life, and heat are all special phases of the same liquid. For him, then, the true way to talk about an apple, for example, is as a particularly dense piece of moisture. Heraclitus, on the other hand, believed that everything is made of fire; all existence is in flux, like the dancing flame, of which an apple is a fleeting shape.

We don’t know much more about these thinkers, as not much of their work survives; most of the accounts we have are second hand. We only know for sure that each proposed a different ultimate substance that everything is made out of. Then, a little while later, along came a philosopher called Plato.

Despite its prominence, ‘Plato’ was actually a nickname meaning ‘broad’ – there is disagreement about its origin, but the most popular theory is that it comes from his time as a wrestler. His real name is thought to have been ‘Aristocles’. Whatever he was really called, Plato changed everything. Instead of arguing, like his predecessors, for a different kind of ultimate substance, he observed that substance alone is not enough to explain what exists: there is also form. In other words, he more or less invented the distinction between form and content.

One could spend a lifetime analysing these terms, and there are whole volumes of art and literary theory that address their nuances; but it’s also a common-sense distinction that we use every day. The form of something is its shape, structure, composition; the content, or substance, is the stuff it’s made of. So the form of an apple is a sweet fruit with a specific genetic profile, and its content is various hydrocarbons and trace elements. The form of a literary work is its style and composition – poetry or prose, past or present tense, first- or third-person, etc. – and its content is its subject matter, what it describes and what happens in it.  

An attempt at a classification of the perfect form of a rabbit. (1915)

We can already see Plato’s influence on modern knowledge in these examples. The correct way to talk about something, for him, was primarily in terms of its form, and only secondarily in terms of its substance. This is still the case for us today. There is a powerful justification for this preference: it allows us to talk about things generally. This is basically the foundation of any science; we would get absolutely nowhere if we only analysed particular individuals. There are just too many things out there. No two animals of the same species, for example, will ever have exactly the same make-up – even if they’re clones. They have eaten different things, had different experiences; they also, quite frankly, create and shed cells so rapidly and unpredictably that differences in their substance are inevitable. What they do have in common, though, is their anatomy, behaviour, and an overall genetic profile that produces these things. 

Forms are peculiar, however, because they don’t exist in the same way as substances do. While there are concrete definitions of substances, the same cannot be said for forms. There are, for example, no perfect triangles in existence, and we could probably never create one – zoom in enough, and something will always be slightly out of place. So how did Plato come up with the idea of something that can never be experienced in real life? The answer is precisely because of things like triangles. Mathematics, and especially geometry, is the original language of forms, and it can describe a perfect triangle or circle, even though one may never exist. The success of mathematical inquiries in Plato’s time allowed him to recognise that the concept of forms which worked in geometry can be applied to understand the world more generally. 

Forms are perfect specimens of imperfect things, are exemplars, or things we aspire to – they are the way things ought to be, in a perfect world. ‘Form’ in Plato’s work is also sometimes translated as ‘idea’ or ‘ideal’. And so, Plato’s answer to the question of how to conduct scientific inquiry was this: the correct way to talk about something is in terms of how it should be. Despite our imperfect world, rational thinking – the capacity of the human mind for grasping things like mathematical truths – can do this, and that’s what sets human beings and their societies apart from the rest of nature. 

Perfect Platonic Solids

It gets a little strange from this point on: Plato believes that forms really exist, but in a separate, perfect world. Our souls start out there and then make their way to the material world to be born, but still have implicit knowledge of their original home, and this is where reason originates. Improbable, yes, but not completely absurd. Plato was clearly trying to explain, to a society that was just beginning to understand the importance of perfect knowledge, how it could exist in our imperfect world of change and difference. Two millennia later, Kant would show that it’s due to the way the human mind is structured, but we don’t really know how this happened either.

Really, we’re still playing Plato’s game. The basic realisation that to know the world, we must study the general and the perfect, and ignore the non-essential characteristics of particular individuals – this is his legacy. Of course, this way of thinking is so deeply ingrained in Western culture that it can be hard to grapple with; it’s so fundamental that we take it for granted. But what we call knowledge today would not be possible at all without it. Seeing this, we can imagine what the influential British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead meant when he wrote that ‘the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists in a series of footnotes to Plato’. 

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Nicko Mroczkowski