Death (Tarot Triptych)
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…
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.
Footnotes to Plato (c.428-347BC)
Nicko Mroczkowski June 11, 2025
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…
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’.
Nicko Mroczkowski
On Photography (Excerpt)
Susan Sontag June 10, 2025
To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store…
Portraits in Life and Death, Peter Hujar. 1976.
When Susan Sontag released ‘On Photography’ in 1977, itself a collection of essays written in the preceding four years, it announced a new era in thinking about the medium. In the near fifty years since, it has become easy to overlook how radical Sontag’s ideas were for they have been absorbed so readily into the common theoretical understanding of photography we struggle to understand photography outside of her thinking. The book considers photography as a somewhat violent act that fosters a voyeuristic relationship with the world, separate from the reality it purports to capture. Yet the work is not inherently critical of the medium, instead it asks us to consider the power of depiction that the camera gives us, and to weild the tool with respect and compassion.
Susan Sontag, June 10, 2025
To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard's Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King's Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard's gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image. Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.
Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them.
For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality-photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid-and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker's film, Si j'avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectible objects, as they still are when served up in books.
Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph-any photograph-seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something "out there," just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life.
While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film-the precise expression on the subject's face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity-and ubiquity-of the photographic record is photography's "message," its aggression.
Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography's glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images.
That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption-the toy of 'the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed-seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
“It seems positively unnatural to travel for pleasure without taking a camera along. Photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had.”
Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing-which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.
Memorializing the achievements of individuals considered as members of families (as well as of other groups) is the earliest popular use of photography. For at least a century, the wedding photograph has been as much a part of the ceremony as the prescribed verbal formulas. Cameras go with family life. According to a sociological study done in France, most households have a camera, but a household with children is twice as likely to have at least one camera as a household in which there are no children. Not to take pictures of one's children, particularly when they are small, is a sign of parental indifference, just as not turning up for one's graduation picture is a gesture of adolescent rebellion.
Through photographs, each family constructs a portrait-chronicle of itself-a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness. It hardly matters what activities are photographed so long as photographs get taken and are cherished. Photography becomes a rite of family life just when, in the industrializing countries of Europe and America, the very institution of the family starts undergoing radical surgery. As that claustrophobic unit, the nuclear family, was being carved out of a much larger family aggregate, photography came along to memorialize, to restate symbolically, the imperiled continuity and vanishing extendedness of family life. Those ghostly traces, photographs, supply the token presence of the dispersed relatives. A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family-and, often, is all that remains of it.
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure. Thus, photography develops in tandem with one of the most characteristic of modern activities: tourism. For the first time in history, large numbers of people regularly travel out of their habitual environments for short periods of time. It seems positively unnatural to travel for pleasure without taking a camera along. Photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had. Photographs document sequences of consumption carried on outside the view of family, friends, neighbors. But dependence on the camera, as the device that makes real what one is experiencing, doesn't fade when people travel more. Taking photographs fills the same need for the cosmopolitans accumulating photograph-trophies of their boat trip up the Albert Nile or their fourteen days in China as it does for lower-middle-class vacationers taking snapshots of the Eiffel Tower or Niagara Falls.
A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it-by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. The very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel. Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. Unsure of other responses, they take a picture. This gives shape to experience: stop, take a photograph, and move on. The method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic-Germans, Japanese, and Americans. Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.
People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad. Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic. In the early 1970s, the fable of the brash American tourist of the 1950s and 1960s, rich with dollars and Babbittry, was replaced by the mystery of the group minded tourist armed with two cameras, one on each hip.
Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation. One fullpage ad shows a small group of people standing pressed together, peering out of the photograph, all but one looking stunned, excited, upset. The one who wears a different expression holds a camera to his eye; he seems self-possessed, is almost smiling. While the others are passive, clearly alarmed spectators, having a camera has transformed one person into something active, a voyeur: only he has mastered the situation. What do these people see? We don't know. And it doesn't matter. It is an Event: something worth seeing-and therefore worth photographing. The ad copy, white letters across the dark lower third of the photograph like news coming over a teletype machine, consists of just six words: " ... Prague ... Woodstock ... Vietnam ... Sapporo ... Londonderry .. . LEICA." Crushed hopes, youth antics, colonial wars, and winter sports are alike-are equa lized by the camera. Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events.
A photograph is not just the result of an encounter between an event and a photographer; picture-taking is an event in itself, and one with ever more peremptory rights-to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going on. Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera's interventions. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing. This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itselfso that something else can be brought into the world, the photograph. After the event has ended, the picture will still exist, conferring on the event a kind of immortality (and importance) it would never otherwise have enjoyed. While real people are out there killing themselves or other real people, the photographer stays behind his or her camera, creating a tiny element of another world: the image-world that bids to outlast us all.
Photographing is essentially an act of nonintervention. Part of the horror of such memorable coups of contemporary photojournalism as the pictures of a Vietnamese bonze reaching for the gasoline can, of a Bengali guerrilla in the act of ba yoneting a trussed-up collaborator, comes from the awareness of how plausible it has become, in situations where the photographer has the choice between a photograph and a life, to choose the photograph. The person who intervenes cannot record; the person who is recording cannot intervene. Dziga Vertov's great film, Man with a Movie Camera (1'929), gives the ideal image of the photographer as someone in perpetual movement, someone movmg through a panorama of disparate events with such agility and speed that any intervention is out of the question. Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) gives the complementary image: the photographer played by James Stewart has an intensified relation to one event, through his camera, precisely because he has a broken leg and is confined to a wheelchair; being temporarily immobilized prevents him from acting on what he sees, and makes it even more important to take pictures. Even if incompatible with intervention in a physical sense, using a camera is still a form of participation. Although the camera is an observation station, the act of photographing is more than passive observing. Like sexual voyeurism, it is a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging whatever is going on to keep on happening. To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged (at least for as long as it takes to get a "good" picture), to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing-including, when that is the interest, another person's pain or misfortune.
Susan Sontag (1933 – 2004) was an American writer, critic, and intellectual, considered one of the most important and brilliant thinkers of her generation. Mostly writing in essay form, through she produced a number of novels and long form works, she explored ideas of art, culture, war, and pain with a singular voice and relentless insight.
The Devil (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel June 7, 2025
The Devil is amongst the most feared cards in the tarot, he is the enemy of mankind. Each depiction shows a horned Devil alongside entrapped humans, but the cause of their entrapment varies greatly…
Name: The Devil
Number: XV
Astrology: Capricorn
Qabalah: Ayin, the Eye
Chris Gabriel June 7, 2025
The Devil is amongst the most feared cards in the tarot, he is the enemy of mankind. Each depiction shows a horned Devil alongside entrapped humans, but the cause of their entrapment varies greatly.
In Rider, we are given the most moral portrait. The Devil is in a traditional form - a man’s body with hairy goatlike legs and clawed feet. His goat horns are topped by a Pentagram, and they arch downwards to his bat wings. He holds his right hand up, while his left holds a flaming wand towards the ground. His face is bearded and monstrous. At his feet, a man and woman are chained to a column. They too are horned, nakeded, and tails protrude behind them. The woman has grown a tail tipped with a cluster of grapes, the man’s is tipped with flames.
In Thoth, the Devil is not a humanoid at all, but a goat replete with great spiralling horns, a third eye, and a bough of blue flowers. The stands in front of a great phallus crowned with a nimbus, and the entrapped souls are not chained, but are the sperm within the immense testes. They are not trapped in the way of the other two cards, rather, they are held in potentia, not yet actualized, but awaiting their future.
In Marseille, the Devil is the strangest of the three: a blue skinned beast with breasts and a penis. While the Rider Devil took on the pose of Baphomet, here we have the full hermaphroditic figure. The Devil differs greatly in different Marseille decks, often having a face in his stomach or eyes in his knees. His body is schizophrenically split into many organs and parts, each one conscious of itself, but the sum total of the Devil is unconscious as he uses his upheld flaming wand to light his way through the dark. The imps beside him have asinine ears and tails. Their horns are stick-like. They are chained to the pedestal of the Devil.
The Devil invites us into the depths of the Unconscious, the root of our desires and fear. This Hell is his home. Marseille and Rider clearly show that these wants are the sinful roots that sprout vice in our lives. The vices controlled by the Rider Devil are wrath, symbolized by the flaming tail, and drunkenness, symbolized by the grape tail. The Hell of this Devil is shown best in Disney’s Pinocchio as Pleasure Island, where ‘naughty boys’ go to smoke, drink and gamble, but soon are turned into asses, growing ears and tails, until they are enslaved and forced to work deep in the mines.
The vices of Marseille are bodily: lust, hunger, and the desires of the flesh. The Marseille Devil calls to mind the delusions of schizophrenics, as described by Victor Tausk, in which one's organs are felt to be foreign, and dominated by outside forces. This tends to be localized in the genitals, but can often spread throughout the whole body. The Devil is the embodiment of that eternal outsider who controls the bodies of the unwilling. As well described vividly by David Foster Wallace in Big Red Son, and typified by Origen, many will castrate themselves to overcome sin and grow closer to God.
Thoth shows us this is not necessary. The card shows the wisdom that Crowley received in the Book of the Law, that “the word of Sin is Restriction”, and that these unconscious forces need not fester down below, but demand to be expressed and brought forth into reality. The souls of the damned are not chained to the ground, but held as sperm awaiting their future fertilization.
Freud has shown that it is only when the drives are repressed, forced down into Hell, that they grow sick. As Blake writes in the Proverbs of Hell: He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.
The Devil of Thoth is but an animal, and though he has a mystic third eye, he is driven by his sexual urges. He is the long maligned sexual drive at last given the freedom to create.
When the Devil comes up in a reading, we must be careful not to overindulge in our vices and follow our simple urges down, but instead to exalt, raise, and utilize them for greater creativity.
Pronoia Pt. 1 - The Art of Sacred Clowning
Molly Hankins June 5, 2025
Pronoia is paranoia’s positive counterpart and describes a worldview rooted in the idea that the universe is conspiring in our favor…
Molly Hankins June 5, 2025
Pronoia is paranoia’s positive counterpart and describes a worldview rooted in the idea that the universe is conspiring in our favor. Author Rob Brezney describes the concept in his 2005 book Pronoia, a modern-day, illustrated manual to life akin to Be Here Now by Ram Dass, and introduces two aspects of the sacred clown that can guide us towards pronoia. The first is a tummler, which is a Yiddish term that refers to someone who “makes a racket”, stirring up a commotion to heighten self-awareness. The second is the Iroquois word ondinnonk, meaning a secret wish of the soul that longs to do good deeds. Brezsny recommends that we allow our ondinnonk to lead our pronoaic mission as a tummler, so that we may elevate the consciousness of ourselves and our community.
Clowning is a primary expression of any tummler, whose sacred duty is to affectionately incite agitation that promotes self-reflection and positive action. The Native Amrican Hopi tribe ritualized the art of sacred clowning in an annual summer performance. Known as Kachina Ceremonies, these displays would last from the Winter to Summer Solstice with a six month build-up to the climax of the summer ritual, taking place in July because heat causes expansion drawing out impurities. Clowns, Princeton University Art and Archaeology Professor Hal Foster explained, played the essential role of clearing corruption out of the community by , “Tracing fractures that already exist in the given order to pressure them.” Existing areas of corruption were pressured to a breaking point by the affectionate agitation of the sacred clowns, and community members became strengthened by this release of impurities.
Brezsny believes that in order to see where corruption has accumulated within ourselves, our leaders and our communities, we must trigger each other. He writes in Pronoia, “We can inspire each other to perpetrate healing mischief, friendly shocks, compassionate tricks, blasphemous reverence, holy pranks and crazy wisdom.” This is the role of the sacred clown or tummler, guided by the good-natured principle of ondinnonk. Within a traditional social hierarchy, only the court jester can safely speak truth to power, and it can only be successfully communicated through play. The Hopi regarded corruption as an inevitability of being human, building in a social purification ceremony aligned with natural cycles to ensure that a corrupted people did not become the dominant force in the tribe.
In Pronoia, fundamentalism is the primary corruptive force of modernity, and Brezsny believes the fundamentalist attitude demands everything be taken too seriously, personally and literally. “Correct belief is the only virtue. Every fundamentalist is committed to waging war against the imagination unless the imagination is enslaved to his or her belief system,” he writes. “And here’s the bad news: like almost everyone in the world, each of us has our own share of the fundamentalist virus.” The next page of the book is blank except for an invitation to confess in writing where we harbor fundamentalism in our own worldviews, challenging us to realise how easy it is to see in others and ignore it in ourselves.
“Healing mischief, friendly shocks, compassionate tricks, blasphemous reverence, holy pranks and crazy wisdom”
If we endeavor to put pressure on the fractured places within our own psyche, we can uncover where fundamentalism has corrupted us and open ourselves up to otherwise unavailable opportunities. These are opportunities for both transcendent self-awareness and society-evolving consciousness expansion. Like the famous Leonard Cohen lyric from “Anthem” says, the cracks are where the light gets in. Though living by a pronaic philosophy in 2025 feels outlandish, it is a radica to consider the possibility that we are currently experiencing an increase of pressure on existing fractures that will ultimately lead us to trade corruption for lightness. The fear of facing our own corrupted nature as individuals and a collective lightens when we approach it with a sense of humor.
Pronoia serves as an invitation to become tummlers unto ourselves, powered by the purity of our innate ondinnonk spirit that inherently wants to perpetuate goodness. As we do so, lightness spreads to the people around us and we all become more suited to administer the sort of, “...healing mischief, friendly shocks, compassionate tricks, blasphemous reverence, holy pranks and crazy wisdom,” that pressures the fractures of our own corruption and gives way to goodness.
Perhaps the secret of how to speed up this process in the collective lies in the blank page Breszny put in Pronoia. In the book’s forward he recommends we act as pronaic co-authors, knowing that the underlying axiom of “as above, so below” applies to both the macro and the microcosm. Breszny knows that to reflect upon and root out our own corruption is to become co-conspirators with the universe, scheming to generate more favor for ourselves and all of life. Embodying sacred clown energy as we undertake the process ensures success.
Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.
Ominous Commandments
Elif Blackstock June 3, 2025
In a large field in northeastern Georgia, just outside the small city of Elberton and its population of below 5,000, stood six granite stones, arranged in a Stonehenge like construction. They functioned, in part as a solar calendar…
The Georgia Guidestones after the 2022 bombing.
Elif Blackstock June 3, 2025
In a large field in northeastern Georgia, just outside the small city of Elberton and its population of below 5,000, stood six granite stones, arranged in a Stonehenge like construction. They functioned, in part as a solar calendar: holes drilled into the granite aligned with the Pole Star, the solstice, and the equinox, and one allowed a ray of sun to pass through at noon, pointing to the day of the year. They were erected in 1980, and commissioned by a man known only by the pseudonym R.C. Christian, allegedly on behalf of a small group of individuals who believed in the importance of the stones, and the message they held. Over the years, they became a tourist attraction, drawing tens of thousands of visitors each year, and the subject of conspiracy and fascination across the world until, in 2022, a bomb exploded at the site, shattering one of the slabs and leading to the demolition of the rest over concerns for their structural integrity after the damage. No one has ever been caught in relation to the crime, and many rejoiced their destruction, for upon the stones were ten maxims which, since their inception, have caused controversy, confusion, celebration, and speculation in equal measure.
On the four main stones, in eight languages, were what appeared to be new commandments for living, written by Christian, and the group he claimed to represents. They do not prescribe to an obvious or exact school of thought, at times political, social, and moral, and moving between the sensible, the eccentric, the absurd, and the worrying. Rational commands such as ‘Be not a cancer on earth—leave room for nature', ‘Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts’, and ‘Balance personal rights with social duties’, stand next to more poetic, cryptic, or outlandish ideas such as ‘Prize truth, beauty and love, seeking harmony with the infinite’, and ‘Unite humanity with a living new language’. Of the ten maxims, however, it is numbers one and two that caused the stone’s controversy, and ultimately led to its destruction. At the top of each of the granite slabs, in English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Traditional Chinese, and Russian respectively, were the phrases ’Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature’ and ‘Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity’.
In 1980, when the stones were erected, the human population was close to 4.5 billion. The two opening principles, then, seemed to not only call for the eradication of nearly 90% of the earths population, but the second maxim also was interpreted as encouraging eugenics. With their obscured origins, the shady nature of their commissioner, and mysterious purpose, alongside the fact that many of the other commandments seemed both rational and applicable to modern life, the two opening statements seemed ominous, and a slate of theories as to the true meaning of the stones began to develop.
“Despite—or perhaps because of—the speculation, no one ever came forward to confirm or deny the identity of R.C. Christian, nor to clarify the stones’ intended purpose”
To some, these declarations represented a philosophical musing on how humanity might live sustainably in the aftermath of global catastrophe when population levels may already be drastically reduced. The Cold War was raging in 1980, and a nuclear armageddon did not seem so far away to many. The Georgia Guidestones, to some, served not as a genocidal directive, but as a kind of Rosetta Stone for future survivors, offering guidance on how to rebuild civilization in harmony with the natural world. The ecological language woven throughout the inscriptions supported this to those who believed this view, seeing the project as a modern-day monument to environmental stewardship and enlightened governance.
Others, however, saw something far darker in the granite. The language of “guiding reproduction” and maintaining a specific population cap struck many as eerily similar to the rhetoric of eugenicists and promoted authoritarian population control. Conspiracy theories flourished, especially in the internet age. Some believed the stones were the work of a shadowy elite planning a New World Order, using the monument as a declaration of their future intentions. For these theorists, the anonymity of R.C. Christian was no coincidence, but a deliberate attempt to mask the involvement of powerful globalist actors. The fact that the site also aligned astronomically only contributed to ideas of occult symbolism, spurring claims that the monument had Masonic or even Satanic undertones.
In right-wing and religious circles, the stones became a lightning rod. Christian evangelicals decried the language of a “new world language” and “harmony with the infinite” as New Age heresy, incompatible with biblical teachings. Some described the structure as “America’s Stonehenge of Satan,” believing it to be the work of dark spiritual forces masquerading as enlightenment. Politicians and pundits from conservative media outlets occasionally referenced the stones as proof of moral decay or creeping globalism, fanning public suspicion.
Despite—or perhaps because of—the speculation, no one ever came forward to confirm or deny the identity of R.C. Christian, nor to clarify the stones’ intended purpose. The Elbert County Granite Finishing Company, which had been paid handsomely for the project, honored a vow of silence, further deepening the mystery. As years passed, the stones stood silent, defying explanation, as more and more visited them each year. Their destruction in 2022 was, to many, both an act of terror and of symbolism. Whether the bomber saw them as a threat, an abomination, or merely a target to stir fear and debate, the Guidestones were finally reduced to rubble. But the questions they raised—about humanity’s future, its values, and its power to shape the world—remain etched in the imagination, if not in stone.
Temperance (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel May 31, 2025
Temperance is the image of spiritual attainment. This is the card of the Guardian Angel, the embodiment of the individual divine Will. It is the Godlike function in man: Creativity…
Name: Temperance or Art
Number: XIV
Astrology: Sagittarius
Qabalah: Samekh
Chris Gabriel May 31, 2025
Temperance is the image of spiritual attainment. This is the card of the Guardian Angel, the embodiment of the individual divine Will. It is the Godlike function in man: Creativity.
In Rider, we are shown an angel in white robes. They pass water between two golden cups while their robe is marked with a golden triangle. They have great red wings, their flowing blonde hair is topped with a little sun, and their head is surrounded with radiance. Their bare feet stand in two worlds: one dips into the pool before them, the other is on the ground where irises grow beside them. They stand in front of a long path which leads to a radiant light in the distance.
In Thoth, we have an angel as an alchemical Hermaphrodite. The Emperor and Empress married in the Lovers card, and here become one. Their skin is blue and white, they have six breasts hanging out of a large green dress adorned with bees and serpents. Their royal mantle is the rainbow, which flows down their chest, as an arrow sits in it. Their crown is silver and gold and they hold fire and a cup of water, both of which are being poured into the cauldron which sits before them. A white lion and red phoenix sit in the flames around the cauldron. Two crescent moons form a lunar bow atop the card, and behind the angel is a golden disk adorned with an acrostic Latin motto of the alchemists::
Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem-
Visit the interior of the Earth, rectification will reveal the hidden stone
VITRIOL.
In Marseille, our angel wears a red and blue robe. They have blue wings and blonde hair with a five petaled flower. They smile as they move water between the two cups they hold.
Temperance is self control, which in its truest mastery is the craft of alchemy. Alchemy, in its most basic form, is the transformation of substances, and through the true alchemy, wise men sought to transform their bodies of lead into divine bodies of gold. The beakers, alembics, vessels and metals were but ceremonial tools to visualize the interior process they were undergoing.
This process is the source of all art: the transformation of external input into sensory impressions and ideas, which are again transformed, distilled, and ultimately externalized to create a work of art.
In Genesis, man is described as being made in God’s image, but at that point, there were no physical descriptions, the only thing one knows about God at that point is that they create. We are, therefore, godlike only in our ability to create and transform.
The Angel of this card is the embodiment of the Divine in each individual, the Guardian Angel, the higher Soul that is simultaneously in contact with God and you. It is the rainbow and the Greek god hermaphroditus, the divided colors and sexes unified. Through magick we can make contact with this higher part of ourselves and begin to follow that great path,symbolized by Sagittarius, the Arrow.
All of this may sound very lofty, but more mundane forms of alchemy are performed every day. In nature, fire and water are opposite, when fires start, rain puts them out. It is extremely rare to find boiling water in nature, outside of a few geysers and hot springs. But through our genius, we developed technologies with which we could overcome nature, we gained control of fire, and placed water over without dousing it. Every cup of tea is an alchemical work.
When we pull this card, we are soon to have a great deal of creative energy, we may begin a serious undertaking, this may be the start of a huge project. When we create, we are engaging directly with the divine, and this card lets us know that forces greater than ourselves are by our side.
The Death of the Author
Roland Barthes May 29, 2025
In his story Sarrasine, Balzac, speaking of a castrato disguised as a woman, writes this sentence: "It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling". Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story's hero? Is it the man Balzac? Is it the author Balzac?
The Death of Marat, Jacques-Louis David. 1793.
First published in 1967 in the American magazine-in-a-box ‘Aspen’, the French theorist Roland Barthes’ essay has gone on to become one of the most important modern words of literary criticism. Barthes central claim is that literary analysis has long, and incorrectly, relied on the intentions of the author as a means to explore and explain written works. Instead, he suggests, it is the individual interpretation of the reader that is the key to discovering meaning in texts, and the author should not be considered. Barthes gives power to the words alone, and removes them from their maker - once they exist on the page, the only intention that matters is the reader, and there is no objective nor definitive meaning to the writing. In the years since it was first published, countless essays, books, and lectures have been given in favor or criticism of Barthes work, but his ideas have nonetheless entered both the pedagogical and popular mainstream, today more than ever.
Roland Barthes, May 20, 2025
In his story Sarrasine, Balzac, speaking of a castrato disguised as a woman, writes this sentence: "It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling". Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story's hero, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is it the man Balzac, endowed by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it the author Balzac, professing certain "literary" ideas of femininity? Is it universal wisdom? or romantic psychology? It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.
· · ·
Probably this has always been the case: once an action is recounted, for intransitive ends, and no longer in order to act directly upon reality — that is, finally external to any function but the very exercise of the symbol — this disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins. Nevertheless, the feeling about this phenomenon has been variable; in primitive societies, narrative is never undertaken by a person, but by a mediator, shaman or speaker, whose "performance" may be admired (that is, his mastery of the narrative code), but not his "genius" The author is a modern figure, produced no doubt by our society insofar as, at the end of the middle ages, with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, or, to put it more nobly, of the "human person" Hence it is logical that with regard to literature it should be positivism, resume and the result of capitalist ideology, which has accorded the greatest importance to the author's "person" The author still rules in manuals of literary history, in biographies of writers, in magazine interviews, and even in the awareness of literary men, anxious to unite, by their private journals, their person and their work; the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions; criticism still consists, most of the time, in saying that Baudelaire's work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, Van Gogh's work his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice: the explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of one and the same person, the author, which delivered his "confidence."
· · ·
Though the Author's empire is still very powerful (recent criticism has often merely consolidated it), it is evident that for a long time now certain writers have attempted to topple it. In France, Mallarme was doubtless the first to see and foresee in its full extent the necessity of substituting language itself for the man who hitherto was supposed to own it; for Mallarme, as for us, it is language which speaks, not the author: to write is to reach, through a preexisting impersonality — never to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realistic novelist — that point where language alone acts, "performs," and not "oneself": Mallarme's entire poetics consists in suppressing the author for the sake of the writing (which is, as we shall see, to restore the status of the reader.) Valery, encumbered with a psychology of the Self, greatly edulcorated Mallarme's theory, but, turning in a preference for classicism to the lessons of rhetoric, he unceasingly questioned and mocked the Author, emphasized the linguistic and almost "chance" nature of his activity, and throughout his prose works championed the essentially verbal condition of literature, in the face of which any recourse to the writer's inferiority seemed to him pure superstition. It is clear that Proust himself, despite the apparent psychological character of what is called his analyses, undertook the responsibility of inexorably blurring, by an extreme subtilization, the relation of the writer and his characters: by making the narrator not the person who has seen or felt, nor even the person who writes, but the person who will write (the young man of the novel — but, in fact, how old is he, and who is he? — wants to write but cannot, and the novel ends when at last the writing becomes possible), Proust has given modern writing its epic: by a radical reversal, instead of putting his life into his novel, as we say so often, he makes his very life into a work for which his own book was in a sense the model, so that it is quite obvious to us that it is not Charlus who imitates Montesquiou, but that Montesquiou in his anecdotal, historical reality is merely a secondary fragment, derived from Charlus. Surrealism lastly — to remain on the level of this prehistory of modernity — surrealism doubtless could not accord language a sovereign place, since language is a system and since what the movement sought was, romantically, a direct subversion of all codes — an illusory subversion, moreover, for a code cannot be destroyed, it can only be "played with"; but by abruptly violating expected meanings (this was the famous surrealist "jolt"), by entrusting to the hand the responsibility of writing as fast as possible what the head itself ignores (this was automatic writing), by accepting the principle and the experience of a collective writing, surrealism helped secularize the image of the Author. Finally, outside of literature itself (actually, these distinctions are being superseded), linguistics has just furnished the destruction of the Author with a precious analytic instrument by showing that utterance in its entirety is a void process, which functions perfectly without requiring to be filled by the person of the interlocutors: linguistically, the author is never anything more than the man who writes, just as I is no more than the man who says I: language knows a "subject," not a "person," end this subject, void outside of the very utterance which defines it, suffices to make language "work," that is, to exhaust it.
“Everything is to be distinguished, but nothing deciphered”
The absence of the Author (with Brecht, we might speak here of a real "alienation:' the Author diminishing like a tiny figure at the far end of the literary stage) is not only a historical fact or an act of writing: it utterly transforms the modern text (or — what is the same thing — the text is henceforth written and read so that in it, on every level, the Author absents himself). Time, first of all, is no longer the same. The Author, when we believe in him, is always conceived as the past of his own book: the book and the author take their places of their own accord on the same line, cast as a before and an after: the Author is supposed to feed the book — that is, he pre-exists it, thinks, suffers, lives for it; he maintains with his work the same relation of antecedence a father maintains with his child. Quite the contrary, the modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now. This is because (or: it follows that) to write can no longer designate an operation of recording, of observing, of representing, of "painting" (as the Classic writers put it), but rather what the linguisticians, following the vocabulary of the Oxford school, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given to the first person and to the present), in which utterance has no other content than the act by which it is uttered: something like the / Command of kings or the I Sing of the early bards; the modern writer, having buried the Author, can therefore no longer believe, according to the "pathos" of his predecessors, that his hand is too slow for his thought or his passion, and that in consequence, making a law out of necessity, he must accentuate this gap and endlessly "elaborate" his form; for him, on the contrary, his hand, detached from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin — or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, that is, the very thing which ceaselessly questions any origin.
· · ·
Death Finds an Author Writing his Life, Edward Hull. 1827.
We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single "theological" meaning (the "message" of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture. Like Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, both sublime and comical and whose profound absurdity precisely designates the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original; his only power is to combine the different kinds of writing, to oppose some by others, so as never to sustain himself by just one of them; if he wants to express himself, at least he should know that the internal "thing" he claims to "translate" is itself only a readymade dictionary whose words can be explained (defined) only by other words, and so on ad infinitum: an experience which occurred in an exemplary fashion to the young De Quincey, so gifted in Greek that in order to translate into that dead language certain absolutely modern ideas and images, Baudelaire tells us, "he created for it a standing dictionary much more complex and extensive than the one which results from the vulgar patience of purely literary themes" (Paradis Artificiels). succeeding the Author, the writer no longer contains within himself passions, humors, sentiments, impressions, but that enormous dictionary, from which he derives a writing which can know no end or halt: life can only imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, a lost, infinitely remote imitation.
· · ·
Once the Author is gone, the claim to "decipher" a text becomes quite useless. To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing. This conception perfectly suits criticism, which can then take as its major task the discovery of the Author (or his hypostases: society, history, the psyche, freedom) beneath the work: once the Author is discovered, the text is "explained:' the critic has conquered; hence it is scarcely surprising not only that, historically, the reign of the Author should also have been that of the Critic, but that criticism (even "new criticism") should be overthrown along with the Author. In a multiple writing, indeed, everything is to be distinguished, but nothing deciphered; structure can be followed, "threaded" (like a stocking that has run) in all its recurrences and all its stages, but there is no underlying ground; the space of the writing is to be traversed, not penetrated: writing ceaselessly posits meaning but always in order to evaporate it: it proceeds to a systematic exemption of meaning. Thus literature (it would be better, henceforth, to say writing), by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a "secret:' that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.
· · ·
Let us return to Balzac's sentence: no one (that is, no "person") utters it: its source, its voice is not to be located; and yet it is perfectly read; this is because the true locus of writing is reading. Another very specific example can make this understood: recent investigations (J. P. Vernant) have shed light upon the constitutively ambiguous nature of Greek tragedy, the text of which is woven with words that have double meanings, each character understanding them unilaterally (this perpetual misunderstanding is precisely what is meant by "the tragic"); yet there is someone who understands each word in its duplicity, and understands further, one might say, the very deafness of the characters speaking in front of him: this someone is precisely the reader (or here the spectator). In this way is revealed the whole being of writing: a text consists of multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each other, into parody, into contestation; but there is one place where this multiplicity is collected, united, and this place is not the author, as we have hitherto said it was, but the reader: the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of; the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination; but this destination can no longer be personal: the reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted. This is why it is absurd to hear the new writing condemned in the name of a humanism which hypocritically appoints itself the champion of the reader's rights. The reader has never been the concern of classical criticism; for it, there is no other man in literature but the one who writes. We are now beginning to be the dupes no longer of such antiphrases, by which our society proudly champions precisely what it dismisses, ignores, smothers or destroys; we know that to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.
Roland Gérard Barthes (1915 – 1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His writing explored a diverse range of fields and influenced the development of multiple schools of theory, including structuralism, anthropology, literary theory, and post-structuralism.
Knight of Disks (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel May 24, 2025
The Knight of Disks is a man with a plan. He sees the cyclical movement of the world and contemplates his movements within them. He is agricultural intelligence, for he knows when to plant seeds, when to harvest, and when to allow a field to remain fallow…
Name: Knight of Disks
Number: 1 or 3
Astrology: Virgo, Fire of Earth
Qabalah: Yod of He or Vau of He
Chris Gabriel May 24, 2025
The Knight of Disks is a man with a plan. He sees the cyclical movement of the world and contemplates his movements within them. He is agricultural intelligence, for he knows when to plant seeds, when to harvest, and when to allow a field to remain fallow.
In Rider, we have an armoured knight, his helmet topped with a sprig, and a pentacle resembling the sun is held in his gloved hands. His black horse also bears a laurel, and they both wear red garments as they stand atop freshly tilled farmland.
In Thoth, our knight is in black armour and his helmet is topped with the bust of a stag. He carries a flail, and a shield in the shape of a disk that radiates solar light. His curious horse looks at the wheat field they stand in.
In Marseille, we have an unarmoured knight following his celestial disk. He rides a blue horse over barren ground and carries a large green wand, the only Knight in the deck to involve two weapons. It is fitting, as he is the Fiery part of the Earth, the active part of nature, the impulse that pushes vegetable life out from the depths of the Earth.
Where the Virgo ruled minor arcana us images of investment, returns and bounty, here is the investor himself. He is not bold or quick like the Knights of Wands and Swords, but he is also not the hesitant coward of Cups. The Knight of Disks is patient and content to wait. We can think of the Battle of Bunker Hill, when Colonel William Prescott insisted his rebels conserve their ammunition, and only fire when they see the whites of their enemies' eyes. This kind of dangerous investment is the bread and butter of the Knight of Disks.
To take action years in advance and at the penultimate moment is the nature of agriculture, an effort of regular immediacy, and a plan that will outlive the farmer. This sort of thinking ahead was absent in America, when farmers destroyed their land by overfarming and led to the Dust Bowl. A good image to keep in mind with this card is a Planter’s Clock. Which notes the solar and lunar cycles, and gives the proper time to plant a given crop.
The Knight of Disks embodies the wisdom of King Solomon in Ecclesiastes, aware of three maxims.
1. To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
2. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
3. A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
He takes heed of the great cycle and moves accordingly, allowing for great development and power.
When we pull this card, we may be dealing with questions of investment or dealing with an investor. This may also indicate a Virgo directly. When faced with this, look to your cosmic clock and see what time it is, and what the proper action is.
Gene Keys and the Hero’s Journey
Molly Hankins May 22, 2025
The hero’s journey mono-myth, as described by author Joseph Campbell, details the commonalities found in heroic stories across many cultures, and serves as both a formula for narrative creation and a metaphor for the arc of the human experience…
Peter Paul Rubens, ‘David Slaying Goliath’. c.1616.
Molly Hankins May 22, 2025
The hero’s journey mono-myth, as described by author Joseph Campbell, details the commonalities found in heroic stories across many cultures, and serves as both a formula for narrative creation and a metaphor for the arc of the human experience. In his most recent white paper, the philosopher and mathematician Robert Edward Grant explains his novel take on simulation theory, claiming that the hero’s journey is much more than a structure for crafting stories. The human experience, he claims, is a “blockchain-based social AI spiritual life simulation”, where participants follow the archetypal structure of the hero’s journey in order to “learn about consciousness, emotional states and the nature of authentic love.” If we accept this hypothesis, astrological tools such as the Gene Keys take on a new dimension of utility for navigating life.
Describing the hero’s journey, which entails the call to adventure, the quest and a return, Campbell identifies different character archetypes in The Hero With A Thousand Faces,. These archetypes are expanded upon in the Gene Keys to describe individual blueprints of what Kabbalah calls tikkuns, our soul’s corrections in this lifetime. Developed by author and channeler Richard Rudd, the Gene Keys combine elements of Human Design, Kabbalah, tarot and the astrological zodiac with the Chinese I Ching and the structure of the human genome sequence. The resulting system mirrors the hero’s journey in many ways, beginning with the expansion on Campbell’s concept of archetypes. There are 64 Gene Keys, matching the 64 hexagrams in the I Ching and the 64 codons of the human genetic code.
Every Gene Key sequence, based on our time and place of birth, contains a life, love and prosperity path known respectively as the Activation, Venus and Pearl Sequences. Each path, in turn, has four archetypal keys describing our tikkun by way of a shadow state we must transmute through a corresponding gift. We all have our own way of moving from the shadow to the gift frequency, represented by different lines in our profile. Each state of being is an attitude, and Rudd contends that rather than our DNA dictating how our lives unfold, our attitudes tell our DNA what kind of person we want to become. The first of the 64 Gene Key archetypes is called ‘From Entropy to Syntropy,’ and it has the shadow frequency of entropy transmuted through the gift of freshness leading to the transcendence state of beauty, which is called the siddhi.
Having this shadow as part of our tikkun can make us feel depressed or frenetic, melancholy about being human or desperate to get away from the fear of gradual decline. But the opposite of entropy is creativity. By shifting our attention towards creative imagination and an appreciation of beauty, we inject freshness into our lives. In the gift frequency of the first Gene Key, we embody the archetype described by Campbell as the ally, assisting the hero by shifting their focus to what is unique. Appreciation of beauty is also the number one factor for building resilience in the face of grief, according to author Florence Williams, who spent many years studying the science of healing from heartbreak.
“It’s impossible to know how many lifetimes it could take us to learn the specific ways of being we must correct, in order to get the best out of human experience, but as we continue to evolve so do our systems for understanding ourselves.”
Each path in the three Gene Key sequences that make up our tikkun, takes us through a challenge and breakthrough to ultimately arrive at core stability. The Activation Sequence begins with the first node of our personal profiles, our life’s work. Doing our life’s work takes us through the challenge of evolution, followed by a breakthrough that allows us to access our radiance, then bringing us to discover our life’s purpose, where we find core stability. Each stage of the Activation Sequence has a corresponding Gene Key archetype detailing what shadow frequency we must shift in order to stabilize our gifts. Shadows block our manifestations whereas gifts magnetize them, and the siddhi is a level of transcendence that describes the frequency of enlightenment. Even if many of us may not reach the siddhic level of expression in this lifetime, studying the siddhis of the Gene Keys orients us to the specific attitudes of enlightened masters so we can expand our consciousness beyond the confines of human limitation.
The hero’s journey is also embodied in the relationship that each sequence has to the others, playing out the call to adventure, the quest, and a return. This makes up what Rudd calls The Golden Path, beginning and ending with our life’s work. For instance, if you have Gene Key 55 with a first line as your life’s work, then the personal challenge that gives way to your evolution is transmuting the shadow of victimization through the gift of freedom. Each line corresponds to the six lines contained in the I Ching hexagrams, and expresses how we move from shadow to gift. If you have a first line in your life’s work then you are here to create something new. The gift of Key 55 is the same as the siddhi, and freedom is the ability to see and ultimately live beyond the cycle of human drama.
It’s impossible to know how many lifetimes it could take us to learn the specific ways of being we must correct, in order to get the best out of human experience, but as we continue to evolve so do our systems for understanding ourselves. Many Kabbalistic teachings refer to ways we can accelerate our evolution, with spiritual study being one mechanism. The Gene Keys is one such an accelerant. While the voluminous system of very specific data can be intimidating at first, particularly to those who’ve never studied any astrological systems, it’s incredibly useful even at the surface level. Any information gleaned is always immediately relevant to your personal hero’s journey.
According to Rudd, influencing our DNA through our attitude is the future of epigenetics, which is the study of how our environment and behaviors affect genetic expression. “You can only be a victim of your attitude. Every thought you think, every feeling you have, every word you utter and every action you take directly programs your genes and therefore your reality. Consequently, at the quantum level you create the environment that programs your genes,” Rudd says. “ This is the great secret the Gene Keys hold - the secret of freedom.” Embodying the hero archetype gives us the strength and boldness to shine light on our shadows and step into the gifts that allow us to freely manifest our will.
If life is, as Robert Edward Grant believes, “an emergent simulation,” then perhaps we can change the game we’re playing by changing ourselves. Nothing less than a global consciousness shift is required of us at this pivotal time in human history, and we have tools like the Gene Keys to accelerate that change by helping us face our personal and collective shadows in a readily actionable way.
Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.
The Poem as Functional Object
Eugen Gomringer May 20, 2025
Some years ago, I defined the new poem as a functional object. This definition was accepted by some as a sign of the times and misguided youth, and by others as a working hypothesis for different developmental procedures.
Untitled, Eugen Gomringer. 1953.
In this introduction to a collection of his ‘constellations’ - visual poems that used the placement of words on a page to communicate ideas, serving as both a literary and visual art - Gomringer lays the foundations for what was still a remarkably new understanding of language. Gomringer tried to liberate writing from its context, to treat words and the printed page as an artwork unto itself, with words being just one shade in the paintbox of a poet. He makes an argument that poetry must be more like utilitarian creative disciplines of design and architecture, and only then will it be given the respect and consideration it deserves.
Eugen Gomringer, May 20, 2025
Some years ago, I defined the new poem as a functional object. This definition was accepted by some as a sign of the times and misguided youth, and by others as a working hypothesis for different developmental procedures. At the same time in South America, or more exactly, in São Paulo, a group was formed whose definition of tile poem coincided with mine. I called my poems "constellations" omitting reference to earlier poems with the same title by other poets. Later, after similar and different forms had been created, my friends in São Paulo and I grouped all our experiments under the term "Concrete Poetry." One reason for this was to honor the concrete Painters in Zürich - Bill, Graeser, Lohse, Vreni, Loewensberg and others - a strong group from which impulses felt throughout the world had been emitted uninterruptedly since the early forties. Since 1942 my creation of the constellations has been decisively influenced by this group. Today "Concrete Poetry" is the general term which included a large number of poetic-linguistic experiments characterized with either constellation, ideogram, stochastic poetry" etc., by conscious study of the material and its structure (for a short time there was a magazine with this name material in Darmstadt): material means the sum of all the signs with which we make poems. Today you find concrete poetry in Japan, Brazil, Portugal, Paris, Switzerland, Austria and Germany.
For some younger poets, the constellation is already old hat. That is it does not go far enough for them. Some of them work typographically more freely; others work typographically less imaginatively. Still others criticize me for trying to say too much. In spite of the fact that many of my purer constellations (for example "avenidas"/ "baum kind hund haus" (tree child dog house)/ "mist mountain butterfly" were preceded by divers experiments. Even today, again and again, I make logical, atomistic and graphic experiments, which serve only as stimulation and discipline.
I find it wisest to stay with the word, even with the usual meanings of the word. By doing this I hope, in spite of the apparent scarcity of my words as compared to the verbosity of non-concrete poetry, to stay in continuity with poetry which emphasizes formal pattern. The purpose of reduced language is not the reduction of language itself but the achievement of greater flexibility and freedom of communication (with its inherent need for rules and regulations). The resulting poems should be, if possible, as easily understood as signs in airports and traffic signs. I see danger in taking away from Concrete Poetry its useful, aesthetic-communicative character on the one side by not understanding the simpler linguistic phenomena (by being over-fed with words, and by lack of artistic sensibility) and on the other side by following the new esoteric of the typographic poets in whom one can sometimes notice a certain lack of imagination. To date I see only in the experiments of Claus Bremer, in his poems in the form of ideograms, genuine enrichment of the constellation. This selection is not comprised of pure constellation only. Each poem contains elements of constellation: the direct juxtaposition of words; repetitions and combinations; questioning of equivalent statements; over-all unity of themes; analysis and synthesis as poetic subject; minimal-maximal tension in the smallest space. I want especially, to show through this small variety that the constellation can be the rallying point as well as the point of departure. Anyone who makes use of the freedoms of the art of poetry in a reasonable way will see that the constellation is not a dead-end or an end at all, as the literary people have said, but on the contrary that it uses thinking and structural methods which can connect artistic intuition with scientific specialization.
Concrete poetry, in general, as well as the constellation, hopes to relate literature as art less to "literature" and more to earlier developments in the fields of architecture, painting, sculpture, industrial design - in other words to developments whose basis is critical but positively-defined thinking.
Eugen Gomringer (b. 1925) is a Bolivian-Swiss poet, professor, and the father of the European Concrete Poetry movement that he began in the 1950s.
Queen of Disks (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel May 17, 2025
The Queen of Disks is the Earth Mother. In each rendition she cradles the world, embodied in a coin. This is her child, and through her energy and eternal fertility it retains its form…
Name: Queen of Disks
Number: 2
Astrology: Capricorn
Qabalah: He of He
Chris Gabriel May 17, 2025
The Queen of Disks is the Earth Mother. In each rendition she cradles the world, embodied in a coin. This is her child, and through her energy and eternal fertility it retains its form.
In Rider, the Queen is crowned with a long green headdress, and is dressed in red and white. She looks down upon the coin happily. Her throne is ornately carved with imagery of fruit, children, and the head of a Goat. These are all symbols of fecundity:ripe swelling fruit, the libidinous goat, and the children which are produced. The environment around her is verdant, and a bunny rabbit sits in the corner.
In Thoth, we find the Queen at a different stage of motherhood altogether. Her crown topped with great spiralling goat horns as she wears an armoured top and holds a crystal-tipped, spiral scepter. She cradles her disk close to her breast. Her throne is atop a palm tree, and a goat stands beside her. Here the Queen is Capricorn, the goat at the top of the mountain; she looks to the vast desert before her, spotted only with a few palms and a dry river. There is much work for her to do.
In Marseille, the Queen is in royal robes, crowned, and bears a scepter that looks like an ear of corn, or a fleur de lys. She is focused entirely on the disk she holds aloft. In it is the heart and seed of her world, the material reality that she inhabits. Qabalistically, she is the water of the Earth. She is mud, the great sign of civilization.
When we think of the Queen of Disks let us think of the great title of Mesopotamia: the Cradle of Civilization. What allowed civilization to flourish was mud. A close proximity to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and then the Nile for Egypt. The water of these rivers turned deathly desert to fertile mud, which allowed for agriculture to flourish. This is the nature of the Queen -she is the union of water and earth as fertile mud.
Mythologically, she is Gaia, Mother Earth, the great globe itself, a union of land and sea in herself, and the endless processes which maintain the world. In humanity, we can think of the hardworking women who raise what is around them. In Thoth, the Queen is a domineering mother who coldly looks at what is around her, and needs to exert her will to ascend to her lofty place. This is softened in Rider and Marseille, where it is the maternal love which cradles the world and keeps it growing.
When we pull this card, we can expect something to take care of. Just as the environment has lovingly given us life, we must give life to the environment. This may be directly a project, an investment in something that will grow and profit. This can also directly relate to a Capricorn in our lives.
The Relativity of Wrong
Isaac Asimov May 15, 2025
I received a letter the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read. In the first sentence, the writer told me he was majoring in English literature, but felt he needed to teach me science. I sighed a bit, for I knew very few English Lit majors who are equipped to teach me science, but I am very aware of the vast state of my ignorance and I am prepared to learn as much as I can from anyone, so I read on…
The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings. Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, 1882.
The title essay from a collection of Asimov’s science writing, ‘The Relativity of Wrong’ shows the master of science-fiction at his rationalist best. Beginning with a personal anecdote on unknowable truth, Asimov makes an impassioned argument for the necessary fallibility of science not being a reason to ignore it, but the very reason we should attempt to accept it, and an ode to the modern era as providing, for the first time in human history, an understanding of the universe less wrong than ever before. It is not a defensive rebuttal, but a thoughtful, humorous exploration of what it means for a scientific theory to be “wrong”, and a powerful defense of rational thinking in a world that often seeks simplicity over nuance.
Isaac Asimov, May 15, 2025
I received a letter the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read. Nevertheless, I tried to make it out just in case it might prove to be important. In the first sentence, the writer told me he was majoring in English literature, but felt he needed to teach me science. (I sighed a bit, for I knew very few English Lit majors who are equipped to teach me science, but I am very aware of the vast state of my ignorance and I am prepared to learn as much as I can from anyone, so I read on.)
It seemed that in one of my innumerable essays, I had expressed a certain gladness at living in a century in which we finally got the basis of the universe straight.
I didn't go into detail in the matter, but what I meant was that we now know the basic rules governing the universe, together with the gravitational interrelationships of its gross components, as shown in the theory of relativity worked out between 1905 and 1916. We also know the basic rules governing the subatomic particles and their interrelationships, since these are very neatly described by the quantum theory worked out between 1900 and 1930.
What's more, we have found that the galaxies and clusters of galaxies are the basic units of the physical universe, as discovered between 1920 and 1930. These are all twentieth-century discoveries, you see. The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong. The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. "If I am the wisest man," said Socrates, "it is because I alone know that I know nothing." the implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal.
My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.
However, I don't think that's so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts, and I will devote this essay to an explanation of why I think so.
First, let me dispose of Socrates because I am sick and tired of this pretense that knowing you know nothing is a mark of wisdom.
No one knows nothing. In a matter of days, babies learn to recognize their mothers.
Socrates would agree, of course, and explain that knowledge of trivia is not what he means. He means that in the great abstractions over which human beings debate, one should start without preconceived, unexamined notions, and that he alone knew this. (What an enormously arrogant claim!)
In his discussions of such matters as "What is justice?" or "What is virtue?" he took the attitude that he knew nothing and had to be instructed by others. (This is called "Socratic irony," for Socrates knew very well that he knew a great deal more than the poor souls he was picking on.) By pretending ignorance, Socrates lured others into propounding their views on such abstractions. Socrates then, by a series of ignorant-sounding questions, forced the others into such a mélange of self-contradictions that they would finally break down and admit they didn't know what they were talking about.
It is the mark of the marvelous toleration of the Athenians that they let this continue for decades and that it wasn't till Socrates turned seventy that they broke down and forced him to drink poison.
Now where do we get the notion that "right" and "wrong" are absolutes? It seems to me that this arises in the early grades, when children who know very little are taught by teachers who know very little more.
Young children learn spelling and arithmetic, for instance, and here we tumble into apparent absolutes.
How do you spell "sugar?" Answer: s-u-g-a-r. That is right. Anything else is wrong.
How much is 2 + 2? The answer is 4. That is right. Anything else is wrong.
Having exact answers, and having absolute rights and wrongs, minimizes the necessity of thinking, and that pleases both students and teachers. For that reason, students and teachers alike prefer short-answer tests to essay tests; multiple-choice over blank short-answer tests; and true-false tests over multiple-choice.
But short-answer tests are, to my way of thinking, useless as a measure of the student's understanding of a subject. They are merely a test of the efficiency of his ability to memorize.
You can see what I mean as soon as you admit that right and wrong are relative.
How do you spell "sugar?" Suppose Alice spells it p-q-z-z-f and Genevieve spells it s-h-u-g-e-r. Both are wrong, but is there any doubt that Alice is wronger than Genevieve? For that matter, I think it is possible to argue that Genevieve's spelling is superior to the "right" one.
Or suppose you spell "sugar": s-u-c-r-o-s-e, or C12H22O11. Strictly speaking, you are wrong each time, but you're displaying a certain knowledge of the subject beyond conventional spelling.
Suppose then the test question was: how many different ways can you spell "sugar?" Justify each.
Naturally, the student would have to do a lot of thinking and, in the end, exhibit how much or how little he knows. The teacher would also have to do a lot of thinking in the attempt to evaluate how much or how little the student knows. Both, I imagine, would be outraged.
Again, how much is 2 + 2? Suppose Joseph says: 2 + 2 = purple, while Maxwell says: 2 + 2 = 17. Both are wrong but isn't it fair to say that Joseph is wronger than Maxwell?
Suppose you said: 2 + 2 = an integer. You'd be right, wouldn't you? Or suppose you said: 2 + 2 = an even integer. You'd be righter. Or suppose you said: 2 + 2 = 3.999. Wouldn't you be nearly right?
If the teacher wants 4 for an answer and won't distinguish between the various wrongs, doesn't that set an unnecessary limit to understanding?
Suppose the question is, how much is 9 + 5?, and you answer 2. Will you not be excoriated and held up to ridicule, and will you not be told that 9 + 5 = 14?
If you were then told that 9 hours had pass since midnight and it was therefore 9 o'clock, and were asked what time it would be in 5 more hours, and you answered 14 o'clock on the grounds that 9 + 5 = 14, would you not be excoriated again, and told that it would be 2 o'clock? Apparently, in that case, 9 + 5 = 2 after all.
Or again suppose, Richard says: 2 + 2 = 11, and before the teacher can send him home with a note to his mother, he adds, "To the base 3, of course." He'd be right.
Here's another example. The teacher asks: "Who is the fortieth President of the United States?" and Barbara says, "There isn't any, teacher.”
"Wrong!" says the teacher, "Ronald Reagan is the fortieth President of the United States.”
"Not at all," says Barbara, "I have here a list of all the men who have served as President of the United States under the Constitution, from George Washington to Ronald Reagan, and there are only thirty-nine of them, so there is no fortieth President.”
"Ah," says the teacher, "but Grover Cleveland served two nonconsecutive terms, one from 1885 to 1889, and the second from 1893 to 1897. He counts as both the twenty-second and twenty-fourth President. That is why Ronald Reagan is the thirty-ninth person to serve as President of the United States, and is, at the same time, the fortieth President of the United States.”
Isn't that ridiculous? Why should a person be counted twice if his terms are nonconsecutive, and only once if he served two consecutive terms? Pure convention! Yet Barbara is marked wrong—just as wrong as if she had said that the fortieth President of the United States is Fidel Castro.
“What actually happens is that once scientists get hold of a good concept they gradually refine and extend it with greater and greater subtlety as their instruments of measurement improve. Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete.”
When my friend the English literature expert tells me that in every century scientists think they have worked out the universe and are always wrong, what I want to know is how wrong are they? Are they always wrong to the same degree? Let's take an example.
In the early days of civilization, the general feeling was that the earth was flat. This was not because people were stupid, or because they were intent on believing silly things. They felt it was flat on the basis of sound evidence. It was not just a matter of "That's how it looks," because the earth does not look flat. It looks chaotically bumpy, with hills, valleys, ravines, cliffs, and so on.
Of course there are plains where, over limited areas, the earth's surface does look fairly flat. One of those plains is in the Tigris-Euphrates area, where the first historical civilization (one with writing) developed, that of the Sumerians.
Perhaps it was the appearance of the plain that persuaded the clever Sumerians to accept the generalization that the earth was flat; that if you somehow evened out all the elevations and depressions, you would be left with flatness. Contributing to the notion may have been the fact that stretches of water (ponds and lakes) looked pretty flat on quiet days.
Another way of looking at it is to ask what is the "curvature" of the earth's surface Over a considerable length, how much does the surface deviate (on the average) from perfect flatness. The flat-earth theory would make it seem that the surface doesn't deviate from flatness at all, that its curvature is 0 to the mile.
Nowadays, of course, we are taught that the flat-earth theory is wrong; that it is all wrong, terribly wrong, absolutely. But it isn't. The curvature of the earth is nearly 0 per mile, so that although the flat-earth theory is wrong, it happens to be nearly right. That's why the theory lasted so long.
There were reasons, to be sure, to find the flat-earth theory unsatisfactory and, about 350 B.C., the Greek philosopher Aristotle summarized them. First, certain stars disappeared beyond the Southern Hemisphere as one traveled north, and beyond the Northern Hemisphere as one traveled south. Second, the earth's shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse was always the arc of a circle. Third, here on the earth itself, ships disappeared beyond the horizon hull-first in whatever direction they were traveling.
All three observations could not be reasonably explained if the earth's surface were flat, but could be explained by assuming the earth to be a sphere.
What's more, Aristotle believed that all solid matter tended to move toward a common center, and if solid matter did this, it would end up as a sphere. A given volume of matter is, on the average, closer to a common center if it is a sphere than if it is any other shape whatever.
About a century after Aristotle, the Greek philosopher Eratosthenes noted that the sun cast a shadow of different lengths at different latitudes (all the shadows would be the same length if the earth's surface were flat). From the difference in shadow length, he calculated the size of the earthly sphere and it turned out to be 25,000 miles in circumference.
The curvature of such a sphere is about 0.000126 per mile, a quantity very close to 0 per mile, as you can see, and one not easily measured by the techniques at the disposal of the ancients. The tiny difference between 0 and 0.000126 accounts for the fact that it took so long to pass from the flat earth to the spherical earth.
Mind you, even a tiny difference, such as that between 0 and 0.000126, can be extremely important. That difference mounts up. The earth cannot be mapped over large areas with any accuracy at all if the difference isn't taken into account and if the earth isn't considered a sphere rather than a flat surface. Long ocean voyages can't be undertaken with any reasonable way of locating one's own position in the ocean unless the earth is considered spherical rather than flat.
Furthermore, the flat earth presupposes the possibility of an infinite earth, or of the existence of an "end" to the surface. The spherical earth, however, postulates an earth that is both endless and yet finite, and it is the latter postulate that is consistent with all later findings. So, although the flat-earth theory is only slightly wrong and is a credit to its inventors, all things considered, it is wrong enough to be discarded in favor of the spherical-earth theory.
And yet is the earth a sphere?
No, it is not a sphere; not in the strict mathematical sense. A sphere has certain mathematical properties; for instance, all diameters (that is, all straight lines that pass from one point on its surface, through the center, to another point on its surface) have the same length.
That, however, is not true of the earth. Various diameters of the earth differ in length.
What gave people the notion the earth wasn't a true sphere? To begin with, the sun and the moon have outlines that are perfect circles within the limits of measurement in the early days of the telescope. This is consistent with the supposition that the sun and the moon are perfectly spherical in shape.
However, when Jupiter and Saturn were observed by the first telescopic observers, it became quickly apparent that the outlines of those planets were not circles, but distinct eclipses. That meant that Jupiter and Saturn were not true spheres.
Isaac Newton, toward the end of the seventeenth century, showed that a massive body would form a sphere under the pull of gravitational forces (exactly as Aristotle had argued), but only if it were not rotating. If it were rotating, a centrifugal effect would be set up that would lift the body's substance against gravity, and this effect would be greater the closer to the equator you progressed. The effect would also be greater the more rapidly a spherical object rotated, and Jupiter and Saturn rotated very rapidly indeed.
The earth rotated much more slowly than Jupiter or Saturn so the effect should be smaller, but it should still be there. Actual measurements of the curvature of the earth were carried out in the eighteenth century and Newton was proved correct.
The earth has an equatorial bulge, in other words. It is flattened at the poles. It is an "oblate spheroid" rather than a sphere. This means that the various diameters of the earth differ in length. The longest diameters are any of those that stretch from one point on the equator to an opposite point on the equator. This "equatorial diameter" is 12,755 kilometers (7,927 miles). The shortest diameter is from the North Pole to the South Pole and this "polar diameter" is 12,711 kilometers (7,900 miles).
The difference between the longest and shortest diameters is 44 kilometers (27 miles), and that means that the "oblateness" of the earth (its departure from true sphericity) is 44/12755, or 0.0034. This amounts to l/3 of 1 percent.
To put it another way, on a flat surface, curvature is 0 per mile everywhere. On the earth's spherical surface, curvature is 0.000126 per mile everywhere (or 8 inches per mile). On the earth's oblate spheroidal surface, the curvature varies from 7.973 inches to the mile to 8.027 inches to the mile.
The correction in going from spherical to oblate spheroidal is much smaller than going from flat to spherical. Therefore, although the notion of the earth as a sphere is wrong, strictly speaking, it is not as wrong as the notion of the earth as flat.
Even the oblate-spheroidal notion of the earth is wrong, strictly speaking. In 1958, when the satellite Vanguard I was put into orbit about the earth, it was able to measure the local gravitational pull of the earth--and therefore its shape--with unprecedented precision. It turned out that the equatorial bulge south of the equator was slightly bulgier than the bulge north of the equator, and that the South Pole sea level was slightly nearer the center of the earth than the North Pole sea level was.
There seemed no other way of describing this than by saying the earth was pear-shaped, and at once many people decided that the earth was nothing like a sphere but was shaped like a Bartlett pear dangling in space. Actually, the pearlike deviation from oblate-spheroid perfect was a matter of yards rather than miles, and the adjustment of curvature was in the millionths of an inch per mile.
In short, my English Lit friend, living in a mental world of absolute rights and wrongs, may be imagining that because all theories are wrong, the earth may be thought spherical now, but cubical next century, and a hollow icosahedron the next, and a doughnut shape the one after.
What actually happens is that once scientists get hold of a good concept they gradually refine and extend it with greater and greater subtlety as their instruments of measurement improve. Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete.
This can be pointed out in many cases other than just the shape of the earth. Even when a new theory seems to represent a revolution, it usually arises out of small refinements. If something more than a small refinement were needed, then the old theory would never have endured.
Copernicus switched from an earth-centered planetary system to a sun-centered one. In doing so, he switched from something that was obvious to something that was apparently ridiculous. However, it was a matter of finding better ways of calculating the motion of the planets in the sky, and eventually the geocentric theory was just left behind. It was precisely because the old theory gave results that were fairly good by the measurement standards of the time that kept it in being so long.
Again, it is because the geological formations of the earth change so slowly and the living things upon it evolve so slowly that it seemed reasonable at first to suppose that there was no change and that the earth and life always existed as they do today. If that were so, it would make no difference whether the earth and life were billions of years old or thousands. Thousands were easier to grasp.
But when careful observation showed that the earth and life were changing at a rate that was very tiny but not zero, then it became clear that the earth and life had to be very old. Modern geology came into being, and so did the notion of biological evolution.
If the rate of change were more rapid, geology and evolution would have reached their modern state in ancient times. It is only because the difference between the rate of change in a static universe and the rate of change in an evolutionary one is that between zero and very nearly zero that the creationists can continue propagating their folly.
Since the refinements in theory grow smaller and smaller, even quite ancient theories must have been sufficiently right to allow advances to be made; advances that were not wiped out by subsequent refinements.
The Greeks introduced the notion of latitude and longitude, for instance, and made reasonable maps of the Mediterranean basin even without taking sphericity into account, and we still use latitude and longitude today.
The Sumerians were probably the first to establish the principle that planetary movements in the sky exhibit regularity and can be predicted, and they proceeded to work out ways of doing so even though they assumed the earth to be the center of the universe. Their measurements have been enormously refined but the principle remains.
Naturally, the theories we now have might be considered wrong in the simplistic sense of my English Lit correspondent, but in a much truer and subtler sense, they need only be considered incomplete.
Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) was a Russian-born American author, professor, and biochemist, who’s science fiction works and accessible science writing are some of the most influential works of 20th Century Western Literature. He wrote over 500 books, including the Foundation series, and was a master at making complex scientific ideas digestible for general audiences.
Students of Total Being
Tuukka Toivonen May 13, 2024
Have you ever tried meditating in a cab that meanders and jolts through the chaotic traffic of a busy city? I mean really meditate: eyes closed, back straight and with the firm intent of bringing your mind to a deep state of calm awareness? If you have, you’ll have experienced in sharp form a central dilemma facing those who wish to remain anchored within the disorder of contemporary society…
“Action which is separative, fragmentary, always leads to conflict both within and without.” - J. Krishnamurti (1960)
Tuukka Toivonen May 13, 2025
Have you ever tried meditating in a cab that meanders and jolts through the chaotic traffic of a busy city? I mean really meditate: eyes closed, back straight and with the firm intent of bringing your mind to a deep state of calm awareness (never minding how odd your behaviour might seem to the driver)? If you have, you’ll have experienced in sharp form a central dilemma facing those who wish to remain anchored within the disorder of contemporary society. By this I am referring not to the pursuit of mindfulness and calm —as vital as that is—but rather to the broader challenge of cultivating and maintaining a coherent way of being, robust enough to neutralize the many sources of disintegration that impinge on our lives. How should we approach this challenge and what does it mean for a person to embody an integrated way of being? Is it even possible to achieve a centered existence amid the cacophony of contemporary life and its myriad centrifugal forces?
There is, I believe, nothing intrinsically mystical or unattainable about developing a way of being that serves as an integrative foundation for our lives. Yet we are dealing here with a phenomenon that—owing to its inherent holism—resists simple definition. Thus, approaching ways of being through neatly delineated explanations or prescriptions would be misplaced - there are as many unique ways of being as there are people. Moreover, all non-human organisms also exhibit distinctive ways of being in the world, as the perceptive work of James Bridle reminds us. For humans, however, there are certain qualities that I associate with those who have cultivated a mature way of being and who are continuing to place emphasis on being over doing, possessing, and competing. These tend to include things like affective and creative attunement, deep self-knowledge, emotional mastery, awareness to the more-than-human world, the pursuit of integrity and honesty, and conscious embodiment (i.e., bringing a full awareness to how we inhabit our bodies, move and relate to others in space).
A vivid appreciation of the interdependence of all life, as well as the ability to love and respond to others with compassion, are further qualities embodied by masters such as Satish Kumar whose way of being is evident in their very presence and in everything they do and produce from day to day. Kumar’s Meditation on the Unity of Life¹ beautifully encapsulates many aspects of this encompassing orientation to life:
Left palm represents the self; right palm represents
the world.
I bring my two palms together and by doing so I
unite myself with the world. […]
I let go of all expectation, attachment, and anxiety.
I let go of all worry, fear, and anger.
I let go of ego.
I breathe in. I breathe out.
I smile, relax, and let go.
I am at home. I am at home. We are at home.
I once joined Kumar at Schumacher College for a morning meditation of this kind, giving me a first-hand sense of the sheer energy and joy that such “practices of being” can generate. It occurred to me afterwards that this way of relating to the world and one’s self never formed any part of my own formal education. I did, however, come into contact with similar elements and the possibility of a more unified way of being when learning karate in my early teens. At the dojo back in my Finnish hometown, every little detail had significance as part of a wider (implicit) whole: the way you tied your belt, how you bowed at the entrance, where you focused your gaze when launching a punch in the course of a kata, even how you showed humility and grace during an intense match, whether you were winning or losing. Although less reflective or meditative a practice, this was a form of mind-body holism embedded in coherent gestures, movements and concepts.
Through these experiences, it has become easier for me to notice and appreciate how many different kinds of individuals—not limited to remarkable spiritual figures such as Kumar—successfully bring an integrated sense of being into their daily lives. Some are well-known, others are not; all seem to possess a powerful presence and appear to be guided at all times by a strong awareness and intentionality. One clear commonality that all seem to express is a focal mind-body practice, ranging from meditation and martial arts to hiking, dance and other types of conscious movement. For some, spiritual or religious practice is more central. Beyond such characteristics that are relatively easy to observe, I believe these individuals also share a deeper essence, a vital core that I could not quite put a finger on.
That is, until I encountered the work of Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986), the cosmopolitan Indian spiritual thinker who incisively addressed the complexities of the human condition, from happiness, love, and identity, to politics and education. Through entering into compassionate and unreserved dialogues with ordinary people, as well as many leaders, educators, and psychologists, Krishnamurti relentlessly challenged his interlocutors to transcend their conditioning, and accept knowledge, so that they could become completely attuned to the unfolding of the present without being held back by the many distortions of thought.
“The quality of our action depends on the quality of our being—that is why there is no fundamental trade-off between being and action and why evolving one’s way of being is such a crucial task.”
A recurring theme in Krishnamurti’s written works is his insistence that we would do well to replace our fragmented modes of being and doing with total being and total action. For Krishnamurti, it is not a matter of trying to fine-tune or “optimize” the ways in which the various parts of contemporary lives are put together—any such efforts that focus on efficiency or superficial “balance” are doomed to fail and breed further fragmentation, driven as they are by greed, fear, or the desire for external approval. Rather, Krishnamurti sought to show that one could reach towards total being and action only through constant inner inquiry and observation that cast away unconscious assumptions and cleared the way for a unified awareness not subject to the divisive shenanigans of the mind. In Commentaries on Living (Series Three), he describes total being to a perplexed interlocutor as follows:
It is the feeling of being whole undivided, not fragmented—an intensity in which there is no tension no pull of desire with its contradictions. It is this intensity, this deep, unpremeditated impulse, that will break down the wall which the mind has built around itself. That wall is the ego, the ‘me’, the self. All activity of the self is separative, enclosing, and the more it struggles to break through its own barriers, the stronger those barriers become. The efforts of the self to be free only build up its own energy, its own sorrow. When the truth of this is perceived, only then is there the movement of the whole. This movement has no centre, as it has no beginning and no end; it’s a movement beyond the measure of the mind—the mind that is put together through time. The understanding of the activities of the conflicting parts of the mind, which make up the self, the ego, is meditation.
Here we find some insight on that deeper commonality that individuals with a mature way of being appear to embody: each such person is not merely oriented towards being over doing, but is a committed student of total being, as described by Krishnamurti. The ego has been (or is being) transcended, its barriers broken, the flow of an integrated awareness is liberated such that it seamlessly combines perception, thought, feeling, embodiment and action. This results in an immediacy and intensity of being that allows truth to readily surface, in any context and situation that life might generate. To truly achieve a depth and integrity of being, one cannot avoid studying total being.
Thich Nhat Hanh once wrote that the quality of our action depends on the quality of our being—that is why there is no fundamental trade-off between being and action and why evolving one’s way of being is such a crucial task. Fragmented orientations to the self can only lead to fragmented behaviors, actions and relationships. The negative consequences are grave not only in positions of leadership and influence, but also at the level of our day-to-day relationships. Conversely, transcending fragmentation can have vast positive impacts that reverberate far and wide.
For these reasons, I have begun to propose that the more action-oriented and entrepreneurial we wish to be, the more we need to cultivate our way of being. We should think less in terms of careers, jobs or personal brands—all of which amount to artificial constructs with a strongly external emphasis, and divisive and distorting effects on our lives—and instead should focus on unity of being, openness to the unknown and humility. Prior to being students of particular skills and disciplines—and prior to being designers, entrepreneurs or artists—we will do well to be students of total being.
How might your future change if you became such a student today?
Tuukka Toivonen, Ph.D. (Oxon.) is a sociologist interested in ways of being, relating and creating that can help us to reconnect with – and regenerate – the living world. Alongside his academic research, Tuukka works directly with emerging regenerative designers and startups in the creative, material innovation and technology sectors.
Tuukka would like to thank Elina Osborne and Chiharu Suzuki for the suggestions they kindly offered in the process of this article’s germination at Amigo House.
¹ Kumar, S. (2023) Radical Love: From Separation to Connection with the Earth, Each Other, and Ourselves. New York: Parallax Press.
Page and Princess of Cups (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel May 10, 2025
The Page of Cups is the lowest court card in the suit of Cups. This is the cup bearer, the waterboy, the servant, and ideal helper. The Page and Princess take pleasure in pleasing, they happily refresh and heal those in need…
Name: Page of Cups, Princess of Cups
Number: 4
Astrology: Earth of Water
Qabalah: He of He
Chris Gabriel May 10, 2025
The Page of Cups is the lowest court card in the suit of Cups. This is the cup bearer, the waterboy, the servant, and ideal helper. The Page and Princess take pleasure in pleasing, they happily refresh and heal those in need.
In Rider, the Page is a young man with black hair and a blue, squid-like turban. His blue tunic is adorned with blooming lotuses, and his undergarments are wine red. He smiles, hand on his hip, and holds a cup with a fish inside. He stands on a shore with waves behind him.
In Thoth, the Princess is a young woman with a great flowing pink dress adorned with crystals. She holds a huge shell within which a turtle sits. Her head is topped with a swan whose wings are spread out. The background is reminiscent of a Georgia O’Keefe painting and a fish leaps out from behind her.
In Marseille, we find a young man with whitish blond hair. He is the only hatless Page, in its stead is a garland of flowers. He moves to the left, and carries a cup in one hand, and in the other its lid. He is sensitive and at risk of closing off his receptive cup.
The Page of Cups is the image of Ganymede, the most beautiful mortal whose name translates literally to “taking pleasure” and “mind”. He was so beloved by Zeus that he seized him to serve as the cupbearer to the Gods, making him immortal and eternally beautiful, but forever submissive. This is the role of the Page of Cups. The Latin form of his name, Catamitus, became an epithet for young homosexual men, equivalent to today’s “twink”. The receptivity of Cups here takes on a clear sexual significance.
We see this role paralleled with the daughter of Zeus as the Princess of Cups. Hebe (literally “Youth”) also acted as cupbearer to the Gods and was the Goddess of eternal youth. We see a more mature form of this figure in the American Revolution’s many “Molly Pitchers” who braved the battlefield to bring water and munitions to the soldiers, often joining the fight when needed.
Materially, we can see versions of the Page and Princess of Cups in nurses, bartenders, and baristas and. We are tended to and pleased by these people, often literally given cups. Service jobs like these generally rely on tips to make them worthwhile, so the server takes up a charming and kind persona. This is one of the few daily niceties that many people have access to, the kindness of service. This is also a role many of us take on, especially as children, fetching things for family members.
When we pull this card we may feel more sensitive than usual, and can have a heightened receptivity to others. You may be called on to serve someone and be rewarded accordingly, you may also find someone willing to serve you.
The Magical Path of No Mind
Molly Hankins May 8, 2025
Reaching a state of magical trance, uninfluenced by conscious or subconscious thought, is an essential element of practicing any form of magic. As described by the chaos magician and author Peter J. Carroll, “To work magic effectively, the ability to concentrate the attention must be built up until the mind can enter a trancelike condition…
Caspar David Friedrich, ‘Woman in Front of the Setting Sun’. 1817.
Molly Hankins May 8, 2025
Reaching a state of magical trance, uninfluenced by conscious or subconscious thought, is an essential element of practicing any form of magic. As described by the chaos magician and author Peter J. Carroll, “To work magic effectively, the ability to concentrate the attention must be built up until the mind can enter a trancelike condition.” If our untamed mind is interfering with our magical will, the effects we seek to create will be short-circuited. Often this materializes as a fear of failure, over-attachment to outcome, or some egoic identification. Our minds are meaning-making machines, and that function is what we have to bypass by focusing on meaningless phenomena.
Carroll suggests we still our minds by steering our thinking away from meaning. This alters consciousness enough to enter a heightened state of gnosis, achieved by generating different forms of inhibitory and excitatory states of mind that quiet the inner monologue. Inhibitory states involve a progressive stilling of the body and mind until only a single object of concentration remains. Excitatory states, on the other hand, are attained by raising the body and mind to an extremely high pitch of excitement so that singular focus becomes possible as all other sensory input is overwhelmed. “Let the mind become as a flame or a pool of still water,” Carroll wrote in his chaos magic manual Liber Null and Psychonaut.
Inhibitory methods are akin to different forms of meditation. First there is the “death posture”, where the body’s physical stillness trains the mind to respond in kind. When thoughts arise, they are to be pushed into the unconscious, which serves as a repository for all thinking that would interfere with the singular focus of magical will.
Mirror gazing is another inhibitory approach. It involves placing a mirror about two feet away and staring into it, while holding as still as possible. Gazing at a fixed object, preferably in nature while the body remains motionless, is another method. Fasting, sleeplessness, and other form of physical exhaustion are other inhibitory methods of inducing gnosis.
“Singular focus is easy to hold in this state because the current of energy feels so strong it overloads all sensory and mental input.”
Walking meditations and magical trance can offer both inhibitory and excitatory approaches to gnosis inducement, depending on the precise methods used. For both slow, inhibitory walking or fast, excitatory walking, Carroll recommends blurring your vision so as not to focus on anything in particular. Gnostic conditions emerge from the body being occupied with the act of walking and the mind busy averting focus. Magical trance can come from inhibitory concentration on a meaningless object or excitatory methods such as chanting, dancing, over-breathing, and even laughter. Laughter is the highest emotion according to Carroll, because it can contain the full spectrum of every other emotion from ecstasy and grief. The excitatory paths to gnosis all involve some form of overload, and the easiest to access is emotional overload. Tapping into fear, anger and horror is where the most potency lies, but extreme experiences of love and grief can also be utilized. Physical pain is also an easy, albeit potentially dangerous onramp to single-pointed thinking. Lyrical exaltation through emotive poetry, song and prayer is another powerful means, and sexual arousal is a very potent gnostic practice. This method is amplified by prolonging the state of sexual excitation, whether by yourself or in partnered sex.
An obvious question surrounding these practices is what does gnosis feel like? The answer is not the same for everyone, but when I successfully achieve a gnostic state it feels like my locus of consciousness relocates to the very center of my body and expands all the way up my spine through the top of my head. I feel my awareness and thoughts collapse into this central column and experience a surge of energy moving upwards. Singular focus is easy to hold in this state because the current of energy feels so strong it overloads all sensory and mental input. The practice of inducing gnosis means holding the state for as long as possible, even if only a few seconds, and building up stamina from there with repetition.
Any regular meditation practice can also act as a gnosis accelerant. When our nervous system and inner monologue get used to being stilled on a daily basis, it becomes easier to access singular gnostic focus, regardless of the practice being used. Simply watching our breath, using a mantra and listening to binaural tones are all effective meditation methods that strengthen our natural magic abilities and our sense of interconnectedness with all of life.
Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.
The Slippery Slope from Anger to Rage
Suzanne Stabile May 6, 2025
The Wisdom of the Enneagram informs how I see the world and spurs my desire to have an offering for those searching for greater understanding and peace. After more than thirty years of learning and teaching, I am more aware than ever of our need to accept that there are nine distinctly different ways of seeing and interpreting the world around us. None are right or wrong; they are expansive rather than limiting, and they are nuanced beyond our imagination…
Young Greeks Attending a Cock Fight, 1846. Jean-Léon Gérôme.
Suzanne Stabile May 6, 2025
The Wisdom of the Enneagram informs how I see the world and spurs my desire to have an offering for those searching for greater understanding and peace. After more than thirty years of learning and teaching, I am more aware than ever of our need to accept that there are nine distinctly different ways of seeing and interpreting the world around us. None are right or wrong; they are expansive rather than limiting, and they are nuanced beyond our imagination.
In my offerings for Tetragrammaton, I’ve spent some time focused on the idea that we each have a default emotion, waiting to take up space in our lives if we aren’t clear about what we’re feeling. And recently I’ve felt we are living in a moment when anxiety and anger are falling on all of us unbidden and often hidden from our awareness.
Anger is the dominant emotion for Enneagram Eights, Nines, and Ones, and it is a hard emotion to define. One source called it “a strong feeling of annoyance, displeasure or hostility,” but I think we can agree that we use those words now as stand-alone emotions. The other two default emotions for Enneagram Triads are shame—for Twos, Threes, and Fours—and fear—for Fives, Sixes, and Sevens. Anger and rage are more observable and therefore easier to identify than the other two. However, all of these emotional responses are both comforting and destructive in equal measure as they influence the behavior of the nine personality types.
Enneagram Eights, Nines, and Ones are in the Anger Triad, which is often referred to as the Gut Triad or the Body-Centered Triad. They receive information from the environment first in their core, or gut, which often causes a reactive rather than a measured response. All three numbers or personality types build “walls” between what they consider self and not-self, and each is built for the distinct purpose of providing the most personal safety.
For Enneagram Eights, the ego-boundary is primarily focused outward, against the environment, and their focus of attention is also outside of themselves. Eights put out a wall of energy so that nothing can get too close, shutting themselves off from vulnerability. They keep their guard up most of the time, and the more wounded they are, the tougher they make it for others to get through.
Type Ones also hold a boundary against the outside world, but they are far more interested in maintaining an internal boundary. They are vigilant about protecting themselves. We all have parts of ourselves that we don’t want to look at or that we don’t trust or approve of—parts of ourselves that make us feel anxious and unprotected. Unlike other numbers, Ones spend a lot of energy trying to hold back unconscious impulses that arise in themselves. “I hate that feeling, and I don’t want it!” they say, or “I have to find a way to stop reacting to everyone and every wrong thing that seems to surround me.” It requires a lot of energy to maintain such strong inner boundaries.
Nines invest lots of energy in protecting their ego boundaries. Internally, they are trying to keep in anything that would cause trouble, and they maintain a strong external boundary trying to keep out anything that would steal their peace. This requires a significant amount of effort, and it is the primary reason Nines have the least energy of all the types. It also explains why they don’t have as much energy as they would like for living and engaging more fully with the world.
There is so much to say about anger because it touches our lives in memorable and altogether different ways. It can be helpful, then, to identify the different ways of expressing these feelings for each of the three numbers.
Eight anger is straight-up, and then it’s over. Everyone involved, and even outside observers, know when an Eight is angry. Once it is expressed, it is finished—except for the lingering effect it has on the other person.
For Nines, anger is a more passive emotion. The peacemakers believe it is in their best interest to protect themselves by expressing anger indirectly. They choose behavior that lets others know they are angry, then hope for the impossible. They want the target of their anger to figure out the reason for their disapproval, apologize for it, and hopefully never do it again—whatever “it” is.
Enneagram Ones don’t believe anger is an acceptable response, so they rename their angry feelings as impatience, anxiety, or frustration. In choosing a substitute, they usually feel better despite it not helping to negotiate a lasting understanding in relationships.
“Will I have the humility to avoid the temptation to defend myself, trying to prove that I’m right?”
Anger is something that happens to your whole body. It’s an emotional response that you consciously feel. At its core, anger is an internal awareness of specific thoughts, feelings, and desires, and yet it is often described in other ways: “I can’t handle much more of this!” or “I obviously thought he was a better person than he is!” For all three personality types, knowing who is to blame is very important, and once the responsibility for the bad behavior is assigned, there is a tendency to simply move on.
Think about these expressions of anger and how they show up in your life. Do you yell, scream, argue, use sarcasm and cynicism, or slam things? As is true with fear and shame, at times we all spiral into behaviors that don’t serve us well. Thankfully, everything contains its opposite. Father Richard Rohr says, “Anger is good and very necessary to protect the appropriate boundaries of self and others. On the other hand, anger becomes self-defeating and egocentric when it hangs around too long after we have received its message.”
Considering that anger has a message for us, the question becomes: can we hear it if we have limited our options by reacting rather than listening? Anger tells us that something is significantly wrong, and it gives us the energy to try to make things right. At its best, anger reveals our concern for fairness, rightness, and justice. There are many times when being angry has motivated me to make changes in my life or to face problems that I have been avoiding, and I know the same is true for others.
Anger has the potential to be redirected toward greater understanding and mutually agreeable solutions. We can even use the energy it offers to move toward transformation, but we have to slow down enough to notice what is happening around us. These questions can be helpful: Are people moving toward me or away from me? In listening to the story I’m telling myself, fueled by my anger, do I pause long enough to ask myself if it’s true? Or is it just fiction that exacerbates my feelings and justifies my bad behavior? And finally, will I have the humility to avoid the temptation to defend myself, trying to prove that I’m right?
Rage is an instinctive reaction to the feeling that we must suppress ourselves in one way or another. When we are feeling judged, misunderstood, justified in our behavior, and empowered to protect ourselves, it’s hard to recognize the slippery slope that awaits us, where the space between anger and rage can be obscured by a lack of awareness. It is helpful to remember that rage is an intensified, growing anger that will be difficult to control. It is wise, therefore, to make every effort to manage anger before we become aware that anger is managing us.
Now, more than ever, we need to be mindful of the energy that accompanies anger. For all that can go wrong—and there is plenty—anger almost always increases and then regenerates the amount of energy we feel. The wisdom that comes from exploring, and perhaps limiting, our options is easily ignored when we are invigorated by a charged exchange, without stopping long enough to consider the consequences.
One of my favorite stories begins with a second-grade boy running down a long hallway in the Sunday School building, trying to catch the Pastor.
“Pastor Joe, please wait! We need your help.”
“What’s wrong? Why aren’t you in Sunday School?”
“I ran out to try to catch up with you. We really need you to come to our class right away.”
“Okay. But why?”
“Because we are all behaving badly and we don’t know how to stop ourselves!”
The distance from anger to rage is not very far, and in the absence of an intervention, our ability to stop ourselves before it’s too late is unlikely. Anger can be a powerful and positive motivator, but it can also become a raging, uncontrolled force that hurts us and others. It is helpful to remember this: regardless of how painful our experiences are or may be, they are just painful experiences—until we add the response of anger or rage.
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.
Eight of Cups (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel May 3, 2025
The Eight of Cups is the inevitable hangover that follows the overindulgence of Sevens’ Debauch. Here, the pleasures that have defined the past two cards in the suit are completely dulled. This is a painfully boring situation…
Name: Indolence, the Eight of Cups
Number: 8
Astrology: Saturn in Pisces
Qabalah: Hod of He
Chris Gabriel May 3, 2025
The Eight of Cups is the inevitable hangover that follows the overindulgence of Sevens’ Debauch. Here, the pleasures that have defined the past two cards in the suit are completely dulled. This is a painfully boring situation.
In Rider, we find a man departing from a rocky shore. Eight cups are stacked on the sand and a sad Moon gazes down upon him. He dons a red cloak,red boots, and walks with a stick. This is an image straight out of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, when after his lengthy complaints and fantasies he says “Here I am on the shores of Breton. Let the cities light up in the evening. My day is done; I’m leaving Europe.”
In Thoth, we have eight cups atop eight sickly, pale lily pads, as two withering lotuses spew water into the system. The waters are swampy and the sky is filled with dark clouds. This card is the heavy dull weight of Saturn in the depths of the Piscean. It is the high pressure one feels when deep sea diving.
In Marseille, we have eight cups and a sprawling flower. In this card, Jodorowsky sees an image of fullness, rather than hangover. Qabalistically this card is “The Intelligence of the Queen”,hich here we can take to mean “knowing when enough is enough”. While Rider and Thoth fall into overindulgence and depression, Marseille exercises restraint.
This is a fairly hopeless card: the party is over, and what remains is a hangover. Often, we indulge to achieve a “high”, to have pleasures, sensual and emotional, and we generally just can’t get enough of these, so we overindulge. Saturn, as the strict and authoritarian planet, despises overindulgence and punishes accordingly with a hangover. If we stay up all night, we suffer the next day - what goes up must come down. If we can accept this, we can achieve the more enlightened position of Marseille, we can get just enough pleasure tonight and not ruin tomorrow.
The boredom and depression this card represents can ultimately serve us though, for it is in stillness and inactivity that the seeds of movement are born. It is only through a willing delve into the depth that we can achieve any heights.
Materially, the card draws up images of Leviathan and strange deep sea life. In our lives, this tends to signify a period of melancholy and depression, or directly a hangover. It may simply be “bad air” or dark clouds over one's head. If we willingly accept the heavy darkness of the depth, we will rise to even greater heights
How Should One Read a Book? (Pt. 2)
Virginia Woolf April 29, 2025
If, then, this is true—that books are of very different types, and that to read them rightly we have to bend our imaginations powerfully, first one way, then another—it is clear that reading is one of the most arduous and exhausting of occupations…
Guiseppe Antonio Petrini, c.1735.
First given as a speech at Hayes Court Common school in Kent at the start of 1926, and then adapted and published in the Yale Review the same year, Woolf’s impassioned ode to reading remains a seminal text. She reminds us that reading is not a passive activity, and that if each book only comes alive through active choices by its reader, it is worth considering how we as a consumer can elevate and enliven the literature we choose to read. The writer and reader are connected, and it is our duty to approach each new book as a different beast, to use our qualities of imagination, insight, and judgement, not rest on laurels of past works but follow our instincts to find the heart, truth, and beauty of each text anew.
Virginia Woolf, April 15, 2025
If, then, this is true—that books are of very different types, and that to read them rightly we have to bend our imaginations powerfully, first one way, then another—it is clear that reading is one of the most arduous and exhausting of occupations. Often the pages fly before us and we seem, so keen is our interest, to be living and not even holding the volume in our hands. But the more exciting the book, the more danger we run of over-reading. The symptoms are familiar. Suddenly the book becomes dull as ditchwater and heavy as lead. We yawn and stretch and cannot attend. The highest flights of Shakespeare and Milton become intolerable. And we say to ourselves—is Keats a fool or am I?—a painful question, a question, moreover, that need not be asked if we realized how great a part the art of not reading plays in the art of reading. To be able to read books without reading them, to skip and saunter, to suspend judgment, to lounge and loaf down the alleys and bye-streets of letters is the best way of rejuvenating one’s own creative power. All biographies and memoirs, all the hybrid books which are largely made up of facts, serve to restore to us the power of reading real books—that is to say, works of pure imagination. That they serve also to impart knowledge and to improve the mind is true and important, but if we are considering how to read books for pleasure, not how to provide an adequate pension for one’s widow, this other property of theirs is even more valuable and important. But here again one should know what one is after. One is after rest, and fun, and oddity, and some stimulus to one’s own jaded creative power. One has left one’s bare and angular tower and is strolling along the street looking in at the open windows. After solitude and concentration, the open air, the sight of other people absorbed in innumerable activities, comes upon us with an indescribable fascination.
The windows of the houses are open; the blinds are drawn up. One can see the whole household without their knowing that they are being seen. One can see them sitting round the dinner table, talking, reading, playing games. Sometimes they seem to be quarrelling—but what about? Or they are laughing—but what is the joke? Down in the basement the cook is reading a newspaper aloud, while the housemaid is making a piece of toast; in comes the kitchen maid and they all start talking at the same moment—but what are they saying? Upstairs a girl is dressing to go to a party. But where is she going? There is an old lady sitting at her bedroom window with some kind of wool work in her hand and a fine green parrot in a cage beside her. And what is she thinking? All this life has somehow come together; there isa reason for it; a coherency in it, could one but seize it. The biographer answers the innumerable questions which we ask as we stand outside on the pavement looking in at the open window. Indeed there is nothing more interesting than to pick one’s way about among these vast depositories of facts, to make up the lives of men and women, to create their complex minds and households from the extraordinary abundance and litter and confusion of matter which lies strewn about. A thimble, a skull, a pair of scissors, a sheaf of sonnets, are given us, and we have to create, to combine, to put these incongruous things together.There is, too, a quality in facts, an emotion which comes from knowing that men and women actually did and suffered these things, which only the greatest novelists can surpass. CaptainScott, starving and freezing to death in the snow, affects us as deeply as any made-up story of adventure by Conrad or Defoe; but it affects us differently. The biography differs from the novel. To ask a biographer to give us the same kind of pleasure that we get from a novelist is to misuse and misread him. Directly he says “John Jones was born at five-thirty in the morning of August 13, I 862,” he has committed himself, focussed his lens upon fact, and if he then begins to romance, the perspective becomes blurred, we grow suspicious, and our faith in his integrity as a writer is destroyed. In the same way fact destroys fiction. IfThackeray, for example, had quoted an actual newspaper account of the Battle of Waterloo in“Vanity Fair,” the whole fabric of his story would have been destroyed, as a stone destroys abubble.
But it is undoubted that these hybrid books, these warehouses and depositories of facts, playa great part in resting the brain and restoring its zest of imagination. The work of building up a life for oneself from skulls, thimbles, scissors, and sonnets stimulates our interest in creation and rouses our wish to see the work beautifully and powerfully done by a Flaubert or a Tolstoi. Moreover, however interesting facts may be, they are an inferior form of fiction, and gradually we become impatient of their weakness and diffuseness, of their compromises and evasions, of the slovenly sentences which they make for themselves, and are eager to revive ourselves with the greater intensity and truth of fiction.
It is necessary to have in hand an immense reserve of imaginative energy in order to attack the steeps of poetry. Here are none of those gradual introductions, those resemblances to the familiar world of daily life with which the novelist entices us into his world of imagination.All is violent, opposite, unrelated. But various causes, such as bad books, the worry of carrying on life efficiently, the intermittent but powerful shocks dealt us by beauty, and the incalculable impulses of our own minds and bodies frequently put us into that state of mind in which poetry is a necessity. The sight of a crocus in a garden will suddenly bring to mind all the spring days that have ever been. One then desires the general, not the particular; the whole, not the detail; to turn uppermost the dark side of the mind; to be in contact with silence, solitude, and all men and women and not this particular Richard, or that particularAnne. Metaphors are then more expressive than plain statements.
Thus in order to read poetry rightly, one must be in a rash, an extreme, a generous state of mind in which many of the supports and comforts of literature are done without. Its power of make-believe, its representative power, is dispensed with in favor of its extremities and extravagances. The representation is often at a very far remove from the thing represented, so that we have to use all our energies of mind to grasp the relation between, for example, the song of a nightingale and the image and ideas which that song stirs in the mind. Thus reading poetry often seems a state of rhapsody in which rhyme and metre and sound stir the mind as wine and dance stir the body, and we read on, understanding with the senses, not with the intellect, in a state of intoxication. Yet all this intoxication and intensity of delight depend upon the exactitude and truth of the image, on its being the counterpart of the reality within. Remote and extravagant as some of Shakespeare’s images seem, far-fetched and ethereal as some of Keats’s, at the moment of reading they seem the cap and culmination of the thought; its final expression. But it is useless to labor the matter in cold blood. Anyone who has read a poem with pleasure will remember the sudden conviction, the sudden recollection (for it seems sometimes as if we were about to say, or had in some previous existence already said, what Shakespeare is actually now saying), which accompany the reading of poetry, and give it its exaltation and intensity. But such reading is attended, whether consciously or unconsciously, with the utmost stretch and vigilance of the faculties, of the reason no less than of the imagination. We are always verifying the poet’s statements, making a flying comparison, to the best of our powers, between the beauty he makes outside and the beauty we are aware of within. For the humblest among us is endowed with the power of comparison. The simplest (provided he loves reading) has that already within him to which he makes what is given him—by poet or novelist—correspond.
“The book upon which we have spent so much time and thought fades entirely out of sight. But suddenly, as one is picking a snail from a rose, tying a shoe, perhaps, doing something distant and different, the whole book floats to the top of the mind complete.”
With that saying, of course, the cat is out of the bag. For this admission that we can compare, discriminate, brings us to this further point. Reading is not merely sympathizing and understanding; it is also criticizing and judging. Hitherto our endeavor has been to read books as a writer writes them. We have been trying to understand, to appreciate, to interpret, to sympathize. But now, when the book is finished, the reader must leave the dock and mount the bench. He must cease to be the friend; he must become the judge. And this is no mere figure of speech. The mind seems (“seems,” for all is obscure that takes place in the mind) to go through two processes in reading. One might be called the actual reading; the other the after reading. During the actual reading, when we hold the book in our hands, there are incessant distractions and interruptions. New impressions are always completing or cancelling the old. One’s judgment is suspended, for one does not know what is coming next.Surprise, admiration, boredom, interest, succeed each other in such quick succession that when, at last, the end is reached, one is for the most part in a state of complete bewilderment. Is it good? or bad? What kind of book is it? How good a book is it? The friction of reading and the emotion of reading beat up too much dust to let us find clear answers to these questions. If we are asked our opinion, we cannot give it. Parts of the book seem to have sunk away, others to be starting out in undue prominence. Then perhaps it is better to take up some different pursuit—to walk, to talk, to dig, to listen to music. The book upon which we have spent so much time and thought fades entirely out of sight. But suddenly, as one is picking a snail from a rose, tying a shoe, perhaps, doing something distant and different, the whole book floats to the top of the mind complete. Some process seems to have been finished without one’s being aware of it. The different details which have accumulated in reading assemble themselves in their proper places. The book takes on a definite shape; it becomes a castle, a cowshed, a gothic ruin, as the case may be. Now one can think of the book as a whole, and the book as a whole is different, and gives one a different emotion, from the book received currently in several different parts. Its symmetry and proportion, its confusion and distortion can cause great delight or great disgust apart from the pleasure given by each detail as it is separately realized. Holding this complete shape in mind it now becomes necessary to arrive at some opinion of the book’s merits, for though it is possible to receive the greatest pleasure and excitement from the first process, the actual reading, though this is of the utmost importance, it is not so profound or so lasting as the pleasure we get when the second process—the after reading—is finished, and we hold the book clear, secure, and (to the best of our powers) complete in our minds.
But how, we may ask, are we to decide any of these questions—is it good, or is it bad?—how good is it, how bad is it? Not much help can be looked for from outside. Critics abound; criticisms pullulate; but minds differ too much to admit of close correspondence in matters of detail, and nothing is more disastrous than to crush one’s own foot into another person’s shoe. When we want to decide a particular case, we can best help ourselves, not by reading criticism, but by realizing our own impression as acutely as possible and referring this to the judgments which we have gradually formulated in the past. There they hang in the wardrobe of our mind—the shapes of the books we have read, as we hung them up and put them away when we had done with them. If we have just read “Clarissa Harlowe,” for example, let us see how it shows up against the shape of “Anna Karenina.” At once the outlines of the two books are cut out against each other as a house with its chimneys bristling and its gables sloping is cut out against a harvest moon. At once Richardson’s qualities—his verbosity, his obliqueness—are contrasted with Tolstoi’s brevity and directness. And what is the reason of this difference in their approach? And how does our emotion at different crises of the two books compare? And what must we attribute to the eighteenth century, and what to Russia and the translator? But the questions which suggest themselves are innumerable. They ramify infinitely, and many of them are apparently irrelevant. Yet it is by asking them and pursuing the answers as far as we can go that we arrive at our standard of values, and decide in the end that the book we have just read is of this kind or of that, has merit in that degree or in this. And it is now, when we have kept closely to our own impression, formulated independently our own judgment, that we can most profitably help ourselves to the judgments of the great critics—Dryden, Johnson, and the rest. It is when we can best defend our own opinions that we get most from theirs.
So, then—to sum up the different points we have reached in this essay—have we found any answer to our question, how should we read a book? Clearly, no answer that will do for everyone; but perhaps a few suggestions. In the first place, a good reader will give the writer the benefit of every doubt; the help of all his imagination; will follow as closely, interpret as intelligently as he can. In the next place, he will judge with the utmost severity. Every book, he will remember, has the right to be judged by the best of its kind. He will be adventurous, broad in his choice, true to his own instincts, yet ready to consider those of other people.This is an outline which can be filled, in at taste and at leisure, but to read something after this fashion is to be a reader whom writers respect. It is by the means of such readers that masterpieces are helped into the world.
If the moralists ask us how we can justify our love of reading, we can make use of some such excuse as this. But if we are honest, we know that no such excuse is needed. It is true that we get nothing whatsoever except pleasure from reading; it is true that the wisest of us is unable to say what that pleasure may be. But that pleasure—mysterious, unknown, useless as it is—is enough. That pleasure is so curious, so complex, so immensely fertilizing to the mind of anyone who enjoys it, and so wide in its effects, that it would not be in the least surprising to discover, on the day of judgment when secrets are revealed and the obscure is made plain, that the reason why we have grown from pigs to men and women, and come out from our caves, and dropped our bows and arrows, and sat round the fire and talked and drunk and made merry and given to the poor and helped the sick and made pavements and houses and erected some sort of shelter and society on the waste of the world, is nothing but this: we have loved reading.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English writer and one of the most influential 20th century modernist authors. An important part of the contemporary literary scene, Woolf’s relevance has only grown in the near century since her passing, and her pioneering essays on artistic theory, literary history, women's writing, and the politics of power have become touchstones for contemporary thought.
King and Prince of Disks (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel April 26, 2025
The King of Disks is a man of the land, and each representation rests amid fertile soil. The fruits of the labor abound, this is a man made rich by his hard work and at the height of earthly power: growth and accumulation. The work of the suit was all investment for these ultimate returns…
Name: King of Disks, Prince of Disks
Astrology: Taurus
Qabalah: Vau of He
Chris Gabriel April 26, 2025
The King of Disks is a man of the land, and each representation rests amid fertile soil. The fruits of the labor abound, this is a man made rich by his hard work and at the height of earthly power: growth and accumulation. The work of the suit was all investment for these ultimate returns.
In Rider, the King looks demurely upon the pentacle he balances upon his knee. His cloak is verdant, covered in grapes and vines, his crown is rosy, and his cowl is scarlet. His other hand holds a sphere topped scepter. The throne is adorned with four Bulls and the ground below him is full of flowers and vines. His castle stands in the background.
In Thoth, we have the Prince of Disks working the field, lowly compared to the King who enjoys the harvest. Doing the labor needed to produce fruit, he is naked but for his helmet, which is topped with a winged bulls head. He is riding in a bull drawn chariot surrounded by vegetable life: onions, tomatoes, flowers, and wheat. He grasps a sphere within which there is a tesseract and bears a scepter topped with the globe and cross. Both he and his bull look ahead.
In Marseille, we find a unique King. Unlike the other three he wears no crown, just a hat to keep the sun from his eyes. A simple and hardworking man, he sits in nature rather than in the palace. There is soil under his feet, life is sprouting from it. He holds one coin, and looks aside to another in the distance. He has chosen the ploughshare over the sword.
The suit of Disks deals with the material world and the things that make it up. Through the course of the suit, we watch the seed grow, change, wither, and then flourish. The King of Disks enjoys these processes and cycles, and is made rich by them. This is how one can master people as well, not by dictating their behaviour, but by putting them in the right environments, providing the proper conditions, and allowing them to grow on their own. A good farmer does not always need to intervene, they simply give nature freedom to flourish.
The Prince is the younger King, actively farming, knowing with absolute certainty that his hard work will produce a brilliant harvest. In many ways, this is the situation of any working person. We work aware of the season we are in, we plant seeds and work the fields to accumulate wealth, to later direct others, and to eventually retire. Most Kings will fight to the death to retain their power and control, the King of Disks is the opposite. He does what must be done and retires happily.
History gives us examples of Kings and leaders who abandoned the palace in favor of the plough. George Washington, the first president of the United States, established democracy instead of making himself king. This decision brought comparison to the Roman consul and dictator Cincinnatus, who after overcoming an invasion over the course of sixteen days immediately relinquished power and returned to his farm.
When we pull this card, we may meet a figure who embodies the King of Disks, an older, wealthy, simple man. We may also need to embody this sort of natural wisdom in order to enjoy the fruits of our labor.