Building with Music: Sound is a Spatial Force

Promises for the 1872 Jubilee.

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Robin Sparkes September 4, 2025

Architecture and music offer distinct but interconnected ways of shaping space. A building’s design directs how sound travels, influencing what people hear, how intensely they perceive it, and the atmosphere it creates. Music, on the other hand, constructs space from within, manipulating acoustic variables in real time. From recording in a bedroom, singing in a karaoke bar, performing in a warehouse or amphitheater, music has the power to transform how a space feels and how we move within it. Just as light waves can brighten a room, sound waves shape the emotional and atmospheric essence of a space.

We can shape the reverberation and resonance of a room by carefully positioning sound sources to guide how the sound unfolds. Subwoofer arrays and delay stacks allow us to synchronize sound across different areas and control how far the bass travels. Using EQ and level adjustments, we can direct the listener’s focus, concentrating frequency similarly to light waves, like a beam of sunlight cutting through a window to illuminate a single point in space. Bodies in a crowd act as moving absorbers and diffusers, continually reshaping the sound field. Through rhythm and spatialized playback, we can influence how these people move and connect, making circulation itself a medium in the psychoacoustic design of space. Sound design, then, acts as a form of spatial agency, granting us the power to reshape the architecture around us in real time.

Music changes how a space feels, the beat drives the room, making it feel entirely different than it would in silence. Sound waves bounce off surfaces, enter the body, and shift perception. A static building hosts sound, and when music activates its acoustics, the architecture responds in real time, becoming embodied and alive. Sound can be a tool for restructuring architecture and redefining our relationship to the environments around us.

Reclaiming Space: Underground Music

Les Rallizes Dénudés.

The acoustic elements of architecture often serve systems of bureaucracy and control. Underground music has the power to reclaim both historical and physical spatial narratives, turning architectural constraints into opportunities, transforming neutral or neglected spaces into sites of shared meaning and protest. By tuning into how music architects space through sound, we can engage in spatial activism to reaffirm presence, build community, and reimagine the built environment. Underground music reclaims space by asserting temporal agency, shaping how time is experienced and shared, and creating moments that resist permanence. A dance floor becomes a blueprint to reimagine the boundaries of time. The audience, moving as one, reshapes the space in real time.

Les Rallizes Dénudés, a psychedelic noise band that emerged in late 1960s Kyoto, were defined by their uncompromising use of volume and repetition in live performance. The only recordings they left behind came from these shows, where protest was enacted in real time and space. By rejecting mediated formats of releasing music, they made the audience’s presence inseparable from the music itself. Through this approach, Les Rallizes Dénudés transformed live performance into a spatial archive. Their music redefines agency by centering presence, activating space as part of the work itself, and imprinting sound directly into a collective experience.

In a similar way, through an evolving ensemble of musicians, performers, and visual artists, Parliament-Funkadelic activated space through collective rhythm. Working across Detroit, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia, they transformed venues into full sensory worlds. The Mothership was a structure of frequencies, basslines and layered harmonies constructing a space of communion.

George Clinton directed these experiences as both bandleader and maker of space. He expanded perception and invited participation into P-Funk's expansive sonic environments. In Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts, Clinton offers a manifesto: “Every thought felt as true… blossoms sooner or later into an act and bears its own fruit.” In live performances Clinton points to a spatial principle of a “higher vibration”, where thought, sound, and growth are all forces that shape experience. His invocation of vibration echoes both acoustics and the metaphorical language of quantum theory, where energy and matter are understood as forms of oscillation.

Funkadelic used vibration to tune the room beyond the limits of sight. In Mothership Connection, Clinton’s chants and performances collapsed the boundary between artist and audience. As Gascia Ouzounian states, controlling sound is a way of controlling presence. P-Funk, however, designed presence as an open system—alive, communal, and bound together. This is the “higher vibration.

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“Bowed fragments scrape into industrial resonance, while sustained tones blur into the hiss of air and the drone of engines. In this juxtaposition, nature and industry collide.”

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In the early 1970s, Martin Rev and Alan Vega emerged from New York City's underground scene, pioneering a fusion of punk energy and electronic experimentation. Rev’s synthesizer, driven by an arpeggiator, generated a continuous cascade of notes, cycling through repeating patterns that created a hypnotic, trance-like effect, enveloping the audience. Rev’s drum machine pulsed with a heartbeat-like rhythm, imposing time on the audience while space seemed to collapse and expand around them. Vega’s presence on stage was commanding. His voice cut through the pulsating rhythm, turning individuals into subjects through the power of address, transforming the call into music itself and folding the audience into the performance. Through this hypnotic, repetitive beat, Rev and Vega cast spells over the spaces they performed in.

Reclaiming Space: Loud Sound

A Crowd Almost Dwarfed by Performers, National Peace Jubilee, Boston, June 1869.

Sound travels through the ear and floods the body with vibration. Depending on tone and frequency, it reflects, lingers, or presses against surfaces. Live performance can manipulate space through sound, creating environments where amplification and presence reorganize how bodies relate to one another. Tim Hecker expands this approach in his essay In the Era of Megaphonics (2007), tracing the rise of amplified sound from the 1880s onward. He examines how emerging technologies of the industrial revolution, such as megaphones, gramophones, and PA systems, transformed public address and performance. These tools shifted sound from embodied, proximate speech toward projected volume, redirecting attention from verbal meaning to sensory force. He situated this transformation within mass political rallies, religious revivals, and stadium-scale concert sites, in sound saturated space and intensified collective experience. 

Amplification became a method for restructuring power relations, turning sound into an immersive field that conditioned behavior and expanded public presence. Distortion and amplification emerged as techniques for redrawing spatial experience. Hecker’s music practice and performances bring these principles to life, transforming venues into immersive soundscapes. His music employs deep drones, dissonant harmonies, and fluctuating frequencies to create a sense of vast, shifting space. Layered textures and industrial tones evoke tension and transcendence, while fog, darkness, and sustained sounds suspend time. In this way, Hecker sculpts space with sound, transforming the room into an instrument itself.

Reclaiming Space: Returning to Nature

Sound can trace the contours of the earth, bending industrial intensity toward the rhythms of wind, water, and foliage, shaping how we inhabit and feel the world around us. London-based artist Damsel Elysium’s music inhabits this intersection, weaving textures of industrial noise and the natural environment into sonic landscapes that reclaim both presence and place. Their work positions sound as a living medium, where body, space, and collective experience resonate together. Damsel reimagines the use of classical instruments, violin and cello, as tools for spatial experimentation. Beyond the traditional orchestral roles, these instruments become vehicles for evoking sounds of wind, machinery, and elemental textures. Bowed fragments scrape into industrial resonance, while sustained tones blur into the hiss of air and the drone of engines. In this juxtaposition, nature and industry collide.

Their performances extend beyond conventional venues into ritualistic encounters with natural environments. At Clandestino in Sweden, Damsel arranged flowers into a semicircle between themselves and the audience. The ritual culminated in the distribution of flowers to each participant, a gesture that carried the performance into the lives of the listeners. The ritual becomes a spatial act of reclamation, an invitation to experience the presence of nature together.

By blending the timbres of string instruments with industrial textures and natural soundscapes, Damsel activates a living dialogue between ecological memory and urban sound. Their work proposes new ways of feeling powerful in space through communion with the environment. Sonic environments, older than human architecture and music, remind us that sound has always been building the world around us.

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

Review of the Arts and Crafts (1898)

Wandbehang mit Alpenveilchen, Hermann Obrist. 1896.

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Ten years before Adolf Loos published the seminal essay ‘Ornament and Crime’ that came, in a way, to be the defining text of modernism, he wrote an early critique of the burgeoning arts and craft movement that laid the foundation of his theories. With sharp wit and cultural insight, he argues that true modernity lies not in ornate symbolism or medieval nostalgia, but in functional beauty rooted in classical ideals and material honesty. Modern design must, he says, reflect modern existence, and the Art Nouveau movement that was sweeping his native Austria seemed to him to look backwards. More than twenty years before the Bauhaus school implemented his ideas, here Loos makes a powerful case for a restrained, purposeful, utilitarian design that reflects the genuine spirit of the time.

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Adolf Loos September 2, 2025

We have a new decorative art. It cannot be denied. Whoever has seen the rooms of Liberty’s furniture store in London, Bing’s L’Art Nouveau on Rue de Provence in Paris, last year’s exhibition in Dresden, and this year’s in Munich, will have to admit it: the old styles are dead, long live the new style!

And yet we cannot take pleasure in it. It is not our style. Our time did not give birth to it. We do possess objects that clearly display the stamp of our time. Our clothing, our gold and silver jewelry, our gems, our leather, tortoise shell, and mother-of-pearl goods, our carriages and railroad cars, our bicycles and locomotives all please us very well. Only we do not make so much of a fuss about them.

These things are modern; that is, they are in the style of the year 1898. But how do they relate to the objects that are currently being passed off as modern? With a heavy heart we must answer that these objects have nothing to do with our time. They are full of references to abstract things, full of symbols and memories. They are medieval.

But we are beyond this epoch. Since the decline of the Western Roman Empire there has been no era that has thought and felt more classically than ours. Think of Puvis de Chavannes and Max Klinger! Has anyone thought more Hellenistically since the days of Aeschylus? Look at the Thonet chair! While subtly embodying the sitting habits of a whole era, it is not born out of the same spirit as the Greek chair with its lavish levels and at its backrest? Look at Louis Seize! Had the spirit of Pericles’ Athens not waft through its forms? If the Greeks had wanted to build a bicycle, it would have been exactly the same as ours. And the Greek tripods of bronze—I am not talking about those given as Christmas presents, but rather those that were used—they do not look exactly like our iron products?

But it is not Greek to want to express one’s individuality in the objects with which one surrounds oneself and which are in daily use. In Germany one sees the greatest variety of clothing; thus of all the civilized peoples, the Germans are the ones least filled with the Greek spirit. The Englishman, however, has only one outfit for a particular occasion, one box, one piece. To him the best is the most beautiful. Thus, filled like Greek, he chooses the best chair, the best box, and the best bicycle. Modifications in form arise not from a desire for novelty, but rather from the wish to make the good more perfect. Yet it is the boldest of our age to produce not a new chair, but the best chair.

However, in the exhibitions referred to, one saw only new chairs. The best chair will not be able to make any great claims to newness. For even ten years ago we had quite comfortable chairs, and the technique of the bent-wood chair, which helps man, has not changed so very much since then that it could also already be expressed in a different form. The improvement will not be something that no expert will be able to recognize. They will be limited to the millimeters of the millimeters in the dimensions or the grade of the wood. How difficult it is to build a truly new chair! How easy it is to invent a new chair! There is a very simple formula: make a chair that is exactly the opposite of that which has been made.

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“The level of culture that mankind attained in classical antiquity can no longer be reached back to from man’s mind.”

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In Munich, an umbrella stand was displayed which can probably best demonstrate what I have said concerning the abundant references and the medieval aspect of utilitarian objects. If it had been the task of the Greek or the Englishman to fashion such a stand, the first thing he would have thought about was to provide a good place for umbrellas to stand in. He would have reflected that the umbrellas ought to be able to be put in easily and taken out easily. He would have reflected that the umbrellas should not suffer any damage and that the covering material of the umbrella should not permit one to get stuck anywhere. But the non-Greek, the German, the average German, would do otherwise. For him, non-considerations take a back seat. The main thing for him is to point out the relationship of this object to the urn by means of its decorative form. Water plants twine their way from bottom to top, and each plant sits a frog. It does not trouble the German that the umbrellas can be ripped quite easily on those sharp leaves. He allows himself perfectly contentedly to be abused by his surroundings—as long as he finds them beautiful.

The level of culture that mankind attained in classical antiquity can no longer be reached back to from man’s mind. Classical antiquity was and is the model of all subsequent periods of culture. But there was cross-fertilization from the Orient that formed the greatest reservoir out of which new harvests of development flowed into the West. It almost seems as if Asia has bequeathed to us forever the last remains of her emotional strength. For we have already had to reach back to the furthermost points of the East, to Japan and Polynesia, and now we have come to an end. How good the Middle Ages had it! The Orient lay there still unexploited, and a voyage to Spain or to the Holy Land was enough to open up new worlds of form for the West. Arab influences transformed the nascent spirit of the West into the Gothic. The masters of the Renaissance had to reach out still further. They conquered Persia and India for us. Think of the Persian carpets without which no portrait of the madonna from this period is complete, and of the German artists and damascene work. The Rococo had to go as far as China; for us, only Japan still remains.

Now what is Japanese about our view of art? “That is a charming dress you are wearing, Madam. But what do I see? The one sleeve has a bow and the other one doesn’t. It’s very Japanese. You have a charming bowl of flowers in your vase. Nothing but long-stemmed flowers: roses, lilies, chrysanthemums. That’s Japanese too. If one wanted to appear truly immersed in favored Japan, we would find this kind of arrangement unbearable. Just ask the peasant girl on the Summe-ringo: she has never heard of Japan. And the peasant girl in her home always in an un-Japanese way. One part big in the middle, and then the others such as in a circle all around it. She finds it pretty.

In the first place, then, “Japanese” means giving up symmetry. Next, it means giving up everything that is represented. The Japanese represent flowers, but they are pressed flowers. They represent people, but they are wax people. It is a kind of objectivity taken to its extreme that cannot become subjective. But at the same time a naturalism is maintained. This is above all the world of embroidery, and it has to be one readily to anyone who delights in naïve textiles. I think of the inexpressibly charming embroidery by Hermann Obrist, for example, whose enthusiasm for Japanese art also, achieves his results.

The September issue of the leading arts and crafts paper Art et Décoration gives an account of a conversation in Paris between a reporter and René Lalique. Lalique, who is one of the greatest goldsmiths in Paris, has the courage to view the excessive use of artistically wrought form and not through materials. He uses copper to look especially distinguished and he adorns it with glass, opals, and even carnelians. This is inspiring. And yet he is wrong. In spite of the brave form, the spirit his objects is not derived from our own spirit; instead they gravitate toward the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They remind us of rustling silks and heavy velvets, rich furs and stiff brocades. It is the world of Charles V and Maximilian, the last knights, which suddenly appears before our eyes. But Lalique’s jewelry looks quite strange in the age of the lightly fluttering silk dress, in the age of the starched shirtfront and black tails. Who would not like them? But who would want to wear them? The pleasure they excite is only platonic. Our age demands small jewelry—jewelry that represents the greatest possible value on the smallest possible area. Our age requires of jewelry that it have “distilled costliness,” an “essence of the magnificent.” For this reason the most valuable stones and materials will be used in our jewelry. The jewelry’s meaning lies for us in the material. Thus, artistic work must content itself with bringing out the material’s worth as much as possible. In jewelry that is to be worn, the work of the goldsmith takes only second place. Lalique’s jewelry is real display-case jewelry, made as if to fill the treasury of a patron of the arts, who then graciously invites the public to admire the magnificent things in his museum.

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Adolf Loos (1870–1933) was an Austrian architect, writer, critic and theorist known for his staunch opposition to ornamentation in design and his role in shaping modernist architecture. His landmark essay Ornament and Crime argued that decorative excess was a sign of cultural degeneration, helping to define the functionalist ethos of the 20th century.

Gain, the Nine of Disks (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Gain, the Nine of Disks
Number: 9
Astrology: Venus in Virgo
Qabalah: Yesod of He

Chris Gabriel August 30, 2025

The Nine of Disks is where the fruits of our labors are made manifest in their glory. We are finally reaching the harvest -what was worked for throughout the suit, and invested properly in Prudence, now begins to reap rewards.

In Rider, we see a noblewoman in a long flowing yellow gown covered in red flowers. She wears a red bonnet and a falconer’s gauntlet, atop which is perched a small falcon with a red blinder. She stands in her full and fantastic vineyard, and by her feet there are nine disks.

In Thoth, we have three central disks, interlinking in red, blue, and green to form Crowley’s phallic and solar seal. Below there are three coins which bear the planetary Gods: Mercury, Venus, and the Moon. Above are Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars. The background is a deep emerald green. This card is given to Venus in Virgo, a careful approach to love and creation.

In Marseille, we have one central disk between two blocks of four disks. Two flowers with closed blossoms emerge from the center, ready to spread out. Qabalistically,  this is the Foundation of the Princess.

The Nine of Disks is perhaps the most pleasing point in the suit;we’ve been working for a great deal of time, and now we see the great bounty in sight. This is the pleasure of a Friday, the final day of work before the freedom of the weekend. 

As Venus in Virgo, the card relates to caution and criticality in love. Consider the scrutiny a farmer has when looking through the harvest; he must discard what is moldy, spoiled, or otherwise wrong. This is how a Virgo Venus approaches relationships, with an intelligent, seemingly uncaring eye. They will pick someone apart before they can give themselves over to love.

This careful, difficult process is what allows us to enjoy the fruits of the harvest - no one wants to eat bread filled with ergot or wine made of spoiled grapes. Gain represents both quantity and quality. It has done the work to increase the harvest, and has the taste to ensure its goodness.

Though we can expect some great benefits when this card appears, we must also keep our wits about us. Here a great deal of old phrases come to mind: a bad apple spoils the bunch, don’t put all your eggs in one basket, don’t count your chickens before they hatch. These phrases emerge from the rational, agricultural mindset which is embodied perfectly in this card.

When we pull this card, we will be entering a harvest period, whether this is beneficial or not depends entirely upon what we have sewn. Sow the wind and harvest the whirlwind, the wages of sin are death. If we have been diligent in our labor, we will be rewarded here.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, THOUGHTS

Timothy Leary's Model of Consciousness

Graphic for a Psychedelic Session led by Leary, 1965.

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Molly Hankins August 28, 2025

While Timothy Leary was in and out of prison during the early 1970s, his friend and collaborator Robert Anton Wilson began expanding on Leary’s Eight-Circuit Model of Consciousness, which he published in multiple books the following decade. Two of these, Prometheus Rising and the Cosmic Trigger series, use this model to describe the evolution of our species from mortals to higher dimensional selves. Humans move, Leary tells us, from a baseline Bio-Survival Intelligence that helps us stay alive into more refined states of being with a greater capacity for information sharing, creating and processing. According to Wilson, as information and understanding increases, humanity draws closer to a critical mass of self-awareness where we can begin to override our conditioning and experience true free will.

Wilson describes the Bio-Survival Circuit  as part of our DNA programmed to, “seek a comfort-safety zone around a mothering organism.” This circuit of consciousness orients us to what is supportive and nourishing and keeps us away from what is predatory or toxic. Born from  ancestral survival strategies, this circuit first expresses in infancy to encourage bonding with the adult humans around us who can keep us alive. When we mature into adulthood, we can easily be brought back into this circuit when our nervous system is stimulated to produce the same state of fear we experienced as helpless infants. The results are predictable, robotic responses that make us incredibly easy to manipulate. Wilson wrote in Prometheus Rising, “A man or woman entering a new situation with the anxiety chemicals of a frightened infant coursing through the brain stem is not going to be able to accurately, observe, judge or decide anything very accurately.” As long as we allow our nervous systems to be negatively influenced, we can’t access free will. 

In modernity, we  instead of looking to interpersonal relationships to soothe our nervous systems from survival anxiety, we instead look to money. This brings us into the second circuit of hierarchy determined by our perception of territory associated with the ‘ego’. Known as the Emotional Territorial Circuit, in this level of consciousness money is a form of territory and the scarcity of it can keep us locked in these lower circuits.This imprint often comes from and is triggered by a father figure, or the lack thereof. According to Wilson and Leary, intergenerational DNA mutations take place based on imprinting we get as children that affects our nervous system in a way that conditions behavior. If we get stuck on this circuit, we lock in a territorial mindset of protecting ourselves from scarcity.

The third circuit is the Semantic Intelligence Circuit, which maps our reality tunnel and informs what is possible or not. These include language, concepts, tools, art, theories, equations, music, or poetry and all wind up informing our internal monologue somehow. “The Semantic Circuit allows us to sub-divide things, and reconnect things, at pleasure. There is no end to its busy-busy-busy labeling and packaging of experience,” Wilson writes of the third circuit. At this level of consciousness, we’re still easily  manipulated because our reality tunnel can be reoriented by activating the Bio-Survival Circuit using fear. We update our map based on information gleaned from a dysregulated nervous system operating on first circuit consciousness data. Our range of responses shrinks and we begin to see the world through the lens of our wounding, which we’re revisiting every time our nervous system is dysregulated.

We can begin to break out of this strange loop at the semantic level by consciously updating our reality tunnel map, which expands our perception and propels us forward. The first and second circuits run on negative feedback as a precursor to returning to stasis, whereas at the third, semantic level we’re enriched by tailoring our perception of reality to meet our needs. This creates a forward propulsion out into the world and brings us to the next circuit -Socio-Sexual Intelligence. This is imprinted in adolescence and creates connection with others from either a regulated or dysregulated state. At this level, dysregulation can express itself in more covert ways, like being overly rational or moralistic. As Wilson wrote in Cosmic Trigger II, “Socio-Sexual Intelligence allows us to manage our social and sexual relations in ways that keep us reasonably happy or at least out of jail.” We learn how to get what we want on this circuit, hopefully in healthy ways.

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“Operating on all eight circuits is an integration of body, mind, spirit and emotions that gives us the regulated state Hermeticists agree is necessary for successfully influencing reality.”

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As we update our reality tunnel map in ways that help us get what we want, we become more difficult to manipulate. The fifth, Holistic Neurosomatic Circuit processes mind-body feedback loops and is imprinted throughout our lives by heightened states of awareness, whether ecstatic or fearful. We can manipulate our state of being to our advantage, moving beyond negative Emotional Territorial reactivity to a level of consciousness where we can select our preferred state of being from the platform of a regulated nervous system. This necessary mutation activates a new era of humanity that appears supernatural, but learned nervous system regulation represents a leap in evolution at the neuro-social level.

At the sixth Collective Neurogenetic Circuit, we come in contact with the Akashic Records, which holds the ancestral data informing our genetic expression. Wilson writes, “The Neurogenetic Circuit is best considered, in terms of current science, as the genetic archives activated by excitement of anti-histone proteins - the DNA memory coiling back to the dawn of life and containing all the genetic blueprints for the future of evolution.” At this level we remember the Creator through ancestral knowing that connects us to higher consciousness. It can come in the form of a spontaneous spiritual experience or from knowing that all of life is connected, from a work of art, meditation, being in nature or a heartfelt message, and the knowledge will stick with us if we spend enough time in sixth circuit consciousness.

At the seventh circuit level of Meta-Programming Intelligence, we learn to re-imprint ourselves so we can choose our preferred reality tunnel. We tune into specific circuits from this level and utilize them to our advantage. Instead of being trapped in the reality tunnel our brain has manufactured, we can imagine how we want it to be and tell our brain that story to program it accordingly. “The Meta-Programming Circuit, known as the soul in Gnosticism… simply represents the mind becoming aware of itself,” Wilson states, distinguishing the soul from our human self. “Simply accept that the universe is so structured that it can see itself, and that this self-reflexive arc is built into our frontal lobes, so that consciousness contains an infinite regress, and all we can do is make models of ourselves making models. Well, at that point, the only thing to do is relax and enjoy the show.”

As our soul kicks back to enjoy the human show, we enter the eighth and final Non-Local Quantum Intelligence Circuit and learn to consciously affect life at the subatomic level. Call it magic, magick, manifestation, or mystical experience, but Wilson calls it being able to affect reality on a meta-physiological level. Non-Local Quantum Intelligence Circuit activation can be brought on by near death or out-of-body experiences, and sometimes can be activated by psychedelics. To really work with it is to have agency in affecting reality to conform to our will, which is the definition of magic. Operating on all eight circuits is an integration of body, mind, spirit and emotions that gives us the regulated state Hermeticists agree is necessary for successfully influencing reality. Paradoxically, by existing in this detached way, we create the right conditions to materially affect our lives. 

Towards the end of  Prometheus Rising Wilson reminds us, “It is more fun to be happy than sad, more enjoyable to choose your emotions than to have them inflicted upon you by mechanical glandular processes, more pleasurable to solve your problems than to be stuck with them forever…  The future exists first in imagination, then in will, then in reality.” And as we take responsibility for curating our reality tunnel and map, we experience true free will. 

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

A Forager’s Take on Fairytales Pt. 1

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Izzy Johns August 26, 2025

Long ago in Drumline, County Clare, in the late 19th Century, an old farmer and his wife huddled for warmth in a mud hut. Many a cold winter passed, and finally, the man agreed to build his wife a house  of bricks and mortar.  

He set to work the following Spring. Not a day had passed when the old man received a  visit from a traveler, who spoke these words:  

“I wouldn’t build there if I was you. That’s the wrong place. If you build there you won’t be  short of company, whatever else.” 

The old man paid him no mind, but sure enough, the moment he and his wife lay down to  rest in their new home, they were plagued by noise and disruption. Furniture was  knocked over, cutlery strewn across the floor, crockery smashed. They couldn’t get a wink of sleep. But, as sure as day, whenever they went to investigate, they found nothing and  no one. The old couple sought the help of the local preacher, who recognised this as the work of the Sidhe, the Little Folk of this land. He tried to exorcize the house, but to no avail.  

After five sleepless nights, the man wearily set off to the market to sell their cows. It was  the Gale day, the day that their rent was due, and money was sparse. English colonisers had seized land from the Irish farmers some years  before. Now they were renting it back to them, and the rent was high.  

The old man got a fair price for the cows, and he stopped at a roadside pub on the way  home. It was there that he encountered the traveler once again. In desperation, the man  begged the traveler for advice. He would do anything so that the Little Folk would let him  rest. The traveler walked him home, and took him to stand in the yard, on the far side of  the house.  

He said: 

“Now, look out there and tell me what you see.” 
[…] “The yard?” 
“No,” he says, “look again.” 
“The road?” 
“No. Look carefully.” 
“Oh, that old Whitethorn bush? Sure, that’s there forever. That could be there since the  start o’ the world.” 
“D’you tell me that now?” 
The old man walked out to the gable o’ the house, called [him], then says, “come over  here.” 
He did. 
“Look out there, and tell me what do you see?” 

He looked out from that gable end, and there, no farther away than the end o’ the garden,  was another Whitethorn bush, standing alone. 

“Now,” says the old man, “I told you. I warned you. The fairies’ path is between them  bushes and beyond. And you’re after building your house on it.” 

Upon the instruction of the traveler, the man built two doors in either side of the house, in line with the Whitethorns. From then on, the Little Folk had a clear passage, and  the man and his wife were not bothered again.¹

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“The higher you climb, the further you travel, the greater the view”

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British Goblins, 1880. Wirt Sikes.

I was very struck by this account. It feels different to the rich, meandering folk-tale jewels I love so much, that are wrapped in mythos and allegory. Instead, this tale falls into the  realm of family and community stories, that are still “lived in”,  in this case, by the  old couple’s grandson, who told this story to Eddie Lenihan in the living room of the very  same house. He said that he still leaves the two doors ajar each night so as to let the fairies pass. There’s no use in locking them, he says, for they’ll only be open again by the morning. 

Make no mistake, this story is not hearsay. A book of fairy tales might read like a book of  fiction, but it isn’t. What we see in this tale, and so many others like it, is a relic of a complex faith system from times gone  by, and it’s important that we storytellers hold it in that way. This story comes from  Ireland, where the fairies are called Sídhe, or Sí, though often called by euphemisms to  avoid catching their attention. The Sidhe are the descendants of the people of Danu, the  Tuatha Dé Danann, a race of fallen Gods and Goddesses that dwell in the liminality  between our world and the otherworld, the An Saol Eile. It’s only fair to acknowledge their  providence, not least is it a crucial act of cultural preservation.  

Fairies have a range of habitats depending on where you are live. In Ireland, they are particularly fond of two places: a lone Whitethorn (Hawthorn) tree, and the forts -  those grand, grassy mounds of earth, often covered in a greater diversity of wild plants  than their surroundings. In this tale, the old couple has disturbed not a habitat, but a  passage between habitats. More savvy builders would have driven four hazel rods into the ground, marking out the proposed foundations of the house. If by the next day any rod had moved, the house should be built elsewhere.  

The fairies in this story star in a role that I’ve seen in countless tales; defending their  habitat from ecological destruction. Here, they were able to communicate with the  intruders and resolve the problem quickly. It’s a good thing that the old couple were  forthcoming. Fairies will always give warnings, but it’s perfectly within their power to  cause grave suffering if those warnings aren’t heeded. They can be at best didactic and  at worst violent, but they have no interest in troubling a person who isn’t troubling them. I  can’t condone the violence, but I marvel at how proficient they are at protecting and  stewarding the land. Plus, they greatly enrich the ecosystem. Various tales see fairies  fertilizing soil for generous farmers, and producing abundances of wildflowers and fungi.  It’s said that the rings of mushrooms we see in woodlands and meadows are where  they’ve danced. 

The Intruder, c.1860. John Anster Fitzgerald.

Thinking about this with an Ecologist’s gaze, fairies are a fascinating species. They might well be a larger genus with loads of regionally-specific variants like small  people, spriggans, buccas, elves, bockles and knockers, browneys, goblins, dryads,  gnomes and piskies. There’s a wealth of anecdotal evidence of their existence,   thousands and thousands of stories, stretching back millenia,  yet we’ve never successfully captured and studied  them. Perhaps what makes this species most unique is their ability to outwit ours. Their cunning gently prods at our human arrogance, contesting our claim to be the most  “developed” of species.

Far less frequently in the UK do we hear tales of the Little Folk interfering with larger  property developments. In London, for example, you’ll scarcely come across a piece of land that hasn’t been leveled ten times over, and most Whitethorns are confined to cultivated hedges. I wonder how many forts have been destroyed in my neighborhood. Our lack of understanding of the fairies’ life cycles and physiology makes it pointless to  speculate on why larger builds don’t experience ramifications from the little folk. It’s hard  not to wonder if heavy machinery, giant crews of contractors and big blocks of hundreds  of dwellings haven’t been too much for the fairies to contend with. I hate to think that,  unbeknownst to us, urbanization might have wiped them out. If fairies are still around, it’s  clear that they’re gravely endangered.  

If this is the case, then it makes fairies one of over two million species under threat of  extinction. It’d be such a shame if these creatures, these stories, and the feelings that  they represent, disappeared altogether. I love this tale for giving us such a tangible  example of humans making space for fairies and subsequently managing to co-exist  peacefully. The fairies in this story are model land guardians, and from that we humans  have a lot to learn.  

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Izzy Johns is a forager and storyteller. She teaches foraging under the monicker Rights  For Weeds and manages the Phytology medicine garden in East London. You can find her  work on Substack [rightsforweeds.substack.com] and Instagram [instagram.com/ rightsforweeds] .

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¹As recounted to Eddie Lenihan in 2001 by the couple’s grandson, recorded in ‘Meeting the Other Folk…”

Knight of Swords (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Knight of Swords
Number: 1
Astrology: Gemini, Fire of Air 
Qabalah: Vau of Vau

Chris Gabriel August 23, 2025

The Knight of Swords is the most active form of air. He is the hot and sharp wind that cuts through the sky. In each iteration, we see the Knight galloping ahead with his sword ready.

In Rider, we have an impassioned knight in reflective armor. His lifted visor reveals a face of great anger. He has a red cape, feathered helmet, and holds his sword high. His grey horse is galloping at a great speed and the trees in the background bend with the wind.

In Thoth, we see a knight in green armor from above. His pointed helmet has four bladed propellers, and his face is obscure. He carries two swords pointed at one target. His horse is long and orange tan. They are riding in the sky, below them three birds soar. 

In Marseille, the knight is armored and expressionless. His pauldron has a face upon it. His long sword points up and ahead, and his blue horse is rearing up, as if preparing to make a great leap.

The Knight of Swords is a missile, a flying war machine. One can think of fighter planes, attack helicopters, drones, and projectiles. The Knight in Thoth shows a visual sympathy with the modern single rotor helicopter, which had not yet been invented when this card was drawn. The card strongly calls up the Flight of the Valkyries scene from Apocalypse Now. 

From the start of aerial warfare, there was a sense of “nobility” in pilots. They were, quite literally above the war. When they were not fighting with one another, they dropped bombs, and early on, barbaric spikes and nails onto the enemy soldiers below. Pilots had the privilege, for perhaps the first time in history, of not seeing the product of their violence. 

In modern times, we have brought this detachment to a profound extreme with drone warfare. Remote pilots sit in offices and use televisions and video game controllers to kill real people. This is the nature of the Knight of Swords, extreme violence without emotion. A pure intellect bent on achieving its will, without concern for others. Where the Page of Swords is the fog of war, and the confusion and hesitation of violence, the Knight cuts through the fog indifferently and lands his blow. 

On a personal scale, this is expertise and effortless action, movement perfectly aligned with the intellect. The card is given to Gemini, so one can think of someone with a playful intelligence, someone with a very sharp tongue.

When we pull this card, rapid movement will be necessary to achieve what one seeks, one may need to literally speed off somewhere, or to direct their thoughts and words very intentionally, a bit of cruelty may be in order.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, THOUGHTS

Dear Brother (1849)

Dostoevsky, Vasily Perov. c. 1872.

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At the age of twenty eight, Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to death. He had written two novels, received to moderate acclaim, that had gained him entry to a social progressive literary circle known as the Petrashevsky Circle. Fearing another revolution, Tsar Nicholas I ordered the arrest and execution of the entire group, on the grounds of reading and distributing banned revolutionary material. At the last moment, while standing in front of the firing squad, Dostoevsky’s sentence was commuted and his life was spared - though he spent the next four years in a Siberian prison camp, followed by six years of compulsory military service in exile. He wrote this letter to his brother that very day, detailing the events, and sharing what he thought might be his final words. Dostoevsky survived the camp, and the service, and returning to society became the most acclaimed writer of his generation, leaving a legacy that is near unparalleled today.

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Fyodor Dostoevsky August 21, 2025

Brother, my precious friend! All is settled! I am sentenced to four years' hard labour in the fortress (I believe, of Orenburg) and after that to serve as a private. Today, the 22nd of December, we were taken to the Semionov Drill Ground. There the sentence of death was read to all of us, we were told to kiss the Cross, our swords were broken over our heads, and our last toilet was made (white shirts). Then three were tied to the pillar for execution. I was the sixth. Three at a time were called out; consequently, I was in the second batch and no more than a minute was left me to live. I remembered you, brother, and all yours; during the last minute you, you alone, were in my mind, only then I realised how I love you, dear brother mine! I also managed to embrace Plescheyev and Durov who stood close to me and to say good-bye to them. Finally the retreat was sounded, and those tied to the pillar were led back, and it was announced to us that His Imperial Majesty granted us our lives. Then followed the present sentences. Palm alone has been pardoned, and returns with his old rank to the army. 

I was just told, dear brother, that today or tomorrow we are to be sent off. I asked to see you. But I was told that this was impossible; I may only write you this letter: make haste and give me a reply as soon as you can. I am afraid that you may somehow have got to know of our death sentence. From the windows of the prison-van, when we were taken to the Semionov Drill Ground, I saw a multitude of people; perhaps the news reached you, and you suffered for me. Now you will be easier on my account. Brother! I have not become downhearted or low-spirited. Life is everywhere life, life in ourselves, not in what is outside us. There will be people near me, and to be a man among people and remain a man for ever, not to be downhearted nor to fall in whatever misfortunes may befall me — this is life; this is the task of life. I have realised this. This idea has entered into my flesh and into my blood. Yes, it 's true! The head which was creating, living with the highest life of art, which had realised and grown used to the highest needs of the spirit, that head has already been cut off from my shoulders. There remain the memory and the images created but not yet incarnated by me. They will lacerate me, it is true! But there remains in me my heart and the same flesh and blood which can also love, and suffer, and desire, and remember, and this, after all, is life. On voit le soleil! Now, good-bye, brother! Don't grieve for me! 

Now about material things: my books (I have the Bible still) and several sheets of my manuscript, the rough plan of the play and the novel (and the finished story A Child's Tale) have been taken away from me, and in all probability will be got by you. I also leave my overcoat and old clothes, if you send to fetch them. Now, brother, I may perhaps have to march a long distance. Money is needed. My dear brother, when you receive this letter, and if there is any possibility of getting some money, send it me at once. Money I need now more than air (for one particular purpose). Send me also a few lines. Then if the money from Moscow comes, — remember me and do not desert me. Well, that is all! I have debts, but what can I do? 

Kiss your wife and children. Remind them of me continually; see that they do not forget me. Perhaps, we shall yet meet some time! Brother, take care of yourself and of your family, live quietly and carefully. Think of the future of your children. . . . Live positively. There has never yet been working in me such a healthy abundance of spiritual life as now. But will my body endure? I do not know. I am going away sick, I suffer from scrofula. But never mind! Brother, I have already gone through so much in life that now hardly anything can frighten me. Let come what may! At the first opportunity I shall let you know about myself. Give the Maikovs my farewell and last greetings. Tell them that I thank them all for their constant interest in my fate. Say a few words for me, as warm as possible, as your heart will prompt you, to Eugenia Petrovna. I wish her much happiness, and shall ever remember her with grateful respect. Press the hands of Nikolay Apollonovich and Apollon Maikov, and also of all the others. Find Yanovsky. Press his hand, thank him. Finally, press the hands of all who have not forgotten me. And those who have forgotten me — remember me to them also. Kiss our brother Kolya. Write a letter to our brother Andrey and let him know about me. Write also to Uncle and Aunt. This I ask you in my own name, and greet them for me. Write to our sisters: I wish them happiness. 

And maybe, we shall meet again some time, brother! Take care of yourself, go on living, for the love of God, until we meet. Perhaps some time we shall embrace each other and recall our youth, our golden time that was, our youth and our hopes, which at this very instant I am tearing out from my heart with my blood, to bury them. Can it indeed be that I shall never take a pen into my hands? I think that after the four years there may be a possibility. I shall send you everything that I may write, if I write anything, my God! How many imaginations, lived through by me, created by me anew, will perish, will be extinguished in my brain or will be spilt as poison in my blood! Yes, if I am not allowed to write, I shall perish. Better fifteen years of prison with a pen in my hands! 

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“Life is a gift, life is happiness, each minute might have been an age of happiness.”

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Write to me more often, write more details, more, more facts. In every letter write about all kinds of family details, of trifles, don't forget. This will give me hope and life. If you knew how your letters revived me here in the fortress. These last two months and a half, when it was forbidden to write or receive a letter, have been very hard on me. I was ill. The fact that you did not send me money now and then worried me on your account; it meant you yourself were in great need ! Kiss the children once again; their lovely little faces do not leave my mind. Ah, that they may be happy! Be happy yourself too, brother, be happy! 

But do not grieve, for the love of God, do not grieve for me! Do believe that I am not downhearted, do remember that hope has not deserted me. In four years there will be a mitigation of my fate. I shall be a private soldier, — no longer a prisoner, and remember that some time I shall embrace you. I was to-day in the grip of death for three-quarters of an hour; I have lived it through with that idea; I was at the last instant and now I live again! 

If any one has bad memories of me, if I have quarrelled with any one, if I have created in any one an unpleasant impression — tell them they should forget it, if you manage to meet them. There is no gall or spite in my soul; I should dearly love to embrace any one of my former friends at this moment. It is a comfort, I experienced it to-day when saying good-bye to my dear ones before death. I thought at that moment that the news of the execution would kill you. But now be easy, I am still alive and shall live in the future with the thought that some time I shall embrace you. Only this is now in my mind. 

What are you doing? What have you been thinking to-day? Do you know about us? How cold it was today! 

Ah, if only my letter reaches you soon. Otherwise I shall be for four months without news of you. I saw the envelopes in which you sent money during the last two months; the address was written in your hand, and I was glad that you were well. 

When I look back at the past and think how much time has been wasted in vain, how much time was lost in delusions, in errors, in idleness, in ignorance of how to live, how I did not value time, how often I sinned against my heart and spirit, — my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, each minute might have been an age of happiness. Si jeunesse savait! Now, changing my life, I am being reborn into a new form. Brother! I swear to you that I shall not lose hope, and shall preserve my spirit and heart in purity. I shall be reborn to a better thing. That is my whole hope, my whole comfort! 

The life in prison has already sufficiently killed in me the demands of the flesh which were not wholly pure; I took little heed of myself before. Now privations are nothing to me, and, therefore, do not fear that any material hardship will kill me. This cannot be! Ah! To have health! 

Good-bye, good-bye, my brother! When shall I write you again? You will receive from me as detailed an account as possible of my journey. If I can only preserve my health, then everything will be right! 

Well, good-bye, good-bye, brother! I embrace you closely, I kiss you closely. Remember me without pain in your heart. Do not grieve, I pray you, do not grieve for me! In the next letter I shall tell you how I go on. Remember then what I have told you: plan out your life, do not waste it, arrange your destiny, think of your children. Oh, to see you, to see you! Good-bye! Now I tear myself away from everything that was dear; it is painful to leave it! It is painful to break oneself in two, to cut the heart in two. Good-bye! Good-bye! But I shall see you, I am convinced — I hope; do not change, love me, do not let your memory grow cold, and the thought of your love will be the best part of my life. Goodbye, good-bye, once more! Good-bye to all! 

Your brother, 

Fiodor Dostoevsky.

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

Enfolded in Living Reality Pt. 2

Plate from Oculus Artificialis, Johann Zahn. 1685.

Tuukka Toivonen August 19, 2025

Philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) warned us decades ago about the folly of viewing reality purely through an analytical or conceptual lens. They were highly critical of the dominance of such “conceived” or analytical perception, or an excessive reliance on abstract concepts, fixed categories and the relentless dissection of phenomena into their constituent parts. For these philosophers, analytical seeing and comprehension was far less than the totality of reality. Instead, they suggested that a continuous, indivisible “lived” perception formed the true ground for all our experience, from the the physical to the cerebral. That perception was the gateway to fully entering the embodied, living reality that always already enfolds us. As society further devalues and grows blind to lived perception and the reality it gives access to, individuals and contemporary organizations not only delude themselves by treating imperfect models of reality as constituting actual reality, they risk distancing themselves from what the ecological thinker and phenomenologist David Abram has called the sensuous world. This deprives us of our very ability to relate to ourselves, other forms of life, and the wider cosmos within which we have always evolved and found profound meaning. As a result, the path to becoming fully human vanishes into thin air. 

In the sobering words of philosopher, neuroscientist and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, “we live no longer in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it”. We designate our abstract concepts, theories, images and other representations as primary and that which is truly present and alive as secondary. In this topsy-turvy rendering of existence, everything is  reversed: health metrics, digital content, synthetic voices and scalable “nature-based solutions” come to be seen as more real and preferable than the dynamic and interrelated living wholes that they selectively abstract and exploit.¹ Indeed, in our reductionist fervour,² we have forgotten that complexity and constant change are the norm. Our disconnect mode of thought make it hard to accept this, but intuitively we know that, as McGilchrist puts it, simplicity represents “a special case  of complexity, achieved by cleaving off and disregarding almost all of the vast reality that surrounds whatever it is we are for the moment as modelling as simple”.³ The act of simplifying what we experience or hope for does help us cope with our daily lives, but taking artificial representations of reality as truth effectively distorts and devitalizes our existence.  

Consider how prioritizing unreal representations at the expense of a directly experienced living reality might manifest in relationships and communications. The relational space has become a site of active algorithmic mediation and intervention, with a rise in  people developing intimate connections with chatbots of varying kinds. Consider a scenario where you are facing psychological hardship and long to be listened to, understood and supported, even if you are not (yet) able to expose the heart of the matter. In such a situation, an advanced AI chatbot may well serve as a supportive partner on the face of things, and it may even manage to intelligently unpick many  of the root reasons behind your suffering. However, it would still amount to a situation where representations and cognition get treated as primary and where that which is truly alive and present is relegated to a secondary role. What gets devalued and displaced is the presence of another human being who feels your pain, their deeper potential for empathizing, and their simply being there, sharing time with you. In this and many other insidious and subtle ways, distorted takes on what constitutes primary reality have the power to corrupt our experiential fabric and the very foundations of our wellbeing.  

Exploring the space between our familiar social realities and the awesome quantum worlds investigated by physicists, I feel that our prevailing assumptions  about human reality need to be subjected to a profound test at an earthly level. Although I do not believe our universe is the product of a computer simulation, we have entered a simulated situation all the same by assigning the status of reality almost exclusively to the words, concepts and technologies we have invented rather than to the interconnected, mysterious and experientially rich reality that underpins our existence. This is a trap we cannot easily escape at a collective level, but at an individual level there is a lot that we can do to transcend the limits of our increasingly controlled experiential realities. Spending more time deeply immersed in art, music, meditation and natural environments is one enjoyable way to begin a journey back into living reality. For more ambitious moments, consider open discussions with those around you on which realities we might treat as primary and how we might define the ground upon which new ideas and technologies are to be built. Such engagements might reveal that many of us are much more seriously interested in exploring new ways to “live in the presence of the world” than common representations of our proclivities would have us believe. 

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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. 

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¹ This distinction between favouring specific solutions or products rather than the underlying life-giving wholes they are derived from offers a basis for assessing whether an action or enterprise is genuinely regenerative or not.

² McGilchrist traces this overwhelming tendency in contemporary culture back to the way society has systematically over-emphasized and amplified the linear, grasping disposition of the left side of the brain at the expense of the more  integrative and holistic orientation of the right hemisphere, owing partly to the preponderance of Cartesian thought and economic ideologies of extraction. McGilchrist has an extensive background in neuroscience research and his work differs decisively with how pop neuroscience and psychology have contrasted the hemispheres and created simplified images of “left-brain” vs “right-brain” thinkers.  

³ McGilchrist, I., 2021. The matter with things: Our brains, our delusions, and the unmaking of the world. Perspectiva Press, London, pp. 17-18. 

Happiness, the Nine of Cups (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Happiness, the Nine of Cups
Number: 9
Astrology: Jupiter in Pisces
Qabalah: Yesod of He

Chris Gabriel August 16, 2025

The Nine of Cups holds the sweetest water in the suit. As a nine, it is given to Yesod, the Unconscious, so this is the Lethean water of forgetfulness, the drink that puts you in a stupor.

In Rider, a large man sits smugly in front of a table, upon which rests his horde of 9 cups. His arms are crossed and his face holds a haughty smile. He wears a white robe and a red turban. The table is draped with a watery table cloth.

In Thoth, we have Happiness; three rows of three pink cups flow into one another and golden lotuses move the water about the card through their orange stems. The card is given to Jupiter in Pisces, the domicile of Jupiter. As such, the Happiness of this card relates to religious ecstasy, fantasy, and metaphysics.

In Marseille, we have another matrix of cups, three by three, around which vegetation grows. At the bottom row of cups, the plants are wilting, atop they are growing strong. Qabalistically, the card is the ‘Foundation of the Queen’.

Happiness is a very pleasantly named card, and indeed the zodiacal placement which is attributed to it is one of the best. This is a restorative step in the suit of Cups where water returns to its essential nature after a difficult detour.

As Jupiter in Pisces, it brings to mind the dreams and promises offered by religion in its most base form. The promise of eternal life, paradise, and reunion with loved ones.  Phrases like “pie in the sky” or “pipe dream” are particularly apt, and we can consider the root of the latter phrase being opium. The water in these cups is akin to  Marx’s idea of religion as the ‘opium of the people.’ While the masses are tormented and oppressed, they hold onto the promises of the church to keep them going, rather than changing their material conditions. The pleasing water held in these nine cups is a spiritual opiate.

Many people drink and do drugs to attain this manner of dreamy hopefulness. In this state one can escape the misery and drudgery of reality, but it is ultimately temporary. The Happiness of this card is ephemeral and finite, and any attempts to make it prolong it lead to the rotting roots shown in Marseille.

The perfect image of this is the Lotus Eaters of The Odyssey, a people entirely dependent on their drugs and indifferent to the world. Many belief systems function this way as well; as numbing anesthetics for the body. The afterlife of the Greeks required the magical Lethean waters of forgetfulness to reach the end. An eternity being dumb and numb.

When we pull this card, we can expect a pleasant time, good dreams, and shared comfort. We may have a very strong imagination at this time or have sprawling dreams. Even in a reverie, we must ask ourselves: who is the dreamer? Are we in a dream of our own, or has someone trapped us in theirs?

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, THOUGHTS

The Soul Star Activation Protocol

De Occulta Philosophia, Heinrich Agrippa.1533.

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Molly Hankins August 14, 2025

The Soul Star Activation Protocol was nearly lost to the world of the 21st century. A metaphysical technology passed down from Tibetan Master Djwhal Khul to Theosophical Society founder Helena Blavatsky to esoteric writer Alice A. Bailey,  it was preserved in The Rainbow Bridge published in 1975. It explains in elegantly simple detail how to build connection with our higher self beyond the world of form, expanding our consciousness, creativity, and magical capacity in the process. Inspired by The Kybalion, a book of Hermetic principles authored by three anonymous initiates, The Rainbow Bridge was anonymously published by two dedicated students of Theosophy and the transmission of this sacred knowledge continues.

The Rainbow Bridge describes an energetic thread “or vibration between states of consciousness”  connecting our Earthly consciousness in third density to the totality of our soul’s consciousness beyond form. This thread is like a low-bandwidth data stream between worlds, that can be expanded by consciously working with this connection. The more data moving through the connection, the higher our state of consciousness and the more broad our capacity to respond to stimulus is. As it expands through effort, it hits critical mass,the bandwidth is suddenly expanded exponentially, and the connection is no longer a low bandwidth thread, but what the authors refer to as a “rainbow bridge”. When this happens, our soul star is activated.

“As consciousness moves from point to point or level to level from Earth upward, man’s nature changes even though his form appears to be the same; in reality it becomes more refined in the substance and energy of which it is composed. There comes a time when centers above the physical body are touched, and man finds himself in a state of being which, although new, seems to be the very essence of his being and somehow, strangely and wonderfully the essence of all being,” the introduction states. “At first there appears to be no difference in his outer vehicles or life, but, in time, he becomes something different, and he does not need to die to experience Heaven. Such experience is one of the goals of all occult teachings and practices.” When the centers above the physical body become activated, so does our soul star.

Master Djwhal Khul’s protocol has four qualifying requirements to build this connection and activate their soul star. Khul believes undertaking this work requires integration of the following principle beliefs into our consciousness before beginning the protocol:

1. The is one all inclusive, original source of consciousness also known as God, Intelligence, the Absolute, etc. 

2. There is a law of rebirth, reincarnation or cyclic return. 

3. Karma is a law of cause and effect we all live within.

4. There is a law of unification on the path of return from form back to the original source of consciousness, all souls are part of the one soul. 

Once the above tenets are accepted and integrated, students may begin the Soul Star Activation Protocol. The soul star, the book tells us, is a bright, white indicator light that sits about 6 inches above the top of our heads and can be seen by energetically sensitive people when the data stream between our human and higher selves sufficiently expands. Activating it requires us to consciously build the connection within our physical and energetic bodies, referred to as the “central channel.” This channel runs through our heads and into the Earth. Those who are called to this work have at least a minimally activated soul star, and consciously engaging with it will begin the activation.

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“Activating our soul star burns off so much psychic debris, as well as that accrued through traumas and the stress of daily life.”

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To begin the Protocol, we must speak or sing the following soul mantram:

I am the soul, I am the light divine, I am love, I am will, I am fixed design.

The final phrase refers to the idea that our soul makes a plan for the lessons they need to learn in every incarnation, in order to reap the most benefit of being in form. The soul and personal self’s objectives are not the same, but part of this work is to begin identifying with the soul as much as possible. After vocalizing the soul mantra, the protocol begins by fixing our attention on our soul star and using triangulation to consciously move the star at a 45 degree angle in front of our forehead. Next we inhale to consciously move our soul star to our third eye, then exhale to move it along the pathway of the central channel and back to its resting place six inches above our heads. The conscious movement of our soul star is in the shape of a triangle.

“By this mental direction of energy, a student is enabled to clear away a channel for the continuous flow of spiritual energies through the lower vehicles or bodies,” the book says. “This is a slow and gradual process because it must be done under control and without haste or carelessness.” Students are advised to begin working just with the single triangulation through the third eye, practising l daily for at least two weeks before adding the second triangle, which moves the soul star just as before at a 45 degree angle in front of the throat then brings it back into the body and up the central channel. With each new triangle, spend two weeks practicing before moving on and introducing more. It takes four months to develop a central channel that fully utilizes the protocol, and the final two triangles through our feet into the Earth must be completed from a standing position.

Activating our soul star burns off so much psychic debris, as well as that accrued through traumas and the stress of daily life. After each session working the protocol we must clean our energy bodies using what’s called the ‘spiritual whirlwind’. You can imagine and concentrate on a tornado-like energy coming down above our heads and into the Earth, moving clockwise to remove all psychic debris. This part of the exercise should be performed for at least three minutes and be included as part of the protocol for those first four months. After that, the spiritual whirlwind may be used as needed, but most of the debris can be burned off in those early months through diligent practice. Recognizing when the whirlwind is no longer necessary is part of becoming more energetically sensitive from this training, so only individual intuition can inform the right time to remove it from the protocol.

Working with the central channel via triangulation, students typically find they don’t want to stop. Building the connection feels so good and is such a supercharge to our personal magic, most of those working with the Soul Star Activation Protocol find themselves integrating it into daily meditations and rituals. Not only does this work benefit our individual, Earthly lives, it also accelerates the evolution of planetary consciousness. “Effects increase with time, application and progressive purification,” the book promises, and as alignment with our soul increases, so does our personal and collective enjoyment of the human experience. 

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

Against Fluency

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Guilliaume Apollinaire, 1918. Calligram.

Arcadia Molinas August 12, 2025

Reading is a vice. It is a pleasurable, emotional and intellectual vice. But what distinguishes it from most vices, and relieves it from any association to immoral behaviour, is that it is somatic too, and has the potential to move you. A book can instantly transport you to cities, countries and worlds you’ve never set foot on. A book can take you to new climates, suggest the taste of new foods, introduce you to cultures and confront you with entirely different ways of being. It is a way to move and to travel without ever leaving the comfort of your chair.

Books in translation offer these readerly delights perhaps more readily than their native counterparts. Despite this, the work of translation is vastly overlooked and broadly underappreciated. In book reviews, the critique of the translation itself rarely takes up more than a throwaway line which comments on either the ‘sharpness’ or ‘clumsiness’ of the work. It is uncommon, too, to see the translator’s name on the cover of a book. A good translation, it seems, is meant to feel invisible. But is travelling meant to feel invisible – identical, seamless, homogenous? Or is travelling meant to provoke, cause discomfort, scream its presence in your face? The latter seems to me to be the more somatic, erotic, up in your body experience and thus, more conducive to the moral component of the vice of reading.

French translator Norman Shapiro describes the work of translation as “the attempt to produce a text so transparent that it does not seem to be translated. A good translation is like a pane of glass. You only notice that it’s there when there are little imperfections— scratches, bubbles. Ideally, there shouldn’t be any. It should never call attention to itself.” This view is shared by many: a good translation should show no evidence of the translator, and by consequence, no evidence that there was once another language involved in the first place at all. Fluency, naturalness, is what matters – any presence of the other must be smoothed out. For philosopher Friedreich Schlerimacher however, the matter is something else entirely. For him, “there are only two [methods of translation]. Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him.” He goes on to argue for the virtues of the former, for a translation that is visible, that moves the reader’s body and is seen and felt. It’s a matter of ethics for the philosopher – why and how do we translate? These are not minor questions when considering the stakes of erasing the presence of the other. The repercussions of such actions could reflect and accentuate larger cultural attitudes to difference and diversity as a whole.

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“The higher you climb, the further you travel, the greater the view”

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Guilliaume Apollinaire, 1918. Calligram.

Lawrence Venuti coins Schlerimacher’s two movements, from reader to author and author to reader, as ‘foreignization’ and ‘domestication’ in his book The Translator’s Invisibility. Foreignization is “leaving the author in peace and moving the reader towards him”, which means reflecting the cultural idiosyncrasies of the original language onto the translated/target one. It means making the translation visible. Domestication is the opposite, it irons out any awkwardness and imperfections caused by linguistic and cultural difference, “leaving the reader in peace and moving the author towards him”. It means making the translation invisible, and is the way translation is so often thought about today. Venuti says the aim of this type of translation is to “bring back a cultural other as the same, the recognizable, even the familiar; and this aim always risks a wholesale domestication of the foreign text, often in highly self- conscious projects, where translation serves an appropriation of foreign cultures for domestic agendas, cultural, economic, political.”

The direction of movement in these two strategies makes all the difference. Foreignization makes you move and travel towards the author, while domestication leaves you alone and doesn’t disturb you. There is, Venuti says, a cost of being undisturbed. He writes of the “partly inevitable” violence of translation when thinking about the process of ironing out differences. When foreign cultures are understood through the lens of a language inscribed with its own codes, and which consequently carry their own embedded ways of regarding other cultures, there is a risk of homogenisation of diversity. “Foreignizing translation in English”, Venuti argues, “can be a form of resistance against ethnocentrism and racism, cultural narcissism and imperialism, in the interests of democratic geopolitical relations.” The potential for this type of reading and of translating is by no means insignificant.

To embrace discomfort then, an uncomfortable practice of reading, is a moral endeavour. To read foreignizing works of translation is to expand one’s subjectivity and suspend one’s unified, blinkered understanding of culture and linguistics. Reading itself is a somatic practice, but to read a work in translation that purposefully alienates, is to travel even further, it’s to go abroad and stroll through foreign lands, feel the climate, chew the food. It’s well acknowledged that the higher you climb, the further you travel, the greater the view. And to get the bigger picture is as possible to do as sitting on your favourite chair, opening a book and welcoming alienation.

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Arcadia Molinas is a writer, editor, and translator from Madrid. She currently works as the online editor of Worms Magazine and has published a Spanish translation of Virginia Woolf’s diaries with Funambulista.

Page and Princess of Disks (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Page/Princess of Disks
Number: 4
Astrology: Earth of Earth
Qabalah: He of He

Chris Gabriel August 9, 2025

The Page of Disks is the lowest court card, the earthiest part of the earth. It is the seed, small in size but immense in potential. In each depiction, the young figure holds a disk which they look upon carefully.

In Rider, the Page is a young man wearing a simple green tunic with tan undergarments. He dons a red turban, gently upholds his disk with both hands, and looks upon it happily. Little wildflowers grow at his feet.

In Thoth, the Princess wears a diaphanous gown and a great fur. She is crowned by a goat’s skull. Her disk is a flower whose center is a Tajitu, a Yin and Yang symbol. She holds a scepter, with its crystal base towards the ground. She smiles, looking down at her pregnancy and blossoming disk.

In Marseille, the Valet is a stern young man. He grips his belt with one hand, and carefully inspects the disk he holds in the other. His feet are pointed in each direction upon barren soil. A few scrubs grow in the waste, but his duty is to bring the earth to life.

The role of this card is to restore life to the barren Earth. Each year, we see plant life die in the winter and begin to blossom again in the spring: this is the place of the Page, themselves the fertile earth.

This fertility extends beyond the flora and to the animal in Thoth. The Princess of Disks is in fact the only card in the deck which features a pregnant woman. In my experience, this card has directly indicated a real pregnancy multiple times. Beyond the physical, this is the natural mind of man, untouched and fertile, ready for inspiration.

It can help to understand this card alongside a concept from the Tao Te Ching: Pu 樸

The characters in this name are Tree and Forest, and is commonly known as “Uncarved Wood”; the wood still in the forest. This is akin to a slab of marble still held in a quarry, not yet sculpted. In the west we have similar concepts, like “Carte Blanche”, a blank paper with which we can dictate freely. 

The Page is a person given a blank check, a blank piece of paper, a block of wood, or a slab of marble. It is what they do with this tabula rasa that matters. In this way, the Princess as a future mother and her unborn child are perfect symbols of infinite potential.

When pulling this card, we are to be given something that we must work upon. One may have to build from the ground up or start a grassroots project. We may become increasingly receptive to inspiration, or, indeed, become literally pregnant.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, THOUGHTS

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

Un Autre Monde, J. J. Grandville. 1844.

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A masterpiece of philosophical fiction, Le Guin’s story has reverberated across generations since it was first published in 1973. At once readable as an allegory for Christ’s sacrifice and as a questioning of the very premise of utilitarianism, ‘Omelas’ is above all else a vivid parable of the modern age. In a world where happiness relies on the abject misery of a single person, we can see clearly the inequality and be disgusted by the injustice - Le Guin creates this world and asks us to look deeper into our own, where the same moral issues are happening everyday yet so few of us choose to walk away from our ‘Omelas’.

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Ursula Le Guin August 7, 2025

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows’ crossing flights, over the music and the singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city, where on the great water-meadow called the Green’ Fields boys and girls, naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, exercised their restive horses before the race. The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west the mountains stood up half encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to make the banners that marked the racecourse snap and flutter now and then. In the silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding through the city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air that from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells.

Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?

They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children – though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! but I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For instance, how about technology? I think that there would be no cars or helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however – that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc. – they could perfectly well have central heating, subway trains,. washing machines, and all kinds of marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating light-sources, fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of that: it doesn’t matter. As you like it. I incline to think that people from towns up and down the coast have been coming in to Omelas during the last days before the Festival on very fast little trains and double-decked trams, and that the train station of Omelas is actually the handsomest building in town, though plainer than the magnificent Farmers’ Market. But even granted trains, I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don’t hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger who desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my first idea. But really it would be better not to have any temples in Omelas – at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy no. Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine souffles to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh. Let them join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations, and the glory of desire be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all. One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt. But what else should there be? I thought at first there were no drugs, but that is puritanical. For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings a great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very arcana and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the pleasure of sex beyond all belief; and it is not habit-forming. For more modest tastes I think there ought to be beer. What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? The sense of victory, surely, the celebration of courage. But as we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial. A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world’s summer; this is what swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life. I really don’t think many of them need to take drooz.

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“They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do.”

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Most of the processions have reached the Green Fields by now. A marvelous smell of cooking goes forth from the red and blue tents of the provisioners. The faces of small children are amiably sticky; in the benign grey beard of a man a couple of crumbs of rich pastry are entangled. The youths and girls have mounted their horses and are beginning to group around the starting line of the course. An old woman, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket, and tall young men, wear her flowers in their shining hair. A child of nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd, alone, playing on a wooden flute. People pause to listen, and they smile, but they do not speak to him, for he never ceases playing and never sees them, his dark eyes wholly rapt in the sweet, thin magic of the tune.

He finishes, and slowly lowers his hands holding the wooden flute.

As if that little private silence were the signal, all at once a trumpet sounds from the pavilion near the starting line: imperious, melancholy, piercing. The horses rear on their slender legs, and some of them neigh in answer. Sober-faced, the young riders stroke the horses’ necks and soothe them, whispering, ”Quiet, quiet, there my beauty, my hope…” They begin to form in rank along the starting line. The crowds along the racecourse are like a field of grass and flowers in the wind. The Festival of Summer has begun.

Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.

In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl.It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits haunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes-the child has no understanding of time or interval – sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother’s voice, sometimes speaks. ”I will be good,” it says. ”Please let me out. I will be good!” They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, ”eh-haa, eh-haa,” and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.

They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.

This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.

Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there snivelling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer.

Now do you believe in them? Are they not more credible? But there is one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible.

At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

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

Enfolded in Living Reality Pt. 1

Plate from Oculus Artificialis, Johann Zahn. 1685.

Tuukka Toivonen August 5, 2025

“…reality is not an animated version of our re-presentation of it, but our re-presentation a  devitalised version of reality. It is the re-presentation that is a special, wholly atypical and  imaginary, case of what is truly present, as the filmstrip is of life […].”    

 -Iain McGilchrist in The Matter with Things (2021) 

Our modern understanding of reality is a curious thing. We have all been told, at one point or another, to “get  real” or to “live in the real world”, lest we veer too far from the parameters of a typical, ordained life course. We are called to engage in regular “reality-checks”, in order to recognize that not all of the ideas and trajectories we choose can succeed in realistic conditions.  Exhortations and assumptions of this kind are what our familiar social universe is composed of, and how it gets maintained. And then we have the physicists, from Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking to Michio Kaku and Carlo Rovelli, who approach reality and the ways it is constituted as the ultimate question for science. Their mind-bending quantum theories suggest that reality is only produced when particles that simultaneously exist in multiple locations become observed, taking specific properties and therefore becoming real. The infinite possibilities that exist as a wave function suddenly collapse into matter made of tangible particles — although even particles themselves have been shown to become fuzzy under close analysis.¹ Some physicists and philosophers even postulate that we exist inside a simulation, or that reality constantly keeps splitting into parallel worlds, creating infinite copies of us without our awareness. We  are, it seems, still far from having reality all figured out.  

Being perched between these two extremes — treating reality rather casually and narrowly within familiar social contexts while acknowledging the discoveries of physicists that fundamentally challenge our assumptions of what is real — makes exploring the topic of reality difficult. Theories of how reality is socially constructed, always contested and ever-changing, were useful within sociology in an earlier era, but now seem complicit in flattening our existence by reducing it — indeed confining it — to language, symbols and institutions.² The conceptual world of quantum physics, despite a considerable number of thinkers who have explored how it might intersect in ways that affect day-to-day lives, starting with Carl Jung’s ideas on synchronicity, often feels disconnected from human experience.) Perhaps, then, there is a terrain between those two poles that, regardless of our relative inattention to it, might be just the right starting point for questioning human reality in the 21st century. What is it,  exactly, that we have been missing due to our polarized take on reality? 

This gap is perhaps the space of a rarely-articulated living reality, a subtle experiential dimension right there before our eyes (and other sense organs), but that we normally overlook and under-value. Artists such as Yuko Kurihara, whose paintings transform the wonderfully uneven, vibrant surfaces of pumpkins, bananas and oranges into an absorbing universe of their own,³ remind us of the hidden layers of reality and the potential we have to perceive them quite readily, given time and the right quality of mind. Contrary to our belief that the words we employ correspond to an actual reality in the moment that we gesture toward it, what seems to occur  instead is that the words themselves come to form their own — superficial and simplified,  relationally diminished — world. Perceptual reality, meanwhile, slips away from view in all its unspoken richness, receding to the background as mere potential. We are far too quick to “collapse” the infinite possibilities, depths and textures of reality into an  impoverished stand-in. This is, of course, partly unavoidable for it would surely be impossible to navigate daily life if we stopped to perceive every single thing anew each time. Yet it is troubling all the same how unaware we are of our casual reductive habits and how easily they can obscure the living nature of reality and our awareness of it, relegating us to live a substitute for a real human existence.  

It seems to me that contemporary technological society has not merely inherited our perceptual poverty but appears to be hell-bent on further reducing our reality to fixed categories, prescriptions, images and algorithms. The powerful cognitive technologies we are in a rush to develop and disseminate build directly on our already-impoverished version of reality. It is logical to assume that they will only entrench this thinnest of realities, locking us more firmly within its confines, or specific regimes of power, as foreseen in Yuval Noah Harari’s⁴ ominous reading of the situation. Many of these technologies will impose progressively stricter and stricter limits on what we can experience and how, drawing our attention to those slivers of presumed reality, based on arbitrary choices, that we think can be easily measured and quantified. Health comes to be appraised and understood through wearables and apps, while the ever-evolving creative process becomes reduced to mere “content”. Unique human voices — our most intimate of expressive instruments — become synthesized into digital production tools deprived of subtlety and immeasurably  precious and intrinsically interwoven ecosystems come to be regarded as worthless if they fail to bend to the needs of scalable business and investment. Whatever still survives within this arid, flattened universe of controlled reality could be easily starved to death as the forces of reductionism accelerate at the expense of the kind of expanded, life-giving, delicate awareness I described above. 

We have, thankfully, not yet arrived at a full culmination of these developments. There is still time to counter the forces that overwhelm us with artificial stimuli and that try to lock us into realities that are narrower and narrower in character. It is still possible, I like to believe, to cultivate and maintain a kind of supple, open awareness and quality of mind that allows us to remain in touch with living, pulsating reality. The second part of this essay will delve further into this profoundly important challenge, which ultimately asks us to choose between two radically different understandings of reality: one as a fragmented patchwork of representations, the other as complex, continuous, alive and whole.

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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. 

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¹ Cossins, D. (ed.) (2025) How to think about reality. New Scientist, London.

² Berger, P.L., Luckmann, T., 1966. The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Garden City, New York, Anchor Books.

³ Some of Kurihara’s works can be viewed on her Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/kuri_nihonga/ 

⁴ Harari, Y.N., 2024. Nexus: A brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI. Fern Press, London. 

Justice/Adjustment (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Justice or Adjustment
Number: XI or VIII
Astrology: Libra
Qabalah: Lamed, the Crook or Staff

Chris Gabriel August 2, 2025

Justice holds a sword and scale. Traditionally, the sword is in her right hand, while the left holds the balance. She is seated and crowned. This is the Roman goddess Justitia and the Egyptian goddess Maat.

In Rider, Justice is young, blonde, and androgynous. Their robes are red with golden trim, and

they wear a simple gold crown. They sit on a stone chair between two columns. Their right hand

holds the sword aloft, level to their neck, while the scales are hung down. They look ahead

stoically.

In Thoth, we have a very different image. Here Justice is “Adjustment”

, and the figure is the

Egyptian goddess Maat - consort to Thoth, divinity of balance. She stands, holding her sword to

the ground with both hands. She herself forms the scale, which holds the symbols for Air and

Libra. Her body is green with streaks of blue.

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

In each depiction we are given a very different form of Justice: the worldly institutions and human judgments of Marseille, the praeter-human divine Justice of Rider, and the embodied balance of Maat in Thoth.

Justice, as a concept, has not been with man from the beginning. It was invented by Plato and Aristotle in the first century and, as Nietzsche points out, has little basis in nature. The idea of equality is political and utopian; it is an ideal rather than an achievable state. Marseille shows this clearly. Rider believes in a divine law, and a fair administration of it. With Maat, we get a very different view.

The Egyptians did not strive for justice, but for maintaining balance and equilibrium. Maat is the goddess not only over the moral affairs of mankind, but the very cosmos too. She wages an endless battle against Chaos. The ordered nature of the celestial cycles, the seasons, and the flooding of the Nile, were all thanks to her. She was depicted as an Ostrich, and her feathers were the symbol of balance. The hearts of men would be set on a scale and measured against one of her feathers in the afterlife.

Often, the legal system is disappointing and imbalanced, and few people feel that justice is consistently served. Religious thinkers generally believe that God will administer justice in the end. With Maat, and adjustment, one can embody balance, and in doing so help to bring the world into homeostasis.

The Hebrew letter Lamed, the Crook, is given to this card. The crook of a shepherd helps to direct sheep, or catch them when they stray from the path. This is an ideal image of Justice, sitting beyond punishment or morality. There is a balanced path forward which mankind must follow. To stray is to fall into chaos.

When pulling this card, we may be met with the consequences of our actions, good or bad. This can be a “reality check” if one has been feeling too high, or a boost, if one has been feeling too low. This can also be pleasant social interaction.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, THOUGHTS

Inside Reality Center's Harmonic Resolution Mission

The Splash of a Drop, Professor A. M. Worthington.1895.

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Molly Hankins July 31, 2025

The paradox at the heart of Reality Center in Los Angeles, which offers a comprehensive nervous system reset via “digital psychedelics,” is that the experience allows us to drop reality entirely for a little while before optimizing performance upon return. Both reality itself and our performance within  it feel like they’ve elevated following a session, akin to playing a freshly tuned musical instrument. While the term digital psychedelics is technically correct to describe how light and sound are used to mimic an altered state, it hardly captures the full essence. Walking into their neon-lit facility inside an old brick building that once housed Santa Monica’s municipal offices in the early 20th century, it’s unclear whether you’re arriving at a law office or an underground rave. 

Past the reception room, where your shoes are removed and your Reality Management Technician greets you, lies a large, dark, high-ceiling room with a massive projection screen in front of four sound-wave table beds. Inside one of the smaller rooms surrounding the main hall, filled with more sound-wave beds and post-experience integration areas, is where your voice is sampled to create custom binaural beats in real time. Reality Center’s proprietary software, InTune, does  just that, as well as map your voice to generate data for 12 different emotional biomarkers represented onscreen by different colors. This is not first generation technology, it’s something neuroscientist Don Estes has been working on for over 40 years that has now been simplified and brought to life with Reality Center’s Millennial co-founders.

He describes a successful session as resulting in, “…a state of mind that occurs when the survival mechanism is turned off and the mind can experience feelings of peace and well-being, connectedness, faith, trust  and communion with the higher self.” In Don’s essay, he describes the intended benefits of the digital psychedelic experience, which he calls a harmonic resolution. “All human suffering”, he writes, “stems from the difference between who a person says they are and who they really are. This difference creates a tension that functions like a black hole, drawing in resonant people, places, events, circumstances, and situations in an attempt to resolve the tension. This is the theme of the current universal age. The whole of the universe cannot be united until every individual part has integrated its own self.” Integration of self is effortless when our nervous system is entrained using vibration, and this is the basis for a theory he developed called sensory resonance. It posits that there are both resonant and dissonant effects on our autonomic nervous system created by the choices we make. 

Enter the Raj brothers, Tarun and Pranab, who were already engaged with sensory resonance practices, making binaural beats together since they were kids. In his role as a Reality Center co-founder, Tarun brought his software-developer brother Pranab into the project to build the InTune software. It’s used both in-session and on your own after the session, which Tarun calls a “digital supplement” using personalized binaurals to re-establish nervous system entrainment after the experience. Vocal samples are recorded after you’ve been put into a meditative state and while  talking about what brings you joy, so the custom binaural generated contains your highest vibrational states of being. A graph with the 12 emotional biomarkers are displayed on a projection screen before you, so as you speak in real time you can see data about what’s going on emotionally in your own subconscious mind. After that it’s time to get on a sound-wave table and have a full body experience of resting in your own frequency. 

Tarun explained, “We’re making sure people that have no experience can achieve these states, which haven’t been available, especially in a personalized way. We’re really focused on making something fine tuned to your specific needs, which is why it’s called InTune. Our voice is a great biometric, it carries with it what you’re thinking, what you’re feeling.” The harmonic data is compared to the words being used, and clusters of information are tracked, which is what becomes the 12 emotional biomarkers. “On a very basic level we have different algorithms that find the fundamental frequency of the tones of your voice. You can say the same word 100 times and it might have a different tone depending on when you said it, how you’re feeling that day, how much sleep you got or what you’re goal state is,” he added about the customization. “We’re looking for the most harmonic parts of your statements, where that tonality is most aligned, that gives us a metric we can use to create instant, personalized biofeedback.”

There’s a delightful balance between science and esoteric philosophy in Reality Center’s approach to sessions, which are intended to empower clients’ psyches so they can make the changes needed to adjust reality to their preferences. Tarun described how our souls  form on Earth with no instruction manual, thrown into the gameplay of the human experience. It can take many lifetimes to acquire learn the knowledge needed to get the best out of being here. “But we’re in a time in which we need dramatic shifts to happen quickly, so this is a tool to create agency for transformation,” he said. As kids, he and Pranab had turntables and were pushing Schumann Resonance standing wave binaural beats through their subwoofers to align themselves, calling themselves “neuro-DJs.” Tarun was clearly the right person to meet Don and put the founding team together, alongside combat veteran and commercial media director Jonathan Chia.

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“After we forgive or let go, what do we actually want to wake up and do everyday now that those things aren’t holding us back?”

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Treating veterans is a core function of Reality Center, which they’re able to do free of charge thanks to grant funding. After losing countless friends during and after his military service to drugs and suicide, Jonathan had a psychedelic experience that left him certain of life after death and solidified his mission to bring this experience to his fellow servicemen and women. Once the nervous system reset takes place, he explained, the experience of expanded consciousness and integration begins. “If you feel like you have to protect yourself all the time, you never really sleep that well and if you don’t sleep well you never get reset. We reset, expand then use the experience to elevate your life. We try to move people as fast as possible to the human performance side of it. After we forgive or let go, what do we actually want to wake up and do everyday now that those things aren’t holding us back?” There are countless reports from clients who have experienced that level of emotional release from a session. 

All Reality Center clients have access to their session technician beyong their appointment to provide integration support, providing ongoing access to a community who’ve shared the experience that positively influences the state of neuroplasticity clients find themselves in. Technicians are extremely open-hearted and minded when it comes to helping clients integrate every aspect of their experience. “We don’t approach this from just a new age wellness perspective,” Pranab explained, “There’s a lot of science that goes into this, but also a lot of comfort. This is not a sterile, clinical building. We’re not trying to be anyone’s guru - we’re peers.” 

Witnessing the peer-to-peer healing dynamic in action between Jonathan and 73-year-old client, veteran and original Source Family member Zarathustra Aquarian, opened up another dimension of Reality Center - the multigenerational collaboration powering the project. Born the same year as Don, Zarathustra lived through the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s and watched the cultural tides turn from the imprisonment of Timothy Leary in 1970 to the decriminalization of psilocybin in American cities 50 years later. They both lived through the technological revolution of computers and smartphones becoming ubiquitous, and even though Don developed the tech decades ago, he needed Millennial design and marketing to bring harmonic resolution therapy to its full iteration. Zarathustra is a computer scientist by training and he came to Reality Center looking for the deep relaxation and connection to his higher self that he gets from a sensory deprivation floatation tank. 

“After working with John, I realized that sensory deprivation is a special case of my theory of sensory resonance, wherein all of the senses are given nothing instead of being synchronized together in a coherent experience as we do at the Reality Center,” said Don. “ Both, all or nothing seem to distract the normal mind from the clutches of the reticular activating system's survival mode that blocks access to those higher states of mind and assists in achieving altered  or non-ordinary states of mind.” In many ways the experience of being put into harmonic resolution via light, sound and vibration stimulus is exactly the opposite of floating in a dark saltwater tank, yet both can yield psychedelic experiences. Don and his co-founders believe our consciousness can more readily separate from the physical body and experience a psychedelic-level of awareness with an entrained nervous system, which is why connecting with dead loved ones is so common. 

In an expanded state of consciousness the veil between dimensions, including that of life and death, become thin. “The difference between your current state and ideal state is where suffering lies,” Tarun reminds us, and having an experience of consciousness beyond death is sometimes the only bridge needed to close the gap between one’s current and one’s ideal state.

We wrapped up at Reality Center with a final, albeit obvious, question: does anything strange ever happen? Stories began pouring out from Tarun and Pranab about equipment turning on when the power was out, glitches coinciding with moments of personal revelation, seeing beings in the room through closed eyes, and an endless list of synchronicities and coincidences. For instance, back-to-back clients with no exposure to each other will use the same word to describe their state of being. Apparently this usually happens in threes, like three consecutive clients who don’t know each other all being from the same town. It’s a rather flirtatious pattern of reality Terence McKenna might characterize as the universe nodding in approval. 

Tarun thinks a synchronicity is just a vibrational correlation, which is precisely the type of data being generated by InTune and the nature of nervous system entrainment facilitated in the session. With all that vibrational correlation percolating in Reality Center’s Morphic field, of course they’re resonant with ongoing instances of correlation. Check out RealityMgmt.com and get InTune here.

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

Queen of Cups (Tarot Triptych)

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

Chris Gabriel July 26, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, THOUGHTS

The Sea and the Wind That Blows

Sailing a Dory, Winslow Homer. 1880.

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

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E. B. White July 24, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cat Boat, Edward Hopper. 1922.

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

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

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

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

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

How Old Is The Sky? A Brief History Across Philosophies

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Sander Priston July 22, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tower (Tarot Triptych)

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

Chris Gabriel July 19, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Book of the Law I:57

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

-Matthew 10:16

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

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

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

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

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

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

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