The Eight of Swords (Tarot Triptych)

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Name:  Interference, the Eight of Swords
Number: 8
Astrology: Jupiter in Gemini
Qabalah: Hod of Yod

Chris Gabriel April 19, 2025

Interference is the perfect name for this card. If the Ace of Swords is pure Signal, the Eight is pure Noise. The message is lost, the image is blurred, the static drowns out the song.

In Rider, we see a woman in bondage. She is blindfolded and white ropes tie up her red dress. She is standing in mud and surrounded by eight swords. A castle sits on a mountain in the distance.

In Thoth, there are two sabers atop a medley of 6 swords. The background is the deep purple of Jupiter, and the erupting fragmented spikes are the orange of Gemini. This is Jupiter in its detriment.

In Marseille,  a small flower sits at the center of eight crosshatched swords. For Jodorwosky, this was the achievement of an empty and receptive mind: overstimulation leading to trance. To Eliphas Levi, this is the Intelligence of the Prince.

The best path to grasping the nature of Interference is to take its name literally. Let us consider the two sabers in Thoth as AM and FM. These are pure and directed signals but when we listen to radio, we are often assaulted with static, which are the six interfering swords. The same applies to  VHF and UHF, AC and DC, etc. Two streams of energy disrupted by background interference.

This is the nature of the fallen Jupiter in Gemini: when domiciled in Sagittarius, Jupiter launches arrows of belief into the distant unknown. When in Gemini it gets lost in immediate multiplicity,missing the tree for the forest. The grand spiritual faculty no longer focuses on the Heavens, but on what surrounds the body.

Rider shows us a grim image of confusion, a very occult view of the situation. Without divine clarity we are blinded, bonded, and beset on all sides. This is the same trouble Hamlet is afflicted by. The Prince who has guided us through the suit of Swords has shown time and time again to lose his contact with the signal, to the point where the Ghost of his father has to return and remind him of his duty after he gets thrown off track.

We can look at this dynamic more positively with another technology, stereo sound. The Eight of Swords is like a record needle, moved wildly by left and right waves of the vinyl but still producing a singular, coherent, Sagittarian sound.

In our lives we experience this very often. When you go into a room but forget what you were going to do, this is background interference overtaking clarity. When you intend to use your phone for a given purpose, but notifications and bright visuals distract you, this is interference. It can happen at greater and greater scales to the point where you have wasted your whole life on distractions, and like the figure in Rider, you are left tied up, blinded, and alone.

When pulling this card, clear your mind, beware of external distractions, and maintain your direction.

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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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Palmer Luckey

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How Should One Read a Book? (Pt. 1)

Guiseppe Antonio Petrini, c.1735.

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First given as a Speech at Hayes Court Common school in Kent at the start of 1926, and then adapted and published in the Yale Review the same year, Woolf’s impassioned ode to reading remains a seminal text. She reminds us that reading is not a passive activity, and that if each book only comes alive through active choices by its reader, it is worth considering how we as a consumer can elevate and enliven the literature we choose to read. The writer and reader are connected, and it is our duty to approach each new book as a different beast, to use our qualities of imagination, insight, and judgement, not rest on laurels of past works but follow our instincts to find the heart, truth, and beauty of each text anew.

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Virginia Woolf, April 15, 2025

At this late hour of the world’s history, books are to be found in almost every room of the house—in the nursery, in the drawing room, in the dining room, in the kitchen. But in some houses they have become such a company that they have to be accommodated with a room of their own—a reading room, a library, a study. Let us imagine that we are now in such a room; that it is a sunny room, with windows opening on a garden, so that we can hear the trees rustling, the gardener talking, the donkey braying, the old women gossiping at the pump—and all the ordinary processes of life pursuing the casual irregular way which they have pursued these many hundreds of years. As casually, as persistently, books have been coming together on the shelves. Novels, poems, histories, memoirs, dictionaries, maps, directories; black letter books and brand new books; books in French and Greek and Latin; of all shapes and sizes and values, bought for purposes of research, bought to amuse a railway journey, bought by miscellaneous beings, of one temperament and another, serious and frivolous, men of action and men of letters. 

Now, one may well ask oneself, strolling into such a room as this, how am I to read these books? What is the right way to set about it? They are so many and so various. My appetite is so fitful and so capricious. What am I to do to get the utmost possible pleasure out of them? And is it pleasure, or profit, or what is it that I should seek? I will lay before you some of the thoughts that have come to me on such an occasion as this. But you will notice the note of interrogation at the end of my title. One may think about reading as much as one chooses, but no one is going to lay down laws about it. Here in this room, if nowhere else, we breathe the air of freedom. Here simple and learned, man and woman are alike. For though reading seems so simple—a mere matter of knowing the alphabet—it is indeed so difficult that it is doubtful whether anybody knows anything about it. Paris is the capital of France; King John signed the Magna Charta; those are facts; those can be taught; but how are we to teach people so to read “Paradise Lost” as to see that it is a great poem, or “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” so as to see that it is a good novel? How are we to learn the art of reading for ourselves? Without attempting to lay down laws upon a subject that has not been legalized, I will make a few suggestions, which may serve to show you how not to read, or to stimulate you to think out better methods of your own. 

And directly we begin to ask how should one read a book we are faced by the fact that books differ; there are poems, novels, biographies on the book shelf there; each differs from the other as a tiger differs from a tortoise, a tortoise from an elephant. Our attitude must always be changing, it is clear. From different books we must ask different qualities. Simple as this sounds, people are always behaving as if all books were of the same species—as if there were only tortoises or nothing but tigers. It makes them furious to find a novelist bringing Queen Victoria to the throne six months before her time; they will praise a poet enthusiastically for teaching them that a violet has four petals and a daisy almost invariably ten. You will save a great deal of time and temper better kept for worthier objects if you will try to make out before you begin to read what qualities you expect of a novelist, what of a poet, what of a biographer. The tortoise is bald and shiny; the tiger has a thick coat of yellow fur. So books too differ: one has its fur, the other has its baldness.

Yes; but for all that the problem is not so simple in a library as at the Zoölogical Gardens.Books have a great deal in common; they are always overflowing their boundaries; they are always breeding new species from unexpected matches among themselves. It is difficult to know how to approach them, to which species each belongs. But if we remember, as we turn to the bookcase, that each of these books was written by a pen which, consciously or unconsciously, tried to trace out a design, avoiding this, accepting that, adventuring the other; if we try to follow the writer in his experiment from the first word to the last, without imposing our design upon him, then we shall have a good chance of getting hold of the right end of the string.

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“We have to remember that it is one of the qualities of greatness that it brings heaven and earth and human nature into conformity with its own vision.”

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To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice. Even, if you wish merely to read books, begin by writing them. For this certainly is true—one cannot write the most ordinary little story, attempt to describe the simplest event—meeting a beggar, shall we say, in the street, without coming up against difficulties that the greatest of novelists have had to face. In order that we may realize, however briefly and crudely, the main divisions into which novelists group themselves, let us imagine how differently Defoe, Jane Austen, and Thomas Hardy would describe the same incident—this meeting a beggar in the street. Defoe is a master of narrative. His prime effort will be to reduce the beggar’s story to perfect order and simplicity. This happened first, that next, the other thing third. He will put in nothing, however attractive, that will tire the reader unnecessarily, or divert his attention from what he wishes him to know. He will also make us believe, since he is a master, not of romance or of comedy, but of narrative, that everything that happened is true. He will be extremely precise therefore. This happened, as he tells us on the first pages of” Robinson Crusoe,” on the first of September. More subtly and artfully, he will hypnotize us into a state of belief by dropping out casually some little unnecessary fact—for instance, “my father called me one morning into his chamber, where he was confined by the gout.” His father’s gout is not necessary to the story, but it is necessary tothe truth of the story, for it is thus that anybody who is speaking the truth adds some small irrelevant detail without thinking. Further, he will choose a type of sentence which is flowing but not too full, exact but not epigrammatic. His aim will be to present the thing itself without distortion from his own angle of vision. He will meet the subject face to face, four-square, without turning aside for a moment to point out that this was tragic, or that beautiful; and his aim is perfectly achieved.

But let us not for a moment confuse it with Jane Austen’s aim. Had she met a beggar woman, no doubt she would have been interested in the beggar’s story. But she would have seen at once that for her purposes the whole incident must be transformed. Streets and the open air and adventures mean nothing to her, artistically. It is character that interests her. She would at once make the beggar into a comfortable elderly man of the upper middle classes, seated by his fireside at his ease. Then, instead of plunging into the story vigorously and veraciously, she will write a few paragraphs of accurate and artfully seasoned introduction, summing up the circumstances and sketching the character of the gentleman she wishes us to know. “Matrimony as the origin of change was always disagreeable” to Mr. Woodhouse, she says. Almost immediately, she thinks it well to let us see that her words are corroborated by Mr. Woodhouse himself. We hear him talking. “Poor Miss Taylor!—I wish she were here again. What a pity it is that Mr. Weston ever thought of her.” And when Mr. Woodhouse has talked enough to reveal himself from the inside, she then thinks it time to let us see him through his daughter’s eyes. “You got Hannah that good place. Nobody thought of Hannah till you mentioned her.” Thus she shows us Emma flattering him and humoring him. Finally then, we have Mr. Woodhouse’s character seen from three different points of view at once; as he sees himself; as his daughter sees him; and as he is seen by the marvellous eye of that invisible lady Jane Austen herself. All three meet in one, and thus we can pass round her characters free, apparently, from any guidance but our own.

Now let Thomas Hardy choose the same theme—a beggar met in the street—and at once two great changes will be visible. The street will be transformed into a vast and sombre heath; the man or woman will take on some of the size and indistinctness of a statue. Further, the relations of this human being will not be towards other people, but towards the heath, towards man as law-giver, towards those powers which are in control of man’s destiny. Once more our perspective will be completely changed. All the qualities which were admirable in “Robinson Crusoe,” admirable in “Emma,” will be neglected or absent. The direct literal statement of Defoe is gone. There is none of the clear, exact brilliance of Jane Austen. Indeed, if we come to Hardy from one of these great writers we shall exclaim at first that he is“melodramatic” or “unreal” compared with them. But we should bethink us that there are at least two sides to the human soul; the light side and the dark side. In company, the light side of the mind is exposed; in solitude, the dark. Both are equally real, equally important. But a novelist will always tend to expose one rather than the other; and Hardy, who is a novelist of the dark side, will contrive that no clear, steady light falls upon his people’s faces, that they are not closely observed in drawing rooms, that they come in contact with moors, sheep, the sky and the stars, and in their solitude are directly at the mercy of the gods. If Jane Austen’s characters are real in the drawing room, they would not exist at all upon the top of Stonehenge. Feeble and clumsy in drawing rooms, Hardy’s people are large-limbed and vigorous out of doors. To achieve his purpose Hardy is neither literal and four-square like Defoe, nor deft and pointed like Jane Austen. He is cumbrous, involved, metaphorical.Where Jane Austen describes manners, he describes nature. Where she is matter of fact, he is romantic and poetical. As both are great artists, each is careful to observe the laws of his own perspective, and will not be found confusing us (as so many lesser writers do) by introducing two different kinds of reality into the same book.

Yet it is very difficult not to wish them less scrupulous. Frequent are the complaints that Jane Austen is too prosaic, Thomas Hardy too melodramatic. And we have to remind ourselves that it is necessary to approach every writer differently in order to get from him all he can give us. We have to remember that it is one of the qualities of greatness that it brings heaven and earth and human nature into conformity with its own vision. It is by reason of this masterliness of theirs, this uncompromising idiosyncrasy, that great writers often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly. They bend us and break us. To go from Jane Austen to Hardy, from Peacock to Trollope, from Scott to Meredith, from Richardson to Kipling, is to be wrenched and distorted, thrown this way and then that. Besides, everyone is born with a natural bias of his own in one direction rather than in another. He instinctively accepts Hardy’s vision rather than Jane Austen’s, and, reading with the current and not against it, is carried on easily and swiftly by the impetus of his own bent to the heart of his author’s genius. But then Jane Austen is repulsive to him. He can scarcely stagger through the desert of her novels.

Sometimes this natural antagonism is too great to be overcome, but trial is always worth making. For these difficult and inaccessible books, with all their preliminary harshness, often yield the richest fruits in the end, and so curiously is the brain compounded that while tracts of literature repel at one season, they are appetizing and essential at another.

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Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English writer and one of the most influential 20th century modernist authors. An important part of the contemporary literary scene, Woolf’s relevance has only grown in the near century since her passing, and her pioneering essays on artistic theory, literary history, women's writing, and the politics of power have become touchstones for contemporary thought.

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Iggy Pop Playlist

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Iggy Pop is an American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and actor. Since forming The Stooges in 1967, Iggy’s career has spanned decades and genres. Having paved the way for ‘70’s punk and ‘90’s grunge, he is often considered “The Godfather of Punk.”

The Ace of Swords (Tarot Triptych)

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

Chris Gabriel April 12, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Vibrational Medicine and the Multidimensional Human

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

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Molly Hankins April 10, 2025

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

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

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

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

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Nefesh - Physical Body 

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

Ruach - Etheric Body

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

Neshama - Mental Body

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

Chaya - Astral Body

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

Yechida - Causal Body

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

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

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

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

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Lift (Museum of Suspense I)

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

Ale Nodarse April 8, 2025

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When was your belief last suspended? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tyler Cowen Playlist

Tyler Cowen April 7th, 2025

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

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Tyler Cowen is Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and serves as chairman and general director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. With colleague Alex Tabarrok, Cowen is coauthor of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution and cofounder of the online educational platform Marginal Revolution University.

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Hannah Peel Playlist

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Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello and Emmy-nominated, RTS and Music Producers Guild winning composer, with a flow of solo albums and collaborative releases, Hannah Peel joins the dots between science, nature and the creative arts, through her explorative approach to electronic, classical and traditional music.

The Five of Cups (Tarot Triptych)

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

Chris Gabriel April 5, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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