Film

The Death of the Author

The Death of Marat, Jacques-Louis David. 1793.

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First published in 1967 in the American magazine-in-a-box ‘Aspen’, the French theorist Roland Barthes’ essay has gone on to become one of the most important modern words of literary criticism. Barthes central claim is that literary analysis has long, and incorrectly, relied on the intentions of the author as a means to explore and explain written works. Instead, he suggests, it is the individual interpretation of the reader that is the key to discovering meaning in texts, and the author should not be considered. Barthes gives power to the words alone, and removes them from their maker - once they exist on the page, the only intention that matters is the reader, and there is no objective nor definitive meaning to the writing. In the years since it was first published, countless essays, books, and lectures have been given in favor or criticism of Barthes work, but his ideas have nonetheless entered both the pedagogical and popular mainstream, today more than ever.

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Roland Barthes, May 20, 2025

In his story Sarrasine, Balzac, speaking of a castrato disguised as a woman, writes this sentence: "It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling". Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story's hero, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is it the man Balzac, endowed by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it the author Balzac, professing certain "literary" ideas of femininity? Is it universal wisdom? or romantic psychology? It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

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Probably this has always been the case: once an action is recounted, for intransitive ends, and no longer in order to act directly upon reality — that is, finally external to any function but the very exercise of the symbol — this disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins. Nevertheless, the feeling about this phenomenon has been variable; in primitive societies, narrative is never undertaken by a person, but by a mediator, shaman or speaker, whose "performance" may be admired (that is, his mastery of the narrative code), but not his "genius" The author is a modern figure, produced no doubt by our society insofar as, at the end of the middle ages, with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, or, to put it more nobly, of the "human person" Hence it is logical that with regard to literature it should be positivism, resume and the result of capitalist ideology, which has accorded the greatest importance to the author's "person" The author still rules in manuals of literary history, in biographies of writers, in magazine interviews, and even in the awareness of literary men, anxious to unite, by their private journals, their person and their work; the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions; criticism still consists, most of the time, in saying that Baudelaire's work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, Van Gogh's work his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice: the explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of one and the same person, the author, which delivered his "confidence."

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Though the Author's empire is still very powerful (recent criticism has often merely consolidated it), it is evident that for a long time now certain writers have attempted to topple it. In France, Mallarme was doubtless the first to see and foresee in its full extent the necessity of substituting language itself for the man who hitherto was supposed to own it; for Mallarme, as for us, it is language which speaks, not the author: to write is to reach, through a preexisting impersonality — never to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realistic novelist — that point where language alone acts, "performs," and not "oneself": Mallarme's entire poetics consists in suppressing the author for the sake of the writing (which is, as we shall see, to restore the status of the reader.) Valery, encumbered with a psychology of the Self, greatly edulcorated Mallarme's theory, but, turning in a preference for classicism to the lessons of rhetoric, he unceasingly questioned and mocked the Author, emphasized the linguistic and almost "chance" nature of his activity, and throughout his prose works championed the essentially verbal condition of literature, in the face of which any recourse to the writer's inferiority seemed to him pure superstition. It is clear that Proust himself, despite the apparent psychological character of what is called his analyses, undertook the responsibility of inexorably blurring, by an extreme subtilization, the relation of the writer and his characters: by making the narrator not the person who has seen or felt, nor even the person who writes, but the person who will write (the young man of the novel — but, in fact, how old is he, and who is he? — wants to write but cannot, and the novel ends when at last the writing becomes possible), Proust has given modern writing its epic: by a radical reversal, instead of putting his life into his novel, as we say so often, he makes his very life into a work for which his own book was in a sense the model, so that it is quite obvious to us that it is not Charlus who imitates Montesquiou, but that Montesquiou in his anecdotal, historical reality is merely a secondary fragment, derived from Charlus. Surrealism lastly — to remain on the level of this prehistory of modernity — surrealism doubtless could not accord language a sovereign place, since language is a system and since what the movement sought was, romantically, a direct subversion of all codes — an illusory subversion, moreover, for a code cannot be destroyed, it can only be "played with"; but by abruptly violating expected meanings (this was the famous surrealist "jolt"), by entrusting to the hand the responsibility of writing as fast as possible what the head itself ignores (this was automatic writing), by accepting the principle and the experience of a collective writing, surrealism helped secularize the image of the Author. Finally, outside of literature itself (actually, these distinctions are being superseded), linguistics has just furnished the destruction of the Author with a precious analytic instrument by showing that utterance in its entirety is a void process, which functions perfectly without requiring to be filled by the person of the interlocutors: linguistically, the author is never anything more than the man who writes, just as I is no more than the man who says I: language knows a "subject," not a "person," end this subject, void outside of the very utterance which defines it, suffices to make language "work," that is, to exhaust it.

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“Everything is to be distinguished, but nothing deciphered”

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The absence of the Author (with Brecht, we might speak here of a real "alienation:' the Author diminishing like a tiny figure at the far end of the literary stage) is not only a historical fact or an act of writing: it utterly transforms the modern text (or — what is the same thing — the text is henceforth written and read so that in it, on every level, the Author absents himself). Time, first of all, is no longer the same. The Author, when we believe in him, is always conceived as the past of his own book: the book and the author take their places of their own accord on the same line, cast as a before and an after: the Author is supposed to feed the book — that is, he pre-exists it, thinks, suffers, lives for it; he maintains with his work the same relation of antecedence a father maintains with his child. Quite the contrary, the modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now. This is because (or: it follows that) to write can no longer designate an operation of recording, of observing, of representing, of "painting" (as the Classic writers put it), but rather what the linguisticians, following the vocabulary of the Oxford school, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given to the first person and to the present), in which utterance has no other content than the act by which it is uttered: something like the / Command of kings or the I Sing of the early bards; the modern writer, having buried the Author, can therefore no longer believe, according to the "pathos" of his predecessors, that his hand is too slow for his thought or his passion, and that in consequence, making a law out of necessity, he must accentuate this gap and endlessly "elaborate" his form; for him, on the contrary, his hand, detached from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin — or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, that is, the very thing which ceaselessly questions any origin.

· · ·

Death Finds an Author Writing his Life, Edward Hull. 1827.

We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single "theological" meaning (the "message" of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture. Like Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, both sublime and comical and whose profound absurdity precisely designates the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original; his only power is to combine the different kinds of writing, to oppose some by others, so as never to sustain himself by just one of them; if he wants to express himself, at least he should know that the internal "thing" he claims to "translate" is itself only a readymade dictionary whose words can be explained (defined) only by other words, and so on ad infinitum: an experience which occurred in an exemplary fashion to the young De Quincey, so gifted in Greek that in order to translate into that dead language certain absolutely modern ideas and images, Baudelaire tells us, "he created for it a standing dictionary much more complex and extensive than the one which results from the vulgar patience of purely literary themes" (Paradis Artificiels). succeeding the Author, the writer no longer contains within himself passions, humors, sentiments, impressions, but that enormous dictionary, from which he derives a writing which can know no end or halt: life can only imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, a lost, infinitely remote imitation.

· · ·

Once the Author is gone, the claim to "decipher" a text becomes quite useless. To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing. This conception perfectly suits criticism, which can then take as its major task the discovery of the Author (or his hypostases: society, history, the psyche, freedom) beneath the work: once the Author is discovered, the text is "explained:' the critic has conquered; hence it is scarcely surprising not only that, historically, the reign of the Author should also have been that of the Critic, but that criticism (even "new criticism") should be overthrown along with the Author. In a multiple writing, indeed, everything is to be distinguished, but nothing deciphered; structure can be followed, "threaded" (like a stocking that has run) in all its recurrences and all its stages, but there is no underlying ground; the space of the writing is to be traversed, not penetrated: writing ceaselessly posits meaning but always in order to evaporate it: it proceeds to a systematic exemption of meaning. Thus literature (it would be better, henceforth, to say writing), by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a "secret:' that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.

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Let us return to Balzac's sentence: no one (that is, no "person") utters it: its source, its voice is not to be located; and yet it is perfectly read; this is because the true locus of writing is reading. Another very specific example can make this understood: recent investigations (J. P. Vernant) have shed light upon the constitutively ambiguous nature of Greek tragedy, the text of which is woven with words that have double meanings, each character understanding them unilaterally (this perpetual misunderstanding is precisely what is meant by "the tragic"); yet there is someone who understands each word in its duplicity, and understands further, one might say, the very deafness of the characters speaking in front of him: this someone is precisely the reader (or here the spectator). In this way is revealed the whole being of writing: a text consists of multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each other, into parody, into contestation; but there is one place where this multiplicity is collected, united, and this place is not the author, as we have hitherto said it was, but the reader: the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of; the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination; but this destination can no longer be personal: the reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted. This is why it is absurd to hear the new writing condemned in the name of a humanism which hypocritically appoints itself the champion of the reader's rights. The reader has never been the concern of classical criticism; for it, there is no other man in literature but the one who writes. We are now beginning to be the dupes no longer of such antiphrases, by which our society proudly champions precisely what it dismisses, ignores, smothers or destroys; we know that to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.

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Roland Gérard Barthes (1915 – 1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His writing explored a diverse range of fields and influenced the development of multiple schools of theory, including structuralism, anthropology, literary theory, and post-structuralism.

Film

Benedikt Taschen

Film

Iggy Pop Playlist

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

Film

Knight of Disks (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Knight of Disks
Number: 1 or 3
Astrology: Virgo, Fire of Earth
Qabalah: Yod of He or Vau of He

Chris Gabriel May 24, 2025

The Knight of Disks is a man with a plan. He sees the cyclical movement of the world and contemplates his movements within them. He is agricultural intelligence, for he knows when to plant seeds, when to harvest, and when to allow a field to remain fallow.

In Rider, we have an armoured knight, his helmet topped with a sprig, and a pentacle resembling the sun is held in his gloved hands. His black horse also bears a laurel, and they both wear red garments as they stand atop freshly tilled farmland.

In Thoth, our knight is in black armour and his helmet is topped with the bust of a stag. He carries a flail, and a shield in the shape of a disk   that radiates solar light. His curious horse looks at the wheat field they stand in.

In Marseille, we have an unarmoured knight following his celestial disk. He rides a blue horse over barren ground and carries a large green wand, the only Knight in the deck to involve two weapons. It is fitting, as he is the Fiery part of the Earth, the active part of nature, the impulse that pushes vegetable life out from the depths of the Earth.

Where the Virgo ruled minor arcana  us images of investment, returns and bounty, here is the investor himself. He is not bold or quick like the Knights of Wands and Swords, but he is also not the hesitant coward of Cups. The Knight of Disks is patient and content to wait. We can think of the Battle of Bunker Hill, when Colonel William Prescott insisted his rebels conserve their ammunition, and only fire when they see the whites of their enemies' eyes. This kind of dangerous investment is the bread and butter of the Knight of Disks.

To take action years in advance and at the penultimate moment is the nature of agriculture, an effort of regular immediacy, and a plan that will outlive the farmer. This sort of thinking ahead was absent in America, when farmers destroyed their land by overfarming and led to the Dust Bowl. A good image to keep in mind with this card is a Planter’s Clock. Which notes the solar and lunar cycles, and gives the proper time to plant a given crop.

The Knight of Disks embodies the wisdom of King Solomon in Ecclesiastes, aware of three maxims. 

1. To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: 

2. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; 

3. A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

He takes heed of the great cycle and moves accordingly, allowing for great development and power.

When we pull this card, we may be dealing with questions of investment or dealing with an investor. This may also indicate a Virgo directly. When faced with this, look to your cosmic clock and see what time it is, and what the proper action is.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Film

Gene Keys and the Hero’s Journey

Peter Paul Rubens, ‘David Slaying Goliath’. c.1616.

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Molly Hankins May 22, 2025

The hero’s journey mono-myth, as described by author Joseph Campbell, details the commonalities found in heroic stories across many cultures, and serves as both a formula for narrative creation and a metaphor for the arc of the human experience. In his most recent white paper, the philosopher and mathematician Robert Edward Grant explains his novel take on simulation theory, claiming that the hero’s journey is much more than a structure for crafting stories. The human experience, he claims, is a “blockchain-based social AI spiritual life simulation”, where participants follow the archetypal structure of the hero’s journey in order to “learn about consciousness, emotional states and the nature of authentic love.” If we accept this hypothesis, astrological tools such as the Gene Keys take on a new dimension of utility for navigating life.

Describing the hero’s journey, which entails the call to adventure, the quest and a return, Campbell identifies different character archetypes in The Hero With A Thousand Faces,. These archetypes are expanded upon in the Gene Keys to describe individual blueprints of what Kabbalah calls tikkuns, our soul’s corrections in this lifetime. Developed by author and channeler Richard Rudd, the Gene Keys combine elements of Human Design, Kabbalah, tarot and the astrological zodiac with the Chinese I Ching and the structure of the human genome sequence. The resulting system mirrors the hero’s journey in many ways, beginning with the expansion on Campbell’s concept of archetypes. There are 64 Gene Keys, matching the 64 hexagrams in the I Ching and the 64 codons of the human genetic code.

Every Gene Key sequence, based on our time and place of birth, contains a life, love and prosperity path known respectively as the Activation, Venus and Pearl Sequences. Each path, in turn, has four archetypal keys describing our tikkun by way of  a shadow state we must transmute through a corresponding gift. We all have our own way of moving from the shadow to the gift frequency, represented by different lines in our profile. Each state of being is an attitude, and Rudd contends that rather than our DNA dictating how our lives unfold, our attitudes tell our DNA what kind of person we want to become. The first of the 64 Gene Key archetypes is called ‘From Entropy to Syntropy,’ and it has the shadow frequency of entropy transmuted through the gift of freshness leading to the transcendence state of beauty, which is called the siddhi. 

Having this shadow as part of our tikkun can make us feel depressed or frenetic, melancholy about being human or desperate to get away from the fear of gradual decline. But the opposite of entropy is creativity. By shifting our attention towards creative imagination and an appreciation of beauty, we inject freshness into our lives. In the gift frequency of the first Gene Key, we embody the archetype described by Campbell as the ally, assisting the hero by shifting their focus to what is unique. Appreciation of beauty is also the number one factor for building resilience in the face of grief, according to author Florence Williams, who spent many years studying the science of healing from heartbreak.

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“It’s impossible to know how many lifetimes it could take us to learn the specific ways of being we must correct, in order to get the best out of human experience, but as we continue to evolve so do our systems for understanding ourselves.”

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Each path in the three Gene Key sequences that make up our tikkun, takes us through a challenge and breakthrough to ultimately arrive at core stability. The Activation Sequence begins with the first node of our personal profiles,  our life’s work. Doing our life’s work takes us through the challenge of evolution, followed by a breakthrough that allows us to access our radiance, then bringing us to discover our life’s purpose, where we find core stability. Each stage of the Activation Sequence has a corresponding Gene Key archetype detailing what shadow frequency we must shift in order to stabilize our gifts. Shadows block our manifestations whereas gifts magnetize them, and the siddhi is a level of transcendence that describes the frequency of enlightenment. Even if many of us may not reach the siddhic level of expression in this lifetime, studying the siddhis of the Gene Keys orients us to the specific attitudes of enlightened masters so we can expand our consciousness beyond the confines of human limitation. 

The hero’s journey is also embodied in the relationship that each sequence has to the others, playing out the call to adventure, the quest, and a return. This makes up what Rudd calls The Golden Path, beginning and ending with our life’s work. For instance, if you have Gene Key 55 with a first line as your life’s work, then the personal challenge that gives way to your evolution is transmuting the shadow of victimization through the gift of freedom. Each line corresponds to the six lines contained in the I Ching hexagrams, and expresses how we move from shadow to gift. If you have a first line in your life’s work then you are here to create something new. The gift of Key 55 is the same as the siddhi, and freedom is the ability to see and ultimately live beyond the cycle of human drama. 

It’s impossible to know how many lifetimes it could take us to learn the specific ways of being we must correct, in order to get the best out of human experience, but as we continue to evolve so do our systems for understanding ourselves. Many Kabbalistic teachings refer to ways we can accelerate our evolution, with spiritual study being one mechanism. The Gene Keys is one such an accelerant. While the voluminous system of very specific data can be intimidating at first, particularly to those who’ve never studied any astrological systems, it’s incredibly useful even at the surface level. Any information gleaned is always immediately relevant to your personal hero’s journey.

According to Rudd, influencing our DNA through our attitude is the future of epigenetics, which is the study of how our environment and behaviors affect genetic expression. “You can only be a victim of your attitude. Every thought you think, every feeling you have, every word you utter and every action you take directly programs your genes and therefore your reality. Consequently, at the quantum level you create the environment that programs your genes,” Rudd says. “ This is the great secret the Gene Keys hold - the secret of freedom.” Embodying the hero archetype gives us the strength and boldness to shine light on our shadows and step into the gifts that allow us to freely manifest our will. 

If life is, as Robert Edward Grant believes, “an emergent simulation,” then perhaps we can change the game we’re playing by changing ourselves. Nothing less than a global consciousness shift is required of us at this pivotal time in human history, and we have tools like the Gene Keys to accelerate that change by helping us face our personal and collective shadows in a readily actionable way.

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

Film

David Avocado Wolfe

Film

The Poem as Functional Object

Untitled, Eugen Gomringer. 1953.

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In this introduction to a collection of his ‘constellations’ - visual poems that used the placement of words on a page to communicate ideas, serving as both a literary and visual art - Gomringer lays the foundations for what was still a remarkably new understanding of language. Gomringer tried to liberate writing from its context, to treat words and the printed page as an artwork unto itself, with words being just one shade in the paintbox of a poet. He makes an argument that poetry must be more like utilitarian creative disciplines of design and architecture, and only then will it be given the respect and consideration it deserves.

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Eugen Gomringer, May 20, 2025

Some years ago, I defined the new poem as a functional object. This definition was accepted by some as a sign of the times and misguided youth, and by others as a working hypothesis for different developmental procedures. At the same time in South America, or more exactly, in São Paulo, a group was formed whose definition of tile poem coincided with mine. I called my poems "constellations" omitting reference to earlier poems with the same title by other poets. Later, after similar and different forms had been created, my friends in São Paulo and I grouped all our experiments under the term "Concrete Poetry." One reason for this was to honor the concrete Painters in Zürich - Bill, Graeser, Lohse, Vreni, Loewensberg and others - a strong group from which impulses felt throughout the world had been emitted uninterruptedly since the early forties. Since 1942 my creation of the constellations has been decisively influenced by this group. Today "Concrete Poetry" is the general term which included a large number of poetic-linguistic experiments characterized with either constellation, ideogram, stochastic poetry" etc., by conscious study of the material and its structure (for a short time there was a magazine with this name material in Darmstadt): material means the sum of all the signs with which we make poems. Today you find concrete poetry in Japan, Brazil, Portugal, Paris, Switzerland, Austria and Germany.

For some younger poets, the constellation is already old hat. That is it does not go far enough for them. Some of them work typographically more freely; others work typographically less imaginatively. Still others criticize me for trying to say too much. In spite of the fact that many of my purer constellations (for example "avenidas"/ "baum kind hund haus" (tree child dog house)/ "mist mountain butterfly" were preceded by divers experiments. Even today, again and again, I make logical, atomistic and graphic experiments, which serve only as stimulation and discipline.

I find it wisest to stay with the word, even with the usual meanings of the word. By doing this I hope, in spite of the apparent scarcity of my words as compared to the verbosity of non-concrete poetry, to stay in continuity with poetry which emphasizes formal pattern. The purpose of reduced language is not the reduction of language itself but the achievement of greater flexibility and freedom of communication (with its inherent need for rules and regulations). The resulting poems should be, if possible, as easily understood as signs in airports and traffic signs. I see danger in taking away from Concrete Poetry its useful, aesthetic-communicative character on the one side by not understanding the simpler linguistic phenomena (by being over-fed with words, and by lack of artistic sensibility) and on the other side by following the new esoteric of the typographic poets in whom one can sometimes notice a certain lack of imagination. To date I see only in the experiments of Claus Bremer, in his poems in the form of ideograms, genuine enrichment of the constellation. This selection is not comprised of pure constellation only. Each poem contains elements of constellation: the direct juxtaposition of words; repetitions and combinations; questioning of equivalent statements; over-all unity of themes; analysis and synthesis as poetic subject; minimal-maximal tension in the smallest space. I want especially, to show through this small variety that the constellation can be the rallying point as well as the point of departure. Anyone who makes use of the freedoms of the art of poetry in a reasonable way will see that the constellation is not a dead-end or an end at all, as the literary people have said, but on the contrary that it uses thinking and structural methods which can connect artistic intuition with scientific specialization.

Concrete poetry, in general, as well as the constellation, hopes to relate literature as art less to "literature" and more to earlier developments in the fields of architecture, painting, sculpture, industrial design - in other words to developments whose basis is critical but positively-defined thinking.

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Eugen Gomringer (b. 1925) is a Bolivian-Swiss poet, professor, and the father of the European Concrete Poetry movement that he began in the 1950s.

Film

Larry Levan Playlist

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

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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.

Film

Queen of Disks (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Queen of Disks
Number: 2
Astrology: Capricorn
Qabalah: He of He

Chris Gabriel May 17, 2025

The Queen of Disks is the Earth Mother. In each rendition she cradles the world, embodied in a coin. This is her child, and through her energy and eternal fertility it retains its form.

In Rider, the Queen is crowned with a long green headdress, and is dressed in red and white. She looks down upon the coin happily. Her throne is ornately carved with imagery of fruit, children, and the head of a Goat. These are all symbols of fecundity:ripe swelling fruit, the libidinous goat, and the children which are produced. The environment around her is verdant, and a bunny rabbit sits in the corner.

In Thoth, we find the Queen at a different stage of motherhood altogether. Her crown topped with great spiralling goat horns as she wears an armoured top and holds a crystal-tipped, spiral scepter. She cradles her disk close to her breast. Her throne is atop a palm tree, and a goat stands beside her. Here the Queen is Capricorn, the goat at the top of the mountain; she looks to the vast desert before her, spotted only with a few palms and a dry river. There is much work for her to do.

In Marseille, the Queen is in royal robes, crowned, and bears a scepter that looks like an ear of corn, or a fleur de lys. She is focused entirely on the disk she holds aloft. In it is the heart and seed of her world, the material reality that she inhabits. Qabalistically, she is the water of the Earth. She is mud, the great sign of civilization.

When we think of the Queen of Disks let us think of the great title of Mesopotamia: the Cradle of Civilization. What allowed civilization to flourish was mud. A close proximity to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and then the Nile for Egypt. The water of these rivers turned deathly desert to fertile mud, which allowed for agriculture to flourish. This is the nature of the Queen -she is the union of water and earth as fertile mud.

Mythologically, she is Gaia, Mother Earth, the great globe itself, a union of land and sea in herself, and the endless processes which maintain the world. In humanity, we can think of the hardworking women who raise what is around them. In Thoth, the Queen is a domineering mother who coldly looks at what is around her, and needs to exert her will to ascend to her lofty place. This is softened in Rider and Marseille, where it is the maternal love which cradles the world and keeps it growing.

When we pull this card, we can expect something to take care of. Just as the environment has lovingly given us life, we must give life to the environment. This may be directly a project, an investment in something that will grow and profit. This can also directly relate to a Capricorn in our lives.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS