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.”

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

The Devil (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: The Devil
Number: XV
Astrology: Capricorn
Qabalah: Ayin, the Eye

Chris Gabriel June 7, 2025

The Devil is amongst the most feared cards in the tarot, he is the enemy of mankind. Each depiction shows a horned Devil alongside entrapped humans, but the cause of their  entrapment varies greatly.

In Rider, we are given the most moral portrait. The Devil is in a traditional form - a man’s body with hairy goatlike legs and clawed feet. His goat horns are topped by a Pentagram, and they arch downwards to his bat wings. He holds his right hand up, while his left holds a flaming wand towards the ground. His face is bearded and monstrous. At his feet, a man and woman are chained to a column. They too are horned, nakeded, and tails protrude behind them. The woman has grown a tail tipped with a cluster of grapes,  the man’s is tipped with flames.

In Thoth, the Devil is not a humanoid at all, but a goat replete with great spiralling horns, a third eye, and a bough of blue flowers. The stands in front of a great phallus crowned with a nimbus, and the entrapped souls are not chained, but are the sperm within the immense testes. They are not trapped in the way of the other two cards, rather, they are held in potentia, not yet actualized, but awaiting their future.

In Marseille, the Devil is the strangest of the three: a blue skinned beast with breasts and a penis. While the Rider Devil took on the pose of Baphomet, here we have the full hermaphroditic figure. The Devil differs greatly in different Marseille decks, often having a face in his stomach or eyes in his knees. His body is schizophrenically split into many organs and parts, each one conscious of itself, but the sum total of the Devil is unconscious as he uses his upheld flaming wand to light his way through the dark. The imps beside him have asinine ears and tails. Their horns are stick-like. They are chained to the pedestal of the Devil.

The Devil invites us into the depths of the Unconscious, the root of our desires and fear. This Hell is his home. Marseille and Rider clearly show that these wants are the sinful roots that sprout vice in our lives. The vices controlled by the Rider Devil are wrath, symbolized by the flaming tail, and drunkenness, symbolized by the grape tail. The Hell of this Devil is shown best in Disney’s Pinocchio as Pleasure Island, where ‘naughty boys’ go to smoke, drink and gamble, but soon are turned into asses, growing ears and tails, until they are enslaved and forced to work deep in the mines.

The vices of Marseille are bodily: lust, hunger, and the desires of the flesh. The Marseille Devil calls to mind the delusions of schizophrenics, as described by Victor Tausk, in which one's organs are felt to be foreign, and dominated by outside forces. This tends to be localized in the genitals, but can often spread throughout the whole body. The Devil is the embodiment of that eternal outsider who controls the bodies of the unwilling. As well described vividly by David Foster Wallace in Big Red Son, and typified by Origen, many will castrate themselves to overcome sin and grow closer to God. 

Thoth shows us this is not necessary.  The card shows the wisdom that Crowley received in the Book of the Law, that “the word of Sin is Restriction”, and that these unconscious forces need not fester down below, but demand to be expressed and brought forth into reality. The souls of the damned are not chained to the ground, but held as sperm awaiting their future fertilization. 

Freud has shown that it is only when the drives are repressed, forced down into Hell, that they grow sick. As Blake writes in the Proverbs of Hell: He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence. 

The Devil of Thoth is but an animal, and though he has a mystic third eye, he is driven by his sexual urges. He is the long maligned sexual drive at last given the freedom to create.

When the Devil comes up in a reading, we must be careful not to overindulge in our vices and follow our simple urges down, but instead to exalt, raise, and utilize them for greater creativity.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, THOUGHTS

Film

Pronoia Pt. 1 - The Art of Sacred Clowning

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Molly Hankins June 5, 2025

Pronoia is paranoia’s positive counterpart and describes a worldview rooted in the idea that the universe is conspiring in our favor. Author Rob Brezney describes the concept in his 2005 book Pronoia, a modern-day, illustrated manual to life akin to Be Here Now by Ram Dass, and introduces  two aspects of the sacred clown that can guide us towards pronoia. The first is a tummler, which is a Yiddish term that refers to someone who “makes a racket”, stirring  up a commotion to heighten self-awareness. The second is the Iroquois word ondinnonk, meaning a secret wish of the soul that longs to do good deeds. Brezsny recommends that we allow our ondinnonk to lead our pronoaic mission as a tummler, so that we may elevate the consciousness of ourselves and our community. 

Clowning is a primary expression of any tummler, whose sacred duty is to affectionately incite agitation that promotes self-reflection and positive action. The Native Amrican Hopi tribe ritualized the art of sacred clowning in an annual summer performance. Known as Kachina Ceremonies, these displays would last from the Winter to Summer Solstice with a six month build-up to the climax of the summer ritual, taking place in July because heat causes expansion drawing out impurities. Clowns,  Princeton University Art and Archaeology Professor Hal Foster explained, played the essential role of clearing corruption out of the community by , “Tracing fractures that already exist in the given order to pressure them.” Existing areas of corruption were pressured to a breaking point by the affectionate agitation of the sacred clowns, and community members became strengthened by this release of impurities. 

Brezsny believes that in order to see where corruption has accumulated within ourselves, our leaders and our communities, we must trigger each other. He writes in Pronoia, “We can inspire each other to perpetrate healing mischief, friendly shocks, compassionate tricks, blasphemous reverence, holy pranks and crazy wisdom.” This is the role of the sacred clown or tummler, guided by the good-natured principle of ondinnonk. Within a traditional social hierarchy, only the court jester can safely speak truth to power, and it can only be successfully communicated through play. The Hopi regarded corruption as an inevitability of being human, building in a social purification ceremony aligned with natural cycles to ensure that a corrupted people did not become the dominant force in the tribe. 

In Pronoia, fundamentalism is the primary corruptive force of modernity, and Brezsny believes the fundamentalist attitude demands everything be taken too seriously, personally and literally. “Correct belief is the only virtue. Every fundamentalist is committed to waging war against the imagination unless the imagination is enslaved to his or her belief system,” he writes. “And here’s the bad news: like almost everyone in the world, each of us has our own share of the fundamentalist virus.” The next page of the book is blank except for an invitation to confess in writing where we harbor fundamentalism in our own worldviews, challenging us to realise  how easy it is to see in others and ignore it in ourselves. 

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“Healing mischief, friendly shocks, compassionate tricks, blasphemous reverence, holy pranks and crazy wisdom”

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If we endeavor to put pressure on the fractured places within our own psyche, we can uncover where fundamentalism has corrupted us and open ourselves up to otherwise unavailable opportunities. These are opportunities for both transcendent self-awareness and society-evolving consciousness expansion. Like the famous Leonard Cohen lyric from “Anthem” says, the cracks are where the light gets in. Though living by a pronaic philosophy in 2025 feels outlandish, it is radical to consider the possibility that we are currently experiencing an increase of pressure on existing fractures that will ultimately lead us to trade corruption for lightness. The fear of facing our own corrupted nature as individuals and a collective lightens when we approach it with a sense of humor.

Pronoia serves as an invitation to become tummlers unto ourselves, powered by the purity of our innate ondinnonk spirit that inherently wants to perpetuate goodness. As we do so, lightness spreads to the people around us and we all become more suited to administer the sort of, “...healing mischief, friendly shocks, compassionate tricks, blasphemous reverence, holy pranks and crazy wisdom,” that pressures the fractures of our own corruption and gives way to goodness. 

Perhaps the secret of how to speed up this process in the collective lies in the blank page Breszny put in Pronoia. In the book’s forward he recommends we act as pronaic co-authors, knowing that the underlying axiom of “as above, so below” applies to both the macro and the microcosm. Breszny knows that to reflect upon and root out our own corruption is to become co-conspirators with the universe, scheming to generate more favor for ourselves and all of life. Embodying sacred clown energy as we undertake the process ensures success.

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

Jack Clark

Film

Ominous Commandments

The Georgia Guidestones after the 2022 bombing.

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Elif Blackstock June 3, 2025

In a large field in northeastern Georgia, just outside the small city of Elberton and its population of below 5,000, stood six granite stones, arranged in a Stonehenge like construction. They functioned, in part as a solar calendar: holes drilled into the granite aligned with the Pole Star, the solstice, and the equinox, and one allowed a ray of sun to pass through at noon, pointing to the day of the year. They were erected in 1980, and commissioned by a man known only by the pseudonym R.C. Christian, allegedly on behalf of a small group of individuals who believed in the importance of the stones, and the message they held. Over the years, they became a tourist attraction, drawing tens of thousands of visitors each year, and the subject of conspiracy and fascination across the world until, in 2022, a bomb exploded at the site, shattering one of the slabs and leading to the demolition of the rest over concerns for their structural integrity after the damage. No one has ever been caught in relation to the crime, and many rejoiced their destruction, for upon the stones were ten maxims which, since their inception, have caused controversy, confusion, celebration, and speculation in equal measure. 

On the four main stones, in eight languages, were what appeared to be new commandments for living, written by Christian, and the group he claimed to represents. They do not prescribe to an obvious or exact school of thought, at times political, social, and moral, and moving between the sensible, the eccentric, the absurd, and the worrying. Rational commands such as ‘Be not a cancer on earth—leave room for nature', ‘Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts’, and ‘Balance personal rights with social duties’, stand next to more poetic, cryptic, or outlandish ideas such as ‘Prize truth, beauty and love, seeking harmony with the infinite’, and ‘Unite humanity with a living new language’. Of the ten maxims, however, it is numbers one and two that caused the stone’s controversy, and ultimately led to its destruction. At the top of each of the granite slabs, in English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Traditional Chinese, and Russian respectively, were the phrases ’Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature’ and ‘Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity’.

In 1980, when the stones were erected, the human population was close to 4.5 billion. The two opening principles, then, seemed to not only call for the eradication of nearly 90% of the earths population, but the second maxim also was interpreted as encouraging eugenics. With their obscured origins, the shady nature of their commissioner, and mysterious purpose, alongside the fact that many of the other commandments seemed both rational and applicable to modern life, the two opening statements seemed ominous, and a slate of theories as to the true meaning of the stones began to develop.

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“Despite—or perhaps because of—the speculation, no one ever came forward to confirm or deny the identity of R.C. Christian, nor to clarify the stones’ intended purpose”

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To some, these declarations represented a philosophical musing on how humanity might live sustainably in the aftermath of global catastrophe when population levels may already be drastically reduced. The Cold War was raging in 1980, and a nuclear armageddon did not seem so far away to many. The Georgia Guidestones, to some, served not as a genocidal directive, but as a kind of Rosetta Stone for future survivors, offering guidance on how to rebuild civilization in harmony with the natural world. The ecological language woven throughout the inscriptions supported this to those who believed this view, seeing the project as a modern-day monument to environmental stewardship and enlightened governance. 

Others, however, saw something far darker in the granite. The language of “guiding reproduction” and maintaining a specific population cap struck many as eerily similar to the rhetoric of eugenicists and promoted authoritarian population control. Conspiracy theories flourished, especially in the internet age. Some believed the stones were the work of a shadowy elite planning a New World Order, using the monument as a declaration of their future intentions. For these theorists, the anonymity of R.C. Christian was no coincidence, but a deliberate attempt to mask the involvement of powerful globalist actors. The fact that the site also aligned astronomically only contributed to ideas of occult symbolism, spurring claims that the monument had Masonic or even Satanic undertones.

In right-wing and religious circles, the stones became a lightning rod. Christian evangelicals decried the language of a “new world language” and “harmony with the infinite” as New Age heresy, incompatible with biblical teachings. Some described the structure as “America’s Stonehenge of Satan,” believing it to be the work of dark spiritual forces masquerading as enlightenment. Politicians and pundits from conservative media outlets occasionally referenced the stones as proof of moral decay or creeping globalism, fanning public suspicion. 

Despite—or perhaps because of—the speculation, no one ever came forward to confirm or deny the identity of R.C. Christian, nor to clarify the stones’ intended purpose. The Elbert County Granite Finishing Company, which had been paid handsomely for the project, honored a vow of silence, further deepening the mystery. As years passed, the stones stood silent, defying explanation, as more and more visited them each year. Their destruction in 2022 was, to many, both an act of terror and of symbolism. Whether the bomber saw them as a threat, an abomination, or merely a target to stir fear and debate, the Guidestones were finally reduced to rubble. But the questions they raised—about humanity’s future, its values, and its power to shape the world—remain etched in the imagination, if not in stone.

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Film

Temperance (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Temperance or Art
Number: XIV
Astrology: Sagittarius
Qabalah: Samekh

Chris Gabriel May 31, 2025

Temperance is the image of spiritual attainment. This is the card of the Guardian Angel, the embodiment of the individual divine Will. It is the Godlike function in man: Creativity.

In Rider, we are shown an angel in white robes. They pass water between two golden cups while their robe is marked with a golden triangle. They have great red wings, their flowing blonde hair is topped with a little sun, and their head is surrounded with radiance. Their bare feet stand in two worlds: one dips into the pool before them, the other is on the ground where irises grow beside them. They stand in front of a long path which leads to a radiant light in the distance.

In Thoth, we have an angel as an alchemical Hermaphrodite. The Emperor and Empress married in the Lovers card, and here become one. Their skin is blue and white, they have six breasts hanging out of a large green dress adorned with bees and serpents. Their royal mantle is the rainbow, which flows down their chest, as an arrow sits in it. Their crown is silver and gold and they hold fire and a cup of water, both of which are being poured into the cauldron which sits before them. A white lion and red phoenix sit in the flames around the cauldron. Two crescent moons form a lunar bow atop the card, and behind the angel is a golden disk adorned with an acrostic Latin motto of the alchemists::

Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem-

Visit the interior of the Earth, rectification will reveal the hidden stone

VITRIOL.

In Marseille, our angel wears a red and blue robe. They have blue wings and blonde hair with a five petaled flower. They smile as they move water between the two cups they hold.

Temperance is self control, which in its truest mastery is the craft of alchemy. Alchemy, in its most basic form, is the transformation of substances, and through the true alchemy, wise men sought to transform their bodies of lead into divine bodies of gold. The beakers, alembics, vessels and metals were but ceremonial tools to visualize the interior process they were undergoing. 

This process is the source of all art: the transformation of external input into sensory impressions and ideas, which are again transformed, distilled, and ultimately externalized to create a work of art.

In Genesis, man is described as being made in God’s image, but at that point, there were no physical descriptions, the only thing one knows about God at that point is that they create. We are, therefore, godlike only in our ability to create and transform.

The Angel of this card is the embodiment of the Divine in each individual, the Guardian Angel, the higher Soul that is simultaneously in contact with God and you. It is the rainbow and the Greek god hermaphroditus, the divided colors and sexes unified. Through magick we can make contact with this higher part of ourselves and begin to follow that great path,symbolized by Sagittarius, the Arrow. 

All of this may sound very lofty, but more mundane forms of alchemy are performed every day. In nature, fire and water are opposite, when fires start, rain puts them out. It is extremely rare to find boiling water in nature, outside of a few geysers and hot springs. But through our genius, we developed technologies with which we could overcome nature, we gained control of fire, and placed water over without dousing it. Every cup of tea is an alchemical work.

When we pull this card, we are soon to have a great deal of creative energy, we may begin a serious undertaking, this may be the start of a huge project. When we create, we are engaging directly with the divine, and this card lets us know that forces greater than ourselves are by our side. 

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, THOUGHTS

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.

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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.”

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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.

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