a long way down

❝ In Phu Langka Plateau (National Park) in Bueng Kan Province, when rainwater accumulates on a natural rock near Naga Cave, it resembles an eye, earning it the name "Naga's Eye" (the eye of the serpent deity). This cave is tied to legends and beliefs surrounding the Naga, and it's said that Naga Cave is a giant serpent that was cursed and turned to stone.❞

Horatia at her harp, salt paper print from calotype negative, ca. 1843

While differing greatly from traditional Tarocchi or tarot cards, this set earned its misleading name because of a few, unimportant similarities. Never a game, scholars generally agree that this set was an educational tool, used to visually describe a fifteenth-century philosophical model of the universe. It was believed that the universe was a ladder-like structure that began with the beggar and rose through the ranks of man, the muses, the liberal arts, the virtues, and the planets, until it finally reached the pinnacle, the dwelling place of God. Reflecting this order, these fifty engravings were divided into five groups of ten: the Conditions of Man; Apollo and the Muses; the Liberal Arts (with three added disciplines–Poetry, Philosophy, and Theology); the Virtues (with three personifications of cosmic principles called "genii"); and the Firmaments of the Universe.

id: All of these manifestations and descriptions combine to make the Hill House of Jackson's final version a house of delusions of family. Hill House will be glad to give you a hand to hold in the night, someone to be there, a sense of belonging. When it is too late, you will realize that all along you were really alone, clinging to your enemy–or to nothing at all. The house's furnishings have "hands everywhere," Luke says: "Little soft glass hands, curving out to you, beckoning-" (209). So do its ghosts. In a scene that Jackson marks as containing the "key" to the book (1D), Eleanor clutches Theodora's hand as she works up the courage to cry out against the torture of a ghostly child. She suddenly looks up to see Theodora on the other side of the room. She screams, "Whose hand was I holding?" (162-163). The horror behind Eleanor's scream is not that she was alone in the dark, but that she believed herself to have someone there.