Moderately Quick Silver

They crawled under his skin, blindly squirming and squelching. He wheezed in agony. How had they gotten in? How had he become their host?

Then he felt the large scar on his wrist. That’s how! Longing for liberation, he dug his nails into his arm, pulling strings of living matter out of it.

A blade of light. The nurse calmed him, pointing at the blood and tissue he’d scratched out of his body. No parasite.

A week passed. He felt them, blindly squirming and squelching. How had they gotten in? Then he felt the scar on his wrist. That’s how!

Morality is a complex thing, though this fact is lost in an age in which debates are reduced to exchanges of snarky remarks on social media. Morality is complex because it deals not in what is but in what ought to be, and what ought to be is invisible to the eyes. How ideas about what ought to be came to exist has kept philosophers and scientists occupied for thousands of years.

And this may account for a good deal of the blind desperation with which people seek something or someone who will tell them how to act. For those of a speculative mindset, reaching definitive conclusions is less a priority than exploring possibilities.

But most people feel the urgent need of external guidance. So some give themselves over to group leaders, others adhere rigidly to an ideology or religion. And those with a more woo woo view of life turn to oracles.

But divination is not a good judge of what's morally right. If you want proof, when was the last time you laid out a spread that gave you advice that was based on moral principles completely incompatible with your own?

Having the stamp of approval of whatever projection we may make onto pretty bits of cardboards is not that good of an idea. It is a surefire way to delude ourselves and it can rob us of our agency and of our responsibility to think for ourselves.

Divination is good at telling us what is, or was, or has a good chance of being in the future. What ought to be is for us to make up our mind about.

Back in my smoking days, I remember thinking that the biggest obstacle to quitting was not just the physical addiction to nicotine, but the fact that cigarettes had simply become a part of my day. Addictions slowly (or quickly) carve time for themselves in our life, so that even when we decide to stop engaging in the addictive behavior, there is a chasm left between the time before engaging in it and the time after engaging in it that needs to be filled. The hardest thing is beginning to reimagine our life as something whole even without the thing we stop doing.

I was talking to my husband's little cousin the other day. She's 16 and she is the typical fried-brained teenager who has been conditioned to expect that anything should be presented in small 15-second soundbites that you can scroll through if the gratification doesn't hit within the first two seconds. By the way, I'm not saying this as a jab at the younger generations: my generation was fried-brained in a different sense, and besides, I know plenty of people older than me whose mind has been beaten to a pulp by the mechanisms of social media.

What I thought was funny, but also a bit worrying, was her fidgety demeanor whenever she had to spend more than a couple of minutes without fiddling with her phone. She was in principle no different than me after an hour of not smoking--except that the withdrawal symptoms kick in much more quickly. I asked her if she could fathom spending a day doing absolutely nothing that she didn't have to do (e.g., going to school, help clean the house, etc.) and she looked at me as if I started speaking in tongues.

To be fair, asking this of most teenagers is asking too much, regardless of the generation, and she's the 'go go go' type anyway. But yesterday I spent the day doing exactly that--nothing that I didn't have to do. It was refreshingly hard to accomplish.

Coming to a point of stillness is difficult when we are constantly bombarded by stimuli. Plus, our conscience of other people's awareness and attention has expanded in recent years from the couple of people around us to potentially the whole world.

The ringing silence I experienced was a reminder of how abstract this type of conscience actually is: I am not in front of an audience. I am alone, a point in the existence reflecting upon itself. It was one of the longest days I had in my recent memory, but not in a bad sense. I can start to see why so many ancient stoics said that each day can be treated as a lifetime in and of itself.

I feel this is a good exercise to do regularly, so I will incorporate it into my practice. It is not meant to be a flight from reality. It is a way of coming back to it so I don't lose sight of its right proportions.

Many people who think they are communing with the gods are simply reacting to crap that their subconscious slings at them. This may or may not have therapeutic value, but it is not magic, since metaphysical forces cannot be psychologized away just so someone can have the safe thrill of believing outside of consensus reality while also appearing sane.

And this is where a fine line needs to be trodden. If on one hand we have the excess of trying to rationalize everything and reduce it to consensus reality, on the other hand irrationalism is just as destructive, and the idea of believing in crap exactly because it is absurd (credo quia absurdum) can lead us down really dark paths, and not the curling-up-with-a-vampire-novel type of dark.

Following my deep dive into the symbols of the door knockers and the road in divination by cards, I want to tackle the symbol of the home. This, too, like the road, is a widespread symbol that is almost never absent from any divination system of a practical nature (I am aware of systems for playing card divination based on Rider Waite symbolism, but they have very little practical use).

The popularity of the symbol of the home is simply a consequence of its importance in people's lives. The home or house card is, in most systems, a 'topic' or significator card indicating the querent's or someone else's house, and the cards surrounding it show us the atmosphere or happenings of the household. Its practical value, therefore, is immense.

In the earliest recorded system for reading the tarot, which is Pratesi's guide for the Bolognese tarot, the house card is the Ace of Cups. This meaning is retained in the more modern variants of the method. This is also an almost universal constant in cartomancy, since the Ace of Cups or Hearts is almost always taken as a symbol of the home.

Whether this association originates with the Bolognese tarot I don't know. It is possible that the symbolism is simply suggested by the shape of the Ace of Cups. In the Visconti tarot, the Ace of Cups is a water spring similar to a baptismal font, but in many older decks it can look similar to a walled structure. If we add to this the fact that the function of the cup is to contain, it may be that this could have suggested the idea of the house to old cartomancers, since a house is a large (the ace is large) containment structure.

Similarly, in almost all card reading systems using Italian regional cards, the Ace of Cups is the home, although I am aware of a couple where the meaning is attributed to the Four of Cups, possibly due to the squarish form suggested by the arrangement of the pips. The Ace of Cups is also the house card in the Sibilla regionale, which is the second-most widespread sibilla deck in Italy.

Why the same idea of home as the Ace was suggested by people using regular playing card suits is unclear, since the Ace of Hearts does not look like anything but a heart. Still, if the system I was taught is anything to go by, the main idea is that hearts deal with one's emotional life and nourishment, and the home is the origin and source (ace) of our emotional life, the place where our first (ace) needs are met. As a matter of fact, the person who taught me cartomancy with playing cards often insisted that the Ace of Hearts is not just any house (though it can be, in practice) but especially one's home, where we come from (the 'spring' we come from, in the Visconti sense), which is why an extended meaning of the house card is often one's family.

The same attribution of the Ace of Hearts to the home is found in most systems I am aware of, including German cartomancy and most English and French methods. As far as tarot is concerned, we find that, in so earlier tarot documents, the Tower is simply called 'casa' (house), before being called House of God or House of the Devil in some other decks (the title 'Tower' is actually a rather late innovation).

Etteilla assigned the house to the Ten of Coins, which Waite retains in his illustration of the Ten of Pentacles, while Paul Case generally matched the house with the Two of Cups, among other things. However, this was more of an accidental consequence of the Golden Dawn attribution of the first cards of the suit of Cups to the zodiac sign of Cancer and, according to the sign/house equivalence theory, to the fourth house, which is the house of the father and therefore of one's fathers and one's family/house.

The Sibilla is a partial exception to the rule of the ace as the home, as the House card is given to the Two of Hearts. The meaning of origin (which metaphorically, depending on the reading, can also indicate the origin of a problem) is retained. Still, the Ace of Hearts is also given to the family and to people living together, among other meanings.

The Sibilla, like the Kipper cards, distinguishes between a House card and a Room card. This is probably because both decks seem to have been consolidated from earlier German or Austrian decks which also had similar cards, although the makers of the Sibilla also took playing cards into consideration.

I cannot speak to the Kipper cards (nor to Lenormand, where there is a House card, attributed to the King of Hearts), but in the Sibilla, the Room can represent a small(er) apartment, as well as a place in general, but it doesn't usually have a connection with the emotional side of life, like the House, although it can represent intimacy, since it is connected with rooms in general, but with the bedroom specifically.

MQS

It is probably one of the ironies of history that nowadays, many who become curious about Hermeticism bump into the Kybalion as their first text, either directly or indirectly through reelaborations of the same ideas. This in spite of the fact that the Kybalion has nothing to do with Hermeticism.

There are a couple of reasons for this: for one, because whoever wrote the Kybalion managed to fool some leading Occultists into believing it was an authentic text (most notably Paul Foster Case, but not only); for two, because the so called laws that are discussed in the text have become embedded into pop-alternative-spirituality since the late 60s. They are like invasive weeds that one can never truly get rid of.

Many people, even today, buy into the Kybalion in different ways. The first line of defense is asserting that it is an authentic text. As few people now can truly believe this in good faith, a more apparently reasonable approach has been to assert that the text is a forgery but its contents are an authentic distillation of Hermetic principles.

This is also demonstrably false. If you read any of the authors who are considered part of the Western philosophical or esoteric canon, you will find no similarity with the Kybalion's ideas until, perhaps, well into American transcendentalism, unless you are desperate to force the texts to say what they don't.

Certainly those ideas are not found in the Hermetica. True, there are superficial similarities of vocabulary, on occasion. For instance, you will often read the author(s) of the Hermetica ramble on about "the Mind", so it would seem that the Kybalion's emphasis on the mind would place it in the Hermetic tradition.

Too bad that the ancient concept of 'mind', as used in philosophical and magical texts, had almost nothing to do with the psychologized concepts of it that fall under the same name and that clearly show that the Kybalion is a modern text both in its authorship and in its content. In fact, it is pretty much a condensation of very fashionable late XIX century ideas, and little more beyond that.

Broadly speaking, no one with some level of historical awareness can believe the Kybalion is anything more than a rather straightforward summary of Victorian beliefs.

This is what leads another group of people to say that the Kybalion is neither an authentic text nor an authentically Hermetic text, but its principles are still valid. Of course you can believe what you please, but there is no necessity of believing in its "laws", which are often either not laws at all or are simply superficial and partial observations about mental phenomena cast in a glamorous esoteric light. Nothing of what is described in that book is either self-evident, clearly logical or practically useful.

All in all there is nothing of special interest contained in the Kybalion. That it hasn't been forgotten like the mass of esoteric booklets produced in the same period is largely due to the way it marketed itself and was marketed by others.

“I’m Empress Rathoi!” Nili screeched from her dingy cubicle. “Every two damn minutes,” Anned grunted, turning in her sleeping bag. Old Nili was getting worse.

Anned wasn’t much better off. She’d wind up a meaningless husk, like everyone else on Toreadis. Yet something rebelled within her, coherent, alive, like the stars judging her from above the collapsed Toreadian skyline.

The following day she snuck onto an airship for Arctamam. First, the pirates welcomed her among their ranks; and when the constitution was abolished, the revolutionaries. After the war, she was crowned empress.

Nili never knew of her role in history.

MQS