#esoteric sciences

Salvete! I was going to make a post for the esoteric Nation of Thaumastia, but because of the new, less definitive and less spoilery route I'm taking, I want to instead go more broadly into esoteric and exoteric sciences.

The esoteric and exoteric sciences are two categorizations of sciences. However, these terms are somewhat arbitrary, and somewhat political. The exoteric sciences include the physics, biology, and other sciences of our real world. The works of Newton, Einstein, Darwin, etc. all fit within the categorization of exoteric sciences. However, these sciences are not nearly as uniform as in our reality. Due to the prevalence of seemingly supernatural occurances in the Wonderstruck Universe, many of the philosophies of the ancients like Aristotle, Pythagoras, and Democritus survived all the way to the present day, just in more naturalist forms. Because of that, exoteric sciences are sometimes also referred to as naturalist sciences.

The term "esoteric sciences" is quite broad, and is really more of an umbrella term referring to many different types of science. It's often tied to what's called the "Esoteric World". The Esoteric World refers to the various nations on Earth who mastered esoteric sciences before mastering the exoteric sciences we did. This doesn't make esoteric or exoteric sciences exclusive, though. The distinction between the Exoteric and Esoteric Worlds is mastery. Esoteric science could be done in the Exoteric World and even taught and learned, but the esoteric sciences would only ever be like some niche most scientists never understood. Thus, the distinction is often much more about familiarity. Sciences unfamiliar or not fully mastered by the Exoteric World are often considered esoteric

Since the beginning of modern globalization, there's been an active and ongoing pursuit to understand the connection between the esoteric and exoteric sciences. To understand a whole greater than the two. This has led to many different debates. One of the most important goals in this frontier of science is to ultimately solve what makes all these seemingly unsimilar sciences tick. There've been many hypothetical models for this, including but not limited to: the pillar models, the spectrum models, the qualitative models, and many more.

The pillar models posit that each science, exoteric or esoteric, is built upon different pillars which define scientific thought. So for each form of science, there are different pillars defining it. The spectrum models posit that there are different universal spectrums the different sciences all exist on, and different sciences have different places on these spectrums. The qualitative models believe in universally constant qualities which define different sciences. And those are all only a few examples. Yet the connection (or perhaps "missing link") between all sciences remains an unsolved mystery.

Strength and Justice…

…or is that Justice and Strength? About 15-20 minutes after you start to study Tarot, you’ll learn that these two cards share a strange sort of linkage.  Much of that is due to sequencing concerns.  In the original Marseilles decks, Justice was card VIII in the order, while Strength was card XI.  Then Arthur Edward Waite came along, and because it made the cards run in perfect order in terms of…

Tarot Tip:Lack of Humanity

Yesterday, I posted about how the RWS deck was noteworthy in part because it added scenes to the Minor cards.  Instead of a few Suit emblems bobbing in a sea of featureless white background, we finally had people and other beings actually doing things in these cards.  Granted, the Aces each feature only a celestial hand appearing in the frame, but all of the other Minors offer fully-developed…

Along with questions about the timing of events, Tarot practitioners often consider binary yes/no questions to be some of the inquiries that Tarot is most ill-equipped to handle.  After all, using Tarot to answer questions isn’t really the same thing as flipping a coin.  Or at the very least, it’s like flipping a 78-sided coin — no easy task!  But there are still ways of getting these binary…

"The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?"

~ Oscar Wilde; De Profundis [1897]