22

MOONS
 22
Moons

Ignota
Delivered on each new and full Moon, 22 Moons brought together 22 poets,
writers, artists, thinkers, astrologers, practitioners, witches
and technologists for 22 lunar phases.⁣
 Contents
The Fool 6
Jenny Hval

The Magician 9
CAConrad

The High Priestess 12

Zola Jesus

The Empress 16
Sophia Al-Maria

The Emperor 22
Bhanu Kapil

The Hierophant 25
Ted Hand

The Lovers 28
Federico Campagna

The Chariot 33
Hoa Nguyen

Strength 36
Bones Tan-Jones

The Hermit 39
Alexis Pauline Gumbs

The Wheel of Fortune 42

Nisha Ramayya

Justice 48
Himali Singh Soin

The Hanged One 52

Nā-kojā-Ābād

4
Death 55
Ariana Reines

Temperance 58
Suzanne Treister

The Devil 61
Caspar Heinemann

The Tower 67
Johanna Hedva

The Star 70
Michelle Tea

The Moon 76
James Bridle & Navine G. Khan-Dossos

The Sun 79
Rebecca Tamás

Judgement 81
Jesse Darling

The World 85
K Allado-McDowell

Contributors 89

5
The Fool
Jenny Hval
Le Mat, The Fool, is the opening card of the Major Arcana. Their lips
begin to move, but there is no sound. This is because the Fool marks the
beginning, or perhaps the time before the beginning, before a sound is
heard.

Because of this, The Fool exists solely in relation to other cards, not in
a realm of its own. If it is placed facing away from another card, that
other card is drained of energy. However, if it is placed facing another,
this other card is charged. If the lips of The Fool move, sound will be
heard in the following card.

In one depiction,* The Fool is a pilgrim about to step off a cliff, holding
a tiny red balloon. You are left to wonder if they know where they are
going or are blissfully unaware. You are left to wonder: that balloon
won’t hold. You are left to wonder: how eerily it reminds me of Equinor,
drilling of a new exploration well in the Cedona sub-basin in the Great
Australian Bight, while bush fires burn through half of the nearby
Kangaroo Island. It is estimated that half of the koala population there
has perished.

There will be no oil spill here: look, we have a balloon, we’re the safest,
most environmentally friendly, most Scandinavian oil company there is.

You are left to wonder: that The Fool is walking to their death blissfully
unaware, eerily reminiscent of the theory of free-market capitalism,†
that good old tune, that circular breath, that no stopping it because there
is no difference between nature and the flow of money. If we happen to fall
off a cliff (extinguish the earth) in the process, then we all died out of
natural causes, because this was nature.

You are left to wonder: if the image of nature as unstoppable and

permanent in its cycles is a useful metaphor for capitalism, not the other
way around. The apocalypse isn’t coming, it’s being told, it’s a story.
Nature being free or unstoppable is a story. Nature is impermanence,
change, mutation, extinction. This is why it can be destroyed, and this is

   Alan Moore and J.H. Williams III, Promethea (book 3).

*

†
   In the Wikipedia article on Capitalism, the word «free» appears 68 times.
7
why we can’t restore or save it. We can only jump to our death, blissfully
privileged, as long as this is the story we are telling.

I imagine The Fool as walking boldly into the future, over the edge of
the cliff, into the Cedona sub-basin, with a balloon in one hand and
the thumb of the other placed in their mouth. An image of narcissism
maybe, or an homage to the Anthropocene’s need to understand the
individual as a complete ecosystem (symbolised by the number of The
Fool: 0).

You don’t need nobody (0).

In the Equinor tarot deck there are 78 cards, and every single one
of them is The Fool, making not a sound and saying not a word but
pointing to the next card, which points to the next, which points to the
next.

8
The Magician
CAConrad
We Must Understand Our Creativity Is an Organ, a Vital One
for Ian and Eleanor Swordy

The Magician is pointing toward Jupiter with one hand while the other
points to Earth for grounding of the transmission. Draw this card to be
told you are brilliant, and all you need to do is finally realise you must
fully embrace your creative tools and integrate them into your daily
life’s work, pleasure, and sustenance. The Magician has access to all four
Earth elements with the ability to draw down a fifth, and sometimes
the sixth element from Jupiter. It is time to awaken every living human’s
creative organ. There are catastrophic predictions for the near future,
and the only way we are going to survive and thrive together is to
imagine where to best place our energies today collectively.

You must listen to your intuitive self, which flows through your heart
chakra. Listen as in trust what you are hearing, then trust yourself that
you can do it. Now is not the time to hesitate, now is the time to leap
and know the forces guiding you also have your back. For a (Soma)
tic poetry ritual with the Magician in this time of ecological crisis
build it progressively for nine days, each day adding a new ingredient.
Start with how we take for granted our waste. Liquid, solid, which are
hazardous, which are biodegradable? Start with a daily awareness of all
forms of waste we produce and where we think they go, then investigate
further to find out where they actually go.

The Magician offers the opportunity to experience seeing limitless

potential where we used to imagine a world with very limited prospects
regrettably. A new ingredient to the ritual involves meditating on the
four elements we possess in and on our bodies. Fire: every human being
is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Have you ever been outside on a day when
it is 98 degrees? Feel the warmth exit your mouth; the exiting air had
just visited the flame that keeps you burning. Earth: flesh, hair, run
your tongue along your teeth, the most immediate connection to your
skeleton. Air: breathe again; imagine what must be present in the air to
keep you healthy and alive. Breathe deeply, exhale slowly until you can
no longer exhale any longer, then slowly inhale until you can no longer
inhale, then hold it for half a minute. How delicious is the air? Water:
tears, saliva, blood, where are your fluids in your body right now?
Where are the fluids flowing or stored? Now focus on all four elements

10
of your body at once, eyes closed, quietly listening, feeling the strength
and also the fragility of your body and life.

If you draw the Magician card in reverse, the solution is simple,

turn around and look. Where have you been guarding against your
priorities of life as a living, breathing artist? Who are you defending
them from and what kind of criticism do you fear? Bronnie Ware was
a nurse who worked with dying patients for many years and kept track
of their regrets. The number one regret of the dying is, ‘I wish I’d had
the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected
of me.’ Always remember this, and let this knowledge help you find
your strength. Stand outside barefoot on the naked Earth for twenty
minutes. Understand you are a lightning rod, then write, write, write!

11
The High Priestess
Zola Jesus
there is no material without the spiritual: to live and exist solely within
the physical world without acknowledging the power of the unseen
begets imbalance and chaos. this new moon, let us listen on the border
with an ear to each side.

but we are struggling.

we only want to believe in what we see,

and not the nameless truth of what we know.
because we cannot know unless we listen.
and to fully listen, we must open ourselves up to the whole spectrum,
including the part we cannot see.

we think we are the smart ones. but we are foolhardy, greedy and
destructive. we are not graceful. we are not divine. we are young. we live
alone, consciously set apart from the one that gave birth to us. we do
not identify with her, the dark place where primal knowledge is born.
we do not want her. yet our survival depends on her conditions. we take
it for granted.

this self-imposed alienation sets us, in the west, against earth, destroy-
ing the equilibrium for all. though it may not feel like we are living in
nature within the big cities, we are. nature is all. it is the buildings as
much as it is the trees.

she is yelling as loud as she can. she is screaming at us to wake up.

in a different timeline, we could have chosen balance. justice. there

would be no crisis. we could be divine.

how late is too late?

we are in despair.
we are in danger.
the deeper we sink into our fear, harmony decays.

in order for a place like earth to exist, we must all play our part within
it. we must read the lines and then rewrite them all: the history of

13
violence, dispossession, exploitation. respect the opportunity to feel
total presence.

find the way to the outside. the escape from this half life.

for once: listen to the spirit guides, listen to the shamanic trigger. the
witches. the medicine women. listen to her.

we must trust the power that rises. the high priestess empowered is
dangerous.

what are we so afraid of?

...our resistance to accept ourselves as a part of nature.

(we have a role.
it is unglamorous.)

but our despair is so strong,

we hold onto it with steel grip.
would we rather keep our lies and die
if staying alive meant having to open our eyes?

creature comforts
inoculate us
from the heavy handed truth
that waits outside our door

wrap around material,

make it give you more than fifty percent;
there will never be enough.

soak in your material

let it deliver you the feeling of being whole
without the mess of what it really means.

otherness is too abstract for us.

but if it feels close to real;

14
maybe it’s enough --
-- (no)

meanwhile,
the chasm widens
and soon we will blister awake
to the flaming sirens of our lost great mother

she is screaming ablaze, angry now.

there are no more warnings,

she must make the final call:

‘
YOU JUST
HAD TO
LISTEN!
’

15
The Empress
Sophia Al-Maria
 III.

Had a fright last night

Crazy clear and bare-faced
Like the want
I had
That one time
The first time
Of a full moon
When I left you
In the wait
And fearful of saying
Agreed on the count of
1, 2, 3…
To say it together
Out loud fuck it
Now been pulled crazy
Since then
Again and again
Like this card
Out that deck
And I examine it
The ebb and flow of
Our bloods
Black and alluvial
Smeared thick like rubies
Above the cave door
Of your chest
And then finally
Watching it
Settle on the river bottom
Of the delta
We share
That floods the planes
Of our place:
The shared space
Of this state
We so lucky to live in
Even though it’s underbrushed

17
 And just an edgeland
Of undeveloped territory
It offers
Brief respite
On the high road
We running out on
The long freeway
Trafficked by lawmen
And the flashing brights
Of oncoming history
But hey all this is really
Going the wrong way
Cuz I got no truck with time
This time
And I’ll tell you a secret:
There’s no compass rose
Growing in my garden
And there are
No walls left for you to climb
I’m just out here
No fear
Flanked by the final harvest
The dusk of data
Feeding a dustbowl
And now things
Well…
They feel like
They’re getting really real
And like…
I’m as shocked as you
As pissed off
As that baby eagle
On the Empress’ lap
Shell-cracked too early
Like the dawn treading
Egg squinting up at
Tomorrow’s sky
With its stubbed wing
Held up half-formed.

18
 And its beak
Open wide to cry
Til she’s filled full
‘No hungry.’
She full
Like Sade’s voice
Holding us
Together
In synch
Tonight
Trooping the colours
of lunar rotations
And toy soldier’s formations
Of love
Marching waves
Under a shared shield
Airlifted off the battlefield
By metal wings
Following the directions
Of an escaped dove
The first dove
Who sighted land first
Belly-round and prey-gray
Who hatched us a hope
And now
Look!
Double! No!
Triple Rainbow!
There!
In the shimmer
Dusted with petroleum dew
And now
I notice
Here I am
Again
At home
In exile
In this new (but familiar) cuntry
This secret homeland

19
 I was born in
But never visited
And find that
Now
I’m subject to this ruler
They call ‘Queen’
A star-crest figure
La Reina!
Al Malik/a!
So damn kingly!
In the cloak
She tore it
In the robe and the mantle
Of impossible possibility
And she speaks so wisely
Of unsayable things
With a subtle smile
Worn over sharp teeth
And I hear her in me
In us too
A deep root
A rhizome voice
Spreading and cracking
Sometimes adolescent
Somehow smoke-worn
But still with
A soft tremolo
Sounding out
The bright echoes
Of the thoughts we carry
Some still/unborn
So tonight I’m going to listen
To Pauline
And stay here
Keeping vigil
Til early morn
And hope
The Full Lune Leo
Might tell me

20
 A secret
Might call me
Out
And with a
Heavy hoist
Might raise me up
Like a flag
Announcing
The birth of this:
Her new regime
And the death of that
Big bad idea
Of the old
Not the free
The myth that
That there might ever be
Anything other
Than a revolution
Led by lovers:
That’s we
(123)

21
The Emperor
Bhanu Kapil
8 * Quick Notes on the Emperor, Climate Grief and the Future of the
Real Moon

1. Don’t touch me. (This is not a fairytale.)

2. Climate grief: patriarchs for the win again.

3. The Emperor’s apron is fused to their thighs. This blood-soaked

heavy skirt indicates a past tense of ritualised or sanctioned slaughter.
How stoic this Emperor is and how calmly they survey their Kingdom.

4. The moon reciprocates the emotion of the water on Earth. Do

something to the water we know, do it enough, and the moon’s colour
starts to fade. Imagine that moonrise. The new moon is pale pink with
navy blue polka dots. I mean, it’s gorgeous, but nobody survives that
kind of beauty, not even an oligarch. Not even the oligarch’s children.

5. Patriarchy: when what’s happening inside the house resembles the

scenes beyond it.

6. The Emperor, reversed, steps across the threshold only when invited.
The illusion of consent initiates the logic of descent. Down you go. The
Emperor, in this reversed form, has come to your house for only one
reason: to consume what gave you spirit, vitality, life.

7. Grate chalk on the step. Close the blue door. Look in. On the new
moon, write sentences on paper that’s fragile, plastic, ridged with petals.
It doesn’t matter what kind of paper it is. Perhaps there’s no paper.
   DEAR ONE, I HOPE YOU HAVE A FANTASTIC AND
*

STUNNING AUGUST THAT BRINGS RELIEF AND CLARITY. I

HOPE THERE IS ENOUGH SPACE OR SUPPORT FOR YOU TO
GET ON WITH THE GRIEVING AND DREAMING THAT IS
CALLED FOR IN THIS TIME OF GREAT OPENINGS, RUPTURES
AND TENDER LAKES OF SUDDEN FEELING. I HOPE YOUR
LOVE COMES TO YOU IN AN UNEXPECTED FORM. THE LOVE
THAT IS THERE FOR YOU. THE NEW MOON AND THE AUGUST
SUN BRING A CHANGE TO THE ATMOSPHERE. YOU DON’T
HAVE TO SACRIFICE YOUR LIFE ANYMORE. LET’S PRETEND
AUGUST IS JANUARY. AS THE SUN GLOWS ORANGE THEN
EBBS. AT THE START OF THIS COMING YEAR.
23
Perhaps there’s no paper in the future. Perhaps you can answer these
questions with a fingertip or in your heart, instead. Perhaps it’s time to
practice thinking and feeling: like this. I have three questions for you,
on the new moon. Answer them silently or with some pressure: 1. Who
are you and who do you love? 2. Describe a morning you woke without
fear. 3. Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?

8. It’s August, or almost August, the eighth month of 2019, as you read
these words in the place that you are reading them. Thank god that
Mercury Retrograde business is over. The Emperors will never read
this newsletter, and so let’s keep doing this: reading and writing in new
ways. Let’s build a pyre of red roses. Let’s bite the Emperor’s ankle if,
glancing up, we see the sole of their boot above our face. Let’s fight
them if we have to, if they invert themselves above us, and we will.
Because: the new moon is for not pretending any more. The new moon
is for the deepest form of play known to human beings but also animals,
robots and the invisible beings who inhabit every place on this planet,
whether we perceive them or not. And when I think about what this
deep play is, then I know it’s something like this, which is what Sayra
Pinto said to me, that fizzy, grey day on the Boston shore in March,
2015, as the new moon rose above the Atlantic. She said: ‘The ancestors
need us to grieve for them, but they need us to dream for them too. One
or the other is not enough.’

24
*

The Hierophant
Ted Hand
‘Change yourself, the heavenly wisdom says, from dead philosophical
stones into living philosophical stones, because I am the true medicine
and I change everything which cannot exist into something eternal.
Why are you possessed by madness? Through yourself but not from you,
is everything which you need and which you wrongly seek outside.’

Carl Jung’s rediscovery of alchemy as a precursor to analytic psychology

is exemplified by this quote from the early modern alchemist Gerhard
Dorn. Jung drew parallels between the alchemist’s work and the process
of integrating the psyche, creating the conditions for a rebirth of al-
chemical thinking within the modern discipline of psychology. Within
Jung’s new esotericism, his theory of the archetypes of the collective
unconscious provides a framework for thinking about the symbols of
Tarot, which esoteric tradition conceived of as signals from the ancient
Book of Thoth. ‘As above, so below’: the master symbol of the Mandala,
pictured in our Jung card, makes the connection between the personali-
ty becoming an integrated whole and the unity of the world.

We chose Carl Jung as the Hierophant of the Philip K. Dick Tarot be-
cause of his influence on Dick, who also created a new esoteric tradition.
The Hierophant is a teacher who initiates students into the mysteries of
the hieratic art of theurgy, stretching back through esoteric traditions
like Tarot and Alchemy to the Neoplatonism and Hermeticism of Late
Antiquity. Dionysius the Areopagite had his Hierotheus and occultists
harken back to the legendary figure of Hermes Trismegistus.

Philip K. Dick was a faithful reader of Jung in the 1950s and 1960s
and in his novels we find characters like Mr. Tagomi of The Man in
the High Castle wrestling with Jungian ideas. Dick’s series of mystical
experiences in the 1970s referred him back to Jung’s work and its
esoteric influences, including the Hermeticism of early modern thinkers
like Paracelsus, Jacob Boehme and Giordano Bruno, reflected in Dick’s
masterpiece Valis.

Like Jung, Dick turned to the esoteric traditions for help with healing,
as part of a response to the trauma that he had experienced and
perceived in the world around him (when he had a vision of Asclepius
he asked for medical attention). We can understand Dick’s mysticism
in the context of the Kabbalistic tradition of Tikkun Olam, or repair

26
of the world to bring it closer to a state of harmony. Just as the Jungian
alchemist seeks to bring light to the darkness of the Unconscious, the
Kabbalist performing Tikkun Olam redeems the spark trapped in the
darkness of matter.

In what is perhaps his most terrifying novel The Three Stigmata

of Palmer Eldritch (source of the Devil card in PKD Tarot) Dick
portrayed a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by global warming. Dickian
spirituality must be seen as a response to the oppressive trauma inflicted
on the environment by a Satanic and mechanised world order that Dick
recast using his own spiritual archetypes such as the ‘Black Iron Prison’.

Dick’s response to the climate grief he experienced and expressed in

his fiction was to articulate a new gnostic spirituality which envisioned
salvation in terms of an escape from the horrors of capitalism. The
situation may be bleak but there is some hope. There are redemptive
possibilities in the dissolution of pseudo-realities, by means of gnostic
signals from a transcendent beam of information-rich light.

27
The Lovers
Federico Campagna
‘The Gods, who live on Mount Olympus, first fashioned a golden race
of mortals; … like the Gods they lived with happy hearts, untouched by
work and sorrow. … And then this race was hidden in the ground. But
still they live as spirits of the earth, holy and good. … The Gods, who
live on Mount Olympus, next fashioned a lesser, silver race of mortals.
… A child was raised at home a hundred years and played, huge baby,
by his mother’s side. When they were grown and reached their prime,
they lived brief, anguished lives. … The earth then hid this second
race, and they are called the spirits of the underworld. … And Zeus the
father made a race of bronze, … worse than the silver race, but strange
and full of power. They loved the groans of violence and war; … their
weapons were made of bronze, their houses bronze. But when this race
was covered by the earth, the son of Kronos made another, fourth, …
more just and good, a godlike race of heroes, who are called the demi-
gods – the race before our own. … Far-seeing Zeus then made another
race, the fifth, who live now on the fertile earth. I wish I was not of this
race, that I had died before, or had not been born. This is the race of
iron.’*

There was a long period, during the centuries of Western modernity,

when time was believed to move unstoppably forward, towards ‘mag-
nificent, progressive destinies’.† With the same intensity of belief as the
moderns, though in an opposite direction, their Greek ancestors saw
time as an implacable regression towards the abyss. Gold, silver, bronze,
and finally iron: the ages of the Anthropocene, according to Hesiod, are
a sequence of steps descending ever lower, until Zeus will finally decide
to put a merciful end to our debacle. It was from within this feeling of
a catastrophic decline, so profound as to be an attribute of reality itself,
that the splendours and triumphs of Classical Greece were planned
and realised. This might sound baffling. What would be the point of
attempting to do anything beautiful or valuable, if every second that
passes gets us closer to a pit of degradation and destruction? There must
have been something else that rescued the Greeks from what could have
been otherwise a reasonable abandonment to catatonic life.

  Hesiod, Works and Days (pp. 109–73), translated by Dorothea Wender

*

†
   G. Leopardi, La Ginestra
29
A trace of this saving medicine can be found already in Hesiod’s lines,
where it gleams like an interruption in the avalanche of the ages. The
race of heroes, incongruously emerging between those of bronze and
of iron, is an exception to the flow of time itself. For a few generations,
while the heroes took over the stage of the world, decline seemed to be
almost suspended. Although the freedom of mortals remained restricted
by the pitiless bonds of Ananke (divine Necessity, superior even to the
Gods), nonetheless it was possible to suspend their fall through the
ravine of time. It took heroes to do so – and not just one hero, but a
whole world that was full of them

‘But who are the heroes?’ asked Hermogenes to Socrates.

With the typical irony that clothed his wisdom, Socrates replied: ‘I
think that there is no difficulty in explaining, for the name is not much
altered, and signifies that they were born of love (eros)… Do you not
know that the heroes are demigods? … All of them sprang either
from the love of a God for a mortal woman, or of a mortal man for a
Goddess; think of the word in the old Attic, and you will see better
that the name heros is only a slight alteration of Eros, from whom the
heroes sprang. Either this is the meaning, or, if not this, then they must
have been skilful as rhetoricians and dialecticians, and able to put the
question (erotan), for eirein is equivalent to legein. … All this is easy
enough; the noble breed of heroes are a tribe of sophists and rhetors.’*

Like Odysseus, who was among their ranks, the heroes were not only
sailors or warriors but also storytellers; rhapsodes capable of catching
time in its falls and of suspending it mid-air through the ravine of
the ages. Conscious of being partly fictional themselves, the heroes
knew how to enter the narrative wheel of time and to arrest its course.
Only the heroes could postpone the final catastrophe of the world; not
indefinitely, alas, but only as long as their song continued.

Then, an end came for them, too.

‘Foul wars and dreadful battles ruined some; some sought the flocks of
Oedipus and died in Cadmus’ land, at seven-gated Thebes; and some,
who crossed the open sea in ships, … were killed at Troy.’ Thus ended
  Plato, Cratylus (397 CE), translated by Benjamin Jowett
*

30
the first age of heroes. And yet, Hesiod continues, they still live to this
day ‘a carefree life, besides the whirling Ocean, on the Blessed Isles.’*
The heroes have moved very little from the world, entering a realm
whose distance from us is ‘vertical’ rather than geographical. Safe on
the Blessed Isles, like the Mahdi of Shiism who lived in hiding over the
past thousand years, the heroes reside within the heart of each mortal as
one of their existential possibilities.

To reach them in their abodes, and to lull oneself for a moment in

an imaginary suspension of time, a little bit of fantasy suffices – even
the sarcastic expedition of Lucian of Samosata, in the True Story,
managed to land on the shores of the Blessed Isles. To awaken them
again and to bring them back into the world, however, is an altogether
different task – and one that mortals cannot face on their own. It took a
generation of exceptional lovers before them to make heroes spring out
of the devastated soil of the age of bronze. Under the aegis of Eros, an
amorous knot was formed between mortals and Gods, and from this
knot emerged the aberrant event of the heroic age.

As it happened then, in the time of myth, so again it happens today, in

the age of iron-turned-silicon. Time continues to precipitate towards
the abyss, and the hand of Zeus appears impatient to pose an end to
this chapter in the anthology of the world. As it was the case then, so
today it is still possible to suspend our fall through the narrowing walls.
Today as ever, a net of mortal words, arranged in the shape of a ‘beau-
tiful narration’, of a kosmos, remains capable of catching our collapse
mid-air.

But our present generation wasn’t born out of the love between a mortal
and a God. Before us, the race of iron has done its best to sanitise the
sky and the earth from any trace of what is ineffable or divine. Our
birth was under nefarious omens. We are not the heroes: our words
are too stiff and frayed to be woven into a net as wide as a kosmos. The
quest of our generation cannot be to save time from its own collapse.
Again, the phantom of catatonia returns, as it did during the Greek
era… And it whispers: ‘What can you do, now, if you’re unable to
act effectively on the world?’ We cannot be heroes, but we can create
the conditions for others, after us, to be them. We can repopulate the
   Lucian of Samosata, True Story, II, pp. 5–28
*

31
sky and the earth in the same way as Eros, ‘born out of poverty and
expediency’,* can render fruitful even the most barren soil. Like those
who betrayed the age of bronze and its degradations, we can be the
exceptional lovers that bind once again the race of mortals and that
of the Gods. Even though we cannot conquer time, we have still the
freedom to betray our own time. Trans-dimensional lovers, we can be
the immediate ancestors of the heroes.

   Plato, Symposium (203c)

*

32
The Chariot
Hoa Nguyen
Greedy, The Chariot can serve the needs of self, ego-in-the-world,
poised on the edge of a fortified city. The I wants to go faster at rest, can
be seen currently as car exhaust on King’s Highway 401. Vroom vroom

But The Chariot is also The Lovers’ after-echo, the small sun of the
solar plexus as a you/I, connected to grand purpose.

‘[The Chariot is] transformation and triumph... reach[ing] into the

divine river of energy’ – Rachel Pollack

See The Chariot depicted at ease with the mythological Sphinx, symbol
of time, calm in endlessness, rivering.

Transformational reaching as a symbol of directed-will, The Chariot

holds a potential for recovery and repair, in kinship to the other major
seven of the deck, The Star.

How might The Chariot arrive as a means for soulful self-collection

despite catastrophe?

There is no winning having already won.

A you collective calls, as transcript:

seek violet / gold interface co-powered :

language plant intelligence emergent :

no dominance and extraction :

appreciation drive

singular / plural gesture

affinity branching

directed by stars

34
Arrive as generative presents / presence

moving yet rooted

writer as a voice glyph

of perfected purpose / unbound by time

Already at home, readied.

Are you ready?

35
Strength
Bones Tan-Jones
 being at one with ourselves and our isolation requires strength.

we must celebrate the ways we have adapted to protect ourselves. for

home may be a place of safety as well as entrapment. self-defence is
more than a punch to the face or a kick in the groin: it is a holistic
practice that exists in the many ways we go about our days, navigating
our lives and boundaries. how can we find ways into health when our
healthcare system is so overloaded? how can we expand our empathy
outwards?

in times like these i turn to what is around me — the plants and herbs
of the land, and my cupboards. the medicine is within.

i would like to share with you a potion, an ancient recipe passed down
through the mouths of many witches. recently this remedy was the
subject of a legal trademark battle in massachusetts. happily, the herb-
alists won, successfully defending fire cider as a medicine of the people
that cannot be patented by anyone.

fire cider
an immunity boosting tonic
an excellent way to connect with plants and herbs that you keep in your
everyday kitchen
re-defining them in terms of their power.

many of these herbs are interchangeable, depending on what you have at

the time of need.
the main ingredients are onion, garlic, ginger, oranges, lemons, hot
peppers (of your choice) and horseradish.

with intention, slice all your ingredients and place in a glass jar.
pour apple cider vinegar over them until all the ingredients are
submerged.
place in a cool dark place for optimal benefits.
each day, give the jar a shake or turn to let the liquid seep through all of
the herbs.
it is preferable to let the mixture brew for four weeks or longer; however,
the tonic can be drunk after a few days.

37
 i invite you to write, on a piece of paper, all the things you can think
of that make you feel strong, your inner strengths. celebrate these of
yourself.
place this paper under the jar for the length of time you have decided.
during your daily jar shakes, speak aloud your strengths, imbuing the
liquid with your power.

when ready to bottle, sieve out all the large ingredients and seal the
liquid in a glass bottle.
you can take a teaspoon daily, in the morning and night, to boost your
immune system. if you feel the onset of cold symptoms, increase to
hourly consumption.
you can also take a teaspoon in hot water, with honey or your choice of
sweetener.

this is just one simple kitchen witch’s tool to maintaining a strong inner
fire.
what are your daily tools for survival?

38
The Hermit
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
now that you know that you are a planet, touch your continents, observe
your shorelines. tend to the holes you burnt into your atmosphere.
breathe. and since you are mostly ocean, honour your saline capacity
and cry, or sweat, or spit if you have to. let your own depth astonish you.
feel the heat of your core.

now that you know that you are a planet, consider your orbit. thank
yourself for the grace it took not to crash into other heavenly bodies.
balance your magnetism and your push. and thank the reckless meteors
that did scrape you. now you can call their deposits mineral and jewel.
finger the ridges of your scars and say this word: mine. remember that
no one can dig into you without your permission. it is for you to make
mountains, it is for you to make valleys out of what happens. listen to
your faultlines, the intimate edges of your hunger.

now that you know that you are a planet, be round around yourself
and whole. be old and patient with your days, remembering how you
used to be before oxygen was such a big deal. let yourself look back on
your sulphuric youth and then laugh at yourself, never forgetting how
that part of you still lives deep in your caves waiting. think back to the
time when everything that now makes up your day would have been
impossible for you to imagine.

now that you know that you are a planet, ask your rivers what they
want. ask them where they want to go, what and who they want to
nourish, and how much. meditate on your flood plains, the mud of you,
the fertile place of stuck. notice what is growing. acknowledge who
keeps coming back.

now that you know that you are a planet, listen to your sky. note exactly
where the lighting only almost lands. play with your clouds but lightly,
they will help you understand. the edge of you is not the end. and at the
end of you this is not over.

planet, choose three of your recent planetary occurrences and describe

them to yourself. how do they occur on the scale of your inner life?:

rain
earthquake

40
wildfire
birth of a mountain ridge
whirlpool
lightning storm
tornado
thunder
overheating
winter
pollution
resurgence of an ‘extinct’ species
erosion
hurricane
pull of the moon on the ocean
clearcut
monsoon
whale migration
butterfly migration
meteor landing
volcanic eruption
coral bleaching
healing of a rainforest
birth of a new element
el nino
cooling of the ocean
pandemic within a parasitic species
explosion of a nearby star
diamond
birth of an island
melting glacier
wind

41
The Wheel of Fortune
Nisha Ramayya
The Wheel of Fortune is the tenth card in the deck and rich with nu-
meric symbolism in its occasions of three, four, and ten. These numbers
can be interpreted is many ways: three rivers flowing through the earth
body, three sounds comprising the seed mantra om, three qualities of
all really existing things (whiteness, redness, and blackness). Four sides
of the triangle in space, four stages of vāc (voice, speech, language, and
sound; conceived as a goddess in Tantric Hindu philosophy), a poetic
meter made up in fours. Ten directions, ten Mahāvidyās (great wisdom
goddesses), ten states of the body produced by love.

The wheel itself might be the spinning wheel as turned by the Fates; or
the discus, thrown by Viṣṇu to cut Satī’s corpse into fifty-or-so pieces;
or the wheel used for raising water from a well; or the sun god’s chariot
as it rolls over his dominion; or a potter’s wheel; or the circle of a
peacock’s tail; or the belly-button, as used for mystical purposes. Before
counting your luck, remember that the wheel of fortune is sometimes
regarded as a weapon; a weapon without rule even for the ones that
wield it; it chops, it drags, it turns, it turns.

Infatuation

Beginning again, the goddess is rendered susceptible. Her body sets the coordi-
nates of the whole wide world, but she herself is stuck: believing in the reality
of worldly objects; watching the news; falling in the direction of the wound.
She falls upon the grave of the wilful child, upon the raised arm of the corpse.
A tree trunk stops five arrows. Sara Ahmed’s rod as the will of the parent, our
arms as life after death. Bhanu Kapil’s mother’s memory of a woman who
had freed her arms. Nat Raha’s arms kind and close arms, brown arms and
private disarmed. The two of us with Sandeep Parmar with David Marriott
with Suzanne Césaire’s arms of miraculous refusal, talking, taking notes. This
tender extraction of ourselves from our wounds.

mūrchana / making stupid

An unreasoning passion, an extra-

-vagant folly. ‘I can’t remember who
he was or who I was or what we did
or how.’ A military show, her arms.

43
Making stupid, stand in business, ‘by the
jingling of ’ class stupefaction in love
as the strong one ‘their bracelets | as they bend
their graceful’ breaking off their weakest arms.

Progress swooning your mother possessed by

origins exhibit origins
administrative affect ‘a motion’
nervous ‘to embrace’ system of the arm.

Mind ‘I went away and made you distant.’

A rise or fall of enjoying sounds ‘while
our arms were busied’ a noose a sword a
severed head while we confer boons in arms.

‘The lotus stems’ ‘that built the house’ what the

fuck you talking for causing inertia
‘lotus stems’ you profit allegories
profit ‘when they become his’ contract arms.

‘They fly out of my’ making fatuous

increase of fires in India they’d let
them all burn view from insensible swoon
‘I dream of babies’ with multiple arms.

Ignorance as the strong one: ‘It’s a sort

of wedding night.’ You are very dreadful
as the horned one you look in a mirror
breaking the long bones of jingling disarm.

Good omen in women bad omen men

‘the Production of Terrorism Act’
hand in hand combat public for granted
‘stirs her will’ overseas ‘but not her arms’.

Golden state violence withered state love

‘holding her legs up’ demand and supply
stand well mother under collateral
pride of the rod curled as the hair bare arms.

44
‘Will of the parent’ waving from windows
winnowing baskets learned from the parents
‘hands attached & gathered’ produce neighbours
‘dead labour’ tongue your enemy your arms.

mohana / infatuating

The being deluded of assurance

infatuate national ‘must take me too’
lovers not ‘bothered to burn’ divine arms.

Lovesick of ‘the rod of the sovereign’

she sits on the rod ‘of miraculous

refusal’ the paint peeling off her arms.

Blissful sounds mind I told you embarrassed

describe a ‘graceful gateway’ mind parting
mind melding unlikeness envy disarm.

‘Her fill’ of likeness thrown out the window

thrown into white corners her ‘skilful stroke’
confers wounds fair-weather sister in arms.

Your children are browner your making light

‘call them terrorists’ brown ‘birds mixed with men’
thrown against the wall you’re twice-born of arm.

Your children are white like your fine armour

fathoming get to fuck measures of love.
‘She stretches.’ Deferring embrace wreck arms.

We are falling from clouds we are quick to

distance embrace former bump ‘so tightly
she shall not go’ mishear boop ‘call to arms’.

The institution of their brooms ‘exposed

as violence’ feeding on enjoyment
of the earth kindness and kindness link arms.

45
Enjoying self as ‘smooth and cool as pearls’
you come home to smiling to downcast eyes
gestures bloodied by the love in your arms.

Poor pronunciation of the greeting

smile ‘they could not rebel’ look down ‘without
moral weapon’ sigh ‘they could not bear arms’.

mohanāstra / attacking

Attacking ‘aliquots’ passed ‘like bricks’ arms.

Against whom it is directed disarmed.
Water levels rising ‘shades of ’ their arms.
Wounded pulling out of mind I said arm.
Fall on the pale of the ally cut arms.
Love in exile one to another’s arms.
Constitute alien class confuse arms.
Social can get to statecraft attack ‘armed
Neutrality’ attack many crossed arms.
Irrational in bed fleeing from arms.

rocana / making bright

Radiant arm.
‘Consciousness arm.
Of kind’ make arm.
Can get to armed.
Fuck bright bend arm.
Twitching make armed.
Exciter arm.
Brown sphere fake arms.
Embrace disarm.
Secure stars armed.

saṁdīpana / setting on fire

‘A gude’ arm.
Setting arms.

46
‘Cause maks’ arm.
On fire armed.
‘A strong arm’.
Failsafe arms.
Many armed.
Take brown arms.
Inflame arms.
Fall to arms.

47
Justice
Himali Singh Soin
the suffix -ice, describing the state of

Justice is anti-polar, but it is held together by the poles. It is the cold

of land in conjunction with the heat of the body. It is the non-binary
binary. Light and weight, wait, no matter what, and in which spirit,
coolly distant or then closeness that comes at a cost. -ice, the suffix, -ice,
describing a three-way of being. Just-ice is in-between these things.
When ice trines fire. It is the apotheosis of antipodes, the obscure
energy and the clarity of the crystal, it is the lake, the reflection of the
sky in the lake and you looking out at the lake, all at once.

Justice hears its own echo for miles. My, language that gathers like a
ghost inside you. Overflowing, you pour mood and structure, word and
margin equally, into two crevasses. From here, you can see yourself,
long and thin in the brass of the binocular. A mood is a structure, a
word a margin. Ritually, it swings one way –

Justice, Promethean leveller of frost and fever, is suspended on a berg

between the dewy motion of the glacier and the thrash of the sea, and
appreciates the waiting. Justice may fall. The Chorus of Spirits invokes
it. What follows is a close reading of the Chorus of Spirits’ speech in
Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound.

Travelled o’er by dying gleams; 679

Be it bright as all between
Cloudless skies and windless streams,
Silent, liquid, and serene;
As the birds within the wind,
As the fish within the wave,
As the thoughts of man’s own mind
Float through all above the grave;
We make there our liquid lair,
Voyaging cloudlike and unpent
Through the boundless element: 689

Justice is a medium between the poet and you, between cloudless skies
and windless streams. A state of bounded boundlessness – stressed
syllables but no definite period – expands and contracts the lines, which
swell and shrink as they ripple through the stanza. Justice pendulums

49
between past and future, holding together a present made up of the
parts that make up the whole span of time, just like the singular
Chorus, made up of a collection of entities. Each line comprises three
trochaic feet with a half-foot catalexis; an expected tetrameter whose
missing syllable suggests a kind of refusal to end. Prometheus hangs on.

Justice comets out to where you think you will never go: Travelled o’er
by dying gleams. Dying seems antithetical to gleam, yet it pinpoints
a cosmic quandary: the light that reaches us long after a star – in a
constant process of compression – has combusted. The photons inside a
star lose energy over their lifetime, till its wavelengths are visible: The
line ends with a semicolon, ; , visually mimicking the particle-wave
duality of light, leaving you to live in the afterlife of the line.

This sense of the self extends into the next line. The letter ‘b’ alliterates
– Be it bright as all between – and in doing so, calls attention to the
verb ‘to be’. Justice is the preposition o’er and between, tipping from the
metaphysical to the meta-poetic, so that it considers how to reconfigure
a tender future while remembering its ruthless, Icarian trajectory.

Justice is all, and -less. The words pivot on an axis of antithetical imag-
ery: bright and dying; birds and fish, man’s mind and the grave. Bright
and between; skies and streams; silent and serene; wind and wave; man
and mind; liquid and lair: alliteration calls attention to the letter within
language and the alphabet within the lexicon.

Float through all above the grave, the heavy, consonant-ridden word,
grave, marks a concrete cul-de-sac. Suddenly, you feel the weight of
Prometheus’ past and his potential fate, but this is quickly overcome by
the lightness and lyric of liquid lair and voyaging, cloudlike. The idea of
liquid is flux, and to harness habitat in water is to necessarily live with
change. Words will change with every re-interpretation. The berg is
only as big as fear.

In pursuit of an origin story, the Chorus of Spirits repeatedly intones

like and as. The Chorus exists only by virtue of metaphor and simile:
ultimately a construction of the poet’s craft. The metaphors them-
selves – as the birds within the wind, as the fish within the wave, as
the thoughts of man’s own mind, cloudlike – become mediums. The

50
analogies deceive you with an expectation of a secondary clause, which
never appears. This is the boundless element: the ever-changing idea
that cannot be defined, Justice’s need for your judgement.

The Chorus of Spirits validates its existence via a process of apophasis,

that is, by demarcating what it is not. Its last verdict, as a collective,
claims that the boundless element is that which begins and ends in thee!
Once the collective has fragmented, a particle within a wave, the First
Spirit proclaims that the soul of Love is that which begins and ends in
thee. Could the boundless element be love? Not the love of justice, but
the justice of love.

That ineffable other, the one that can only be described via metaphor.
It is itself that it carries across: it is a meta-medium. Love is the chorus
of our ancestors, those that continue to live after they have died; the
pulse and the throb of word and breath; the grains of sand in glass; the
theft of ice and its immortal ability to keep us; you and me; the endless
source, –ice as a way, –ice as an end. Just-ice is cradled by something
that comes after crown and sword, by even and mean.

51
The Hanged One
Nā-kojā-Ābād
This is the last transmission of 22 Moons and it comes in two forms: audio
and text. The audio is a meditative practice that will guide you on a yoga
nidra journey. Touch the dreamworld. This audio can be accessed here
(right click, save as).

To practise the yoga nidra, you will need a pair of headphones and a quiet
space where you can lie down on your back. Ensure you are warm and
comfortable. You may wish to use a pillow, blanket and an eyemask. Put on
the headphones and play the audio file, then follow the instructions.

You open your eyes to the morning light, rising before the other souls
wake.

The air is fresh and green. The scent of last night’s rain lingers; gems of
moonwater upon the grass glisten in the dawning light. You leave your
home, which you have known since birth, which made you. You walk.
You are looking for something.

The morning sky above you is an unfamiliar red. Crimson. The streets
are silent. In the Chinese garden, there is a moongate. A stone portal
arching over an electric grid covered in ivy. A tunnel that is also a key.

In the garden you meet a stranger. ‘Where are you from?’, you ask. The
reply is this: ‘I come from Nā-kojā-Ābād.’

‘What horizon did you penetrate to come here?’ you ask. They respond:
‘The red door to the temple is guarded by two elephants, both vomiting
rainbows. Their vomit meets in the sky above them and fuses to form
a lunette. The lunette is decorated with brides-to-be standing a corpse-
width apart. One is to be enjoyed; one worshipped only. The brides are
protected by lions, who are nothing like the real police sitting across
the street from the real temple. They protect and enforce the reality that
requires them; you do not require them.’

She gives you a gift. It is something you already possess. You close your
eyes and enter the temple covered in leaves, pushing open the red door.
The temple (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite,
perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. A sphere whose exact
center is any hexagon and whose circumference is unattainable. The

53
Library (which others call the universe) has existed for eternity. A place
where no matter how long you walk, you will arrive back at the point of
departure. A mirrorworld of your own making.

Suspended from a tree, which rises high into the sky and reaches down
into the centre of the earth, you turn into the void inside yourself and
meet your twin on the convex surface of the sphere of spheres.

Surrender to the stillness of a world in endless flux. The topography of

images of the eighth climate is a labyrinth, yet to be resolved.

a halo of light composed of crimson triangles. a yellow square. an unfinished

jigsaw that bears your name. a white cat lost in mist. your twin dancing
holding a black egg. the saltwater we come from, splashing. the sea serpent
mother. the water still inside us, still above and below us. your ankles wet
from monsoon rain. your hands holding orbs of emerald light. an iridescent
flash, the opal surface, mercury rising. lost on a t-shaped highway. the ther-
mometer cold under your tongue. the crackle of melting ice. long grass of green
crystal. futures flowers. a thousand-petalled lotus opens and closes. a universe
of tessellating white flags. your grandfather’s clock striking twelve. the book of
hours, painted in gold leaf. pictures of you. you. you.

54
Death
Ariana Reines
DELTA DELTA DELTA
CHANGE CHANGE CHANGE

Welcome to the winter of our surrender and to the season, also, of our
tireless work.

The Unnamed is a living energy. A thin, living person – with a red heart
at the base of the spine and bloody genitals, this reaper is the indiscrim-
inate giver of the planet’s most mysterious and universal blessing. This
card means surrender and this card means change. This card reminds
you: there is more, far more to this reality than what you can see.

And furthermore, to filter a Rilke quote through the contemporary

panopticon: here there is no place that does not see you.

It’s a time of surrender, but this surrender expresses itself through labor.
This card is the card of a worker. The work is endless and to do it right
requires a kind of sainthood.

Things have gotten to such a point that we all are being forced,
reshaped, into sainthood. There is no escape: we must change. Death is
one form of alchemy, but there are many kinds of death. The blood at
the base of this figure’s spine signifies life force, the continuity of life,
and the mirthful boner of real honesty. To know oneself, which used
to be the dictum of philosophy, is no longer the luxury of philosophers.
We cannot pay others to do our thinking and our knowing for us. Just
being alive on the planet right now implies a Bodhisattva vow: one that
you have already taken, whether or not you remember it. We are here to
help one another change. We can none of us escape the metallic shock
of blood on our blade. It is also true that in order to live at all we have
to cross the charnel ground, literally stepping over dead bodies, moving
from bardo to bardo among beings in torment, delusion, and pain. And
we ourselves are the dismembered bodies upon that ground, our craving
hands still reaching up in yearning. This is where we work. It is on this
strange terrain that we marry the truth, and in so doing, transform fate
into destiny.

You know what is wrong with you. Marry that until it drops. Surrender
to it now. Build your virtue not upon some vague yearning to become

56
someone else, but on the X-ray vision of a being that can’t even SEE
lies, let alone engage with them. This realm is a holograph; I am not
asking you to shame yourself. I am asking you to trust what feels dead,
let it die, do not slow down or stop as you swing your sickle across the
ruined fields and burned-out majesties of who you yearned to have
become right now. I am saying: you must keep going, CHANGE
CHANGE CHANGE, for the being that knows us all at our most
secret has the world under its acid eye right now. Does it feel leaden?
Hell yes. But the only way out is through.

57
Temperance
Suzanne Treister
The flight beyond the Kuiper Belt through turquoise stardust enveloped
death of cyber dreams of old Earth in century-based spans of Moon
worship becoming ultimately un(space)timely lost and deprived of
sustainable ecologies internalised by hope exacerbated by greed and lost
by billions despite the now euphoric travelling sensation through cosmic
particles bathed in light no longer required but there in any case despite
it all and beyond it all.

An unlikely powerful sensation overcoming millenia of civilised

theories of what and when and how and why and if not now when? Now
is then the time, the spacetime, the non-time with no past or future
for anyone to inhabit or mourn or look towards but a time of sorts
nonetheless.

Lost clouds of spacetime, lost music, untethered data, revolving in-

wards, breathing openly, transmitting messages, what messages, I know
you want to know, I know you want to know. The Earth and its Moon
were-are one and the same as is all of it. The Universe is the Metaverse
is Dark Matter is the Singularity is the Cosmic Reproduction are the
wars between hitherto invisible planets is the passing of forgotten
futures is the raising of impossible hopes and the death of the Human
Race.

In our communal death is the inevitability of what they call beyond

time or what we call after the event, a place we will never inhabit nor
love from a distance because it does not include us but we can start to
think and plan for our non-inclusion because that is what we do, we
are geared for control of everything we consider outside ourselves even
when everything we think we know is only ever always already inside
ourselves just waiting to turn on the projector in that spacetimed-out
psychoanalytic sense perhaps or that void with eyes looking out, beyond
the Kuiper belt, beyond our vision, beyond our minds, beyond it all. So
over it all, so soon.

But now the stars rush towards the spacecraft at light speed casting
green shadows of lost ecosystems in our path towards the single moon
of Earth, the two moons of Mars, the five moons of Pluto, the thirteen
moons of Neptune, the twenty-seven moons of Uranus, the sixty-two
moons of Saturn and the sixty-seven moons of Jupiter and we are out,

59
out there beyond the solar system, out there beyond our mind’s eye.
And there looking at us, un-judging or datacollecting or even really
noticing us, is the end.

But sometimes the end contains a beginning. Ask the algorithm at the
next séance. Ask the schoolteacher, ask the politician, ask the electri-
cian, ask the technoshaman, now switch on the lights.

60
The Devil
Caspar Heinemann
GOATSE OF THE HEART

(OR ‘A MISSIVE ON THE DEVIL ON THE OCCASION OF

THE VIRGO FULL MOON’
OR ‘LOVE IN THE TIME OF CORONAVIRUS’)

‘Have compassion for other people, especially when it’s hard, because
that resistance you feel when you don’t want to have compassion for
somebody, that’s just stretching, that’s just stretching, it doesn’t mean
that’s your limitation, it’s just stretching. I tweeted recently, jokingly,
that it’s like an anal training kit, to try to have compassion for people.
I’m like, ‘You feel that resistance, you feel that resistance?’ And then it’s
uncomfortable, it’s like ‘Just relax around it and see if you can go a little
bit bigger.’ So that’s my porn-witch answer. But I think people would be
surprised how much their heart can gape.’ – Bailey Jay, in conversation
on Ultraculture with Jason Louv

(DISCLAIMER: THIS IS A COLD READING, SO TAKE

WHAT YOU NEED AND COMPOST THE REST.*) MY
FRIEND CA CONRAD, FEATURED ON A PREVIOUS
MOON, HAS A BOOK CALLED ‘WRITING IN ALL CAPS
IS THE BREATH MINT OF THE SOUL’. I’M TURNING TO
THIS TACTIC NOW BECAUSE NOT ONLY IS IT MINTY,
REFRESHING, AND SOCIALLY LUBRICATING, BUT
ALSO CREATES WIDER EXPANSES AND OPENINGS IN
INDIVIDUAL LETTERS AND THE SPACES BETWEEN
THEM, EXPANSES THAT FEEL PERSONALLY AND
SOCIETALLY VALUABLE RIGHT NOW. I CAN FEEL
THE CAPS GAPS ERODING IN MYSELF A RECENT
DEPRESSIVE VACUUM-PACKING IMPULSE, AN IMPULSE
MIRRORED IN THE WORLD AT LARGE AS WE ATTEMPT
WIDESPREAD GLOBAL DISINFECTION. GORDON WHITE
IN A CORONAVIRUS HOT TAKE NEWSLETTER PROPOSED
‘The coronavirus didn’t cause this state of chaos, this state of chaos

   THIS PHRASE BORROWED FROM AN ESSAY COLLECTION

*

OF THE SAME NAME BY MARGARET KILLJOY

62
caused the coronavirus’* AND I BROADLY AGREE BUT I’M NOT
SURE THAT WHAT THIS IS, AT LEAST WHERE I AM
WRITING FROM IN NORTHERN EUROPE, IS A STATE OF
CHAOS SO MUCH AS A STATE OF MINOR BREACH OF
THE HERMETIC SEAL, EXPOSING GENERALLY LOW
LEVELS OF TOLERANCE FOR PERCEIVED BREACHES
OF BOUNDARIES (BODILY OR OTHERWISE), A LOW
LEVEL OF TOLERANCE THAT HAS BEEN ABUNDANTLY
APPARENT IN MY BIRTH COUNTRY (ENGLAND) FOR
A LONG LONG TIME BEFORE CORONAVIRUS (SEE: 4+
YEAR ONGOING NATIONAL QUARANTINE PROJECT).
WHAT IS SCARY IS NOT REALLY THE RELATIVELY
MILD CORONAVIRUS ITSELF, BUT THE RACIALISED
AGGRESSION AND EVEN GREATER GENERALISED
ALIENATION RESULTING FROM FEAR AROUND IT.
LIKE AN OLD INJURY, THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE
INJURY ARE WORSE THAN THE THE INJURY ITSELF,
THE WAYS WE TIGHTEN AND CONSTRICT TO PREVENT
SUFFERING, CREATING FURTHER SUFFERING. YOU’RE
NOT MORE LIKELY TO GET CORONAVIRUS IF YOU SMILE
AT THE PERSON COUGHING THAN YOU ARE IF YOU
SCOWL. MY THEME FOR THIS FULL MOON IN VIRGO
IS LETTING GO OF THE IDEA THAT MY LIFE WILL BE
BETTER INSIDE A HEAVILY ARMOURED FORTRESS
WITH OTHER PEOPLE OUTSIDE OF IT, INCLUDING MY
INTERNAL LIFE.

WHEN IT COMES TO COMPASSION, COPS AND CEOS ARE

MY EDGE, THE PLACE I REALLY FEEL THE STRETCH
AND STRUGGLE TO GIVE IN AND LET MORE IN. FOR
THIS REASON, THE BIG EMBARRASSING QUESTION
THAT HAS BEEN HAUNTING ME IN RECENT MONTHS IS
HOW TO PROPOSE ACAB (HOW MUCH LESS IMPACTFUL
WHEN EVERYTHING IS ALL CAPS!) WITH COMPASSION.
BUT THE ONLY TOPIC POTENTIALLY MORE
EMBARRASSING TO WRITE ABOUT THAN ROMANTIC
LOVE FOR A SPECIFIC OTHER IS NON-ROMANTIC LOVE
   I’M WRITING WITHOUT INTERNET RIGHT NOW SO THIS
*

COULD BE SLIGHTLY MISQUOTED

63
FOR EVERY OTHER. SEARCHING FOR A STARHAWK
QUOTE ABOUT HOW EVERYTHING POWERFUL
WILL NECESSARILY APPEAR IN OUR CULTURE AS
EMBARRASSING, I APPROPRIATELY COME UP AGAINST
A PAYWALL FOR A NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE TITLED
‘WHAT IS YOUR MOST POLITICALLY INCORRECT
FANTASY?’ FROM 1997 I.E. BEFORE HALF THE POLITICAL
SPHERE EXPLICITLY BECAME PEOPLE GETTING OFF
ON THE IDEA OF ENACTING THEIR MOST POLITICALLY
INCORRECT FANTASIES. THE PROBLEM IS THAT
DESPITE THIS CESSPIT, A CULTURE THAT SEEKS TO
ELIMINATE POLITICALLY INCORRECT FANTASY IN THE
REALM OF FANTASY IS ALSO A (MORE MINOR) CESSPIT.
STEEPED IN CHAMOMILE TEA AND BUDDHISM,
WHAT I HAVE BEEN TRYING TO RECONCILE WITH
IS HOW COMPASSION SOMETIMES FEELS LIKE MY
MOST POLITICALLY INCORRECT FANTASY. OR MAYBE
MY MOST POLITICALLY INCORRECT FANTASY IS WE
DISREGARD THE NOTION THAT ANYONE TRULY
BENEFITS FROM OPPRESSION.* WHICH IS NOT TO SAY
THAT EVERYONE SUFFERS EQUALLY WITHIN IT, BUT
IT’S NOBODY’S BEST LIFE. I RECENTLY REALISED MY
TEENAGE NOTION OF EVIL BUSINESSMEN DESTROYING
THE WORLD FOR ‘PROFIT’ DIDN’T CHECK OUT
BECAUSE ON AN INDIVIDUAL LEVEL NOBODY DOES
ANYTHING FOR ‘PROFIT’, THEY DO IT IN A MISPLACED
ATTEMPT TO ACCESS A FEELING OF SECURITY, SAFETY,
SELF-WORTH, BELONGING, ETC. AND I REMEMBER
FEELING ANNOYED AT THE INVOLUNTARY AROUSAL
OF COMPASSION. THERE IS A LOT OF BONDAGE IN
ATTEMPTING TO REMAIN DISCRETE.

WHAT HAS THIS GOT TO DO WITH THE DEVIL?

CONTRARY TO POPULAR THEOLOGY, THE DEVIL IS
NOT REBELLION AGAINST ESTABLISHED ORDER – THE
DEVIL IS A COP. THE COP. THE COP IN YOUR HEAD

   MY THINKING ON THIS OWES A LOT TO RADICAL

*

DHARMA BY JASMINE SYEDULLAH, LAMA ROD OWENS, AND

angel Kyodo Williams
64
WHO DECIDES WHAT BELONGS AND WHAT DOES NOT.
THIS IS DIFFICULT BECAUSE IT SEEMS TO INSCRIBE
THE POLICE INTO ARCHETYPAL PERMANENCE, A
PERMANENCE THAT IS THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT I
INTEND. INSTEAD I COULD SAY A COP IS A DEVIL. OR
WE GOT RID OF SPIRITUAL DEVILS AND REPLACED
THEM WITH PHYSICAL COPS. THIS IS NOT THE POLICE
AS PERPETUAL BUT THE POLICE AS ONE HORRIFIC
MANIFESTATION OF AN ENLIGHTENMENT CLEANSING
IMPULSE THAT MANY OF US HAVE WORK TO DO IN
UNDOING. ONE ASPECT OF THIS IS THE IDEA THAT
WE ARE MOST OURSELVES WHEN MOST CUT OFF
FROM EVERYTHING THAT IS NOT ‘OUR’ ‘SELVES’. THE
DEVIL IS ABOUT BOUNDARIES, HOW TO BE IN RIGHT
RELATIONSHIP TO THE BOUNDARIES WE NEED. IT’S
ABOUT OUR BOUNDARIES AROUND BOUNDARIES. I AM
THINKING ABOUT THE BOUNDARY THAT PLACES SOME
PEOPLE AS FUNDAMENTALLY IRREDEEMABLE AND
THE SUFFERING WE CAUSE OURSELVES IN HOPING FOR
SOMETHING BETTER WHILST HOLDING THAT TO BE
THE IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERCOME OBSTACLE.

I WAS THINKING ABOUT THIS WHILE WEARING A NEW

SHIRT MY FRIEND JAKE KENT MADE, OF TWO TEDDY
BEARS EMBRACING SURROUNDED BY THE PHRASE
‘Loving you is easy…because you’re not a cop’, POLITICS SEEM
MUCH EASIER WHEN WE OPERATE WITH A SINGLE
CLEAR DESTROYABLE ENEMY WHO IS THE REASON
THINGS ARE NOT THE WAY WE WISH THEY WERE.
SADLY, THIS EMPHASIS ON THE ENEMY WHO IS NOT
US IS STRATEGICALLY AND PERSONALLY FUTILE AS IT
MAKES THE FORCED CHANGE OR DESTRUCTION OF
ANOTHER THE PREREQUISITE FOR A MORE LIVEABLE
WORLD, WHICH HONESTLY DOESN’T SOUND VERY
LIVEABLE TO ME. WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO MAKE
THE CONSCIOUS DECISION TO DISREGARD NOBODY, TO
BUILD A POLITICS ON UNCONDITIONAL COMPASSION
WITHOUT EXPECTATION, ON THE LOVING THAT IS
HARD?

65
THIS IS ADAMANTLY NOT A LIBERAL CALL TO HAVE
TEA WITH NAZIS OR LOVE THE POLICE. I VISCERALLY
HATE THE POLICE AND AM NOT SEEKING TO FORCE
THAT OUT, THE COUNTERPRODUCTIVITY OF THAT
EFFORT TO FORCE OUT IS KIND OF THE POINT.
CLENCHING SO HARD TO KEEP EVERYTHING IN AND
OUT IS EXHAUSTING AND BAD FOR YOUR BREATHING,
SO I AM TRYING TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE WAYS IN
WHICH MY HATRED OF THE POLICE IS IN PART PARTS
OF MYSELF THAT I HATE (THE DESIRE TO MITIGATE
FEAR THROUGH CONTROL) BEING REFLECTED BACK
TO ME, AND HOW FTP IS ALSO UNDOING THIS DESIRE
TO CONTROL IN THE REALM THAT IS WITHIN MY
POWER TO CONTROL (MYSELF).

MY THOUGHT FOR YOU THIS FULL MOON IS: WHAT

HAPPENS IF WE TRY TO GOATSE OUR HEARTS, GAPE
A LITTLE WIDER, LET GO OF FATALISTIC PUNITIVE
ESSENTIALISM AND THE TOTAL DISIDENTIFICATION
OF OURSELVES WITH THE OTHER. TO PARAPHRASE
RAM DASS, WE ARE NEVER MORE OURSELVES THAN
WHEN WE LET GO OF OURSELVES AS SEPARATE.

ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS BUT NOT ONLY COPS ARE

COPS AND ALL COPS COULD NOT BE.

66
Marie White, the Mary-el Tarot

The Tower
Johanna Hedva
No Future

The Tower is the card of punks, that special kind of punk who knows
how to build a bomb out of wires and old batteries and sets it off for the
insurrection of it, but also for the lulz. The Tower is ‘NO FUTURE’
stick-and-poked onto a face. It’s that one guy in the pit at the hardcore
show, shirtless, rabid, wet eyes rife with a menace that makes everyone
around him give wide berth because you know that, tonight, he wants
to break himself, and if you get in the way, you’ll get broken too.

The Tower is the major arcana card ruled by Mars. Red planet. Ancient
god of violence, rage, and war. Mars is virility, physical strength, force,
warriors, athletes. Today, his reign would include guns, bombs, combus-
tion engines, and teargas. In appropriating Mars from the Greek war
god Ares, the Romans tried to smooth over Ares’ deranged bloodlust
(he demanded sacrifice in the form of puppies), but Mars is still savage,
from and of the wild, deity of thunder and storms, in some myths he
rides fire-breathing horses. In astrology, Mars shows what will incite
a person onto the metaphorical battlefield and what weapon they will
use when they’re on it. In death transits, Mars is the culprit of sudden,
unexpected accidents; injuries to the head. I like to point out that Aries,
the first sign of the zodiac, which happens on the spring equinox,
cracking through the ice of winter to begin the new astrological year, is
ruled by Mars.
To begin, to begin anything, we need a spark, a flame, a big bang, a fist
punching through a wall.

It’s masculine, but it doesn’t only belong to men. The Greek goddesses
of vengeance, the Erinyes (which the Romans made into the Furies),
are archetypally martial – when a crime has occurred, they transform
into shrieking winged creatures with blood shooting out of their eyes,
tormenting the perpetrator until he (almost always, he’s a he) is brought
to justice. The Tower is Medea killing her children and Jason’s new
wife – not because of jealousy, but because, by divorcing Medea, Jason
rendered her and their children stateless: murdering them was a political
act. I imagine, if Medea had had her cards read then, The Tower would
have appeared.
After the 2016 US election, I started wearing a pin on my lapel of The
Tower card.

68
As much as it is destruction and chaos, it is also generative. Crisis is
perhaps the most generative thing of all – the forest fire necessary for
new growth – for how many of us change unless we are forced to?

The Tower’s chaos is far more upheaving than the wisdom and con-
clusion of Death. When it came up in a reading for Asher Hartman
around a new play he was working on, he said, with relief, ‘Oh, good,’
and this changed everything I thought I knew about how to approach
The Tower. Asher told me that he hopes to get The Tower when he’s
making something new, because that’s how he knows the work is going
where it needs to, and that he should keep following it.
As an artist, feeling like you’re falling from a great height with your
head on fire is a sign that you’re being propelled forward by something
vehement, explosive, something that’s crackling alive and blasting apart
the ground beneath your feet, and what else should an artist hope to be
guided by than a force with enough rupture to raze everything to the
ground?

What are you doing with your art if it’s not blowing shit up? I’m not
talking about just any shit – The Tower is not simply chaos, it’s institu-
tional chaos, and it has actual, material consequences: the thing on fire
in The Tower card is the tower itself.

And remember: after The Tower, when you’ve landed in the charred
field, and the horizon is now visible in all directions, the space liberated,
flattened, purged, in the emancipated vacuum that arises after a great
disruption, you can see The Star.

69
The Star
Michelle Tea
In order to talk to The Star to discuss the apocalypse

Firstly, go into a trance.

In the afternoon I laid upon a yoga mat on my floor. I breathed the way
my teacher – a vegan mom at my son’s preschool, who takes ayahuasca
and who cut the aetheric cords that would otherwise have bound me for
lifetimes to a fickle Gemini lover – taught me. It is simple to breathe.
In through the mouth to the stomach, then filling the lungs. Then out
through the mouth, again and again until your breath is a smooth circle,
a merry-go-round spinning through your body.

I had crystals around me. Good for communing with The Star are
quartz, and amethyst, and celestine, and selenite. I placed them above
my head, in the path of the emanations/sucking whorl of my crown
chakra; and I placed them in the path of my root chakra’s vibrations, the
v-for-void between my thighs; and I placed them on my heart chakra,
that stage, which flares without fail every time I breathe like this; and
also on my solar power center; and even balanced on my third eye,
teetering like the top stone in a rock pile on the side of a desert road.

I had music around me, too. I have always looked to pop stars the way
people in Greece looked to the oracle women of Delphi. Music is a
shortcut to emotion. People who have Alzheimers and dementia and
cannot recognise the face of their beloved can remember all the words
to the song that seized their heart when they were sixteen years old, so
music lives in a magic and untouchable part of our brain, maybe not
even our brain, maybe it has been uploaded to our mind, that cloud.
And so it made sense to me deeply and intuitively when, during my first
time entering into a breath trance, in a room full of other Los Angeles
preschool mothers, my teacher blasted Concrete Blonde’s Joey. We were
in the proper space to receive the song, not as such but as an archetypal
story of broken love and everyone cried.

Excuse me – but if you do lie upon a yoga mat upon your own floor
and attempt to commune in this way with The Star or any entity of the
Tarot or elsewhere, prepare to cry. I did not believe my teacher when
she offered us this warning, or when she described the way our (your)
hands might clench into claws and our upper lip might crawl up our

71
gums, shrinking creepily, like a mummy. All of these things happened
and have continued to happen, every time, so just know that they might
happen to you, too.

For this particular trance I looked to Aquarian pop stars, as The Star
corresponds to that sign. It shares its traits of big visions, inspiration,
idealism, and download from other realms. My intention was to
commune with The Star around the issue of this planet: what humans
have done/are doing to it, and the coming apocalypse. The Star is really
a great card to have a conversation about the apocalypse with, because
in the order of the major arcana she comes directly after The Tower, a
glyph of Apocalypse. It is The Star that we turn to after the structures
of our civilization have fallen. It takes The Star’s utopian dreamer-vision
to have the glittering faith that better, love-centric structures can be
built, and built to last. It is The Star’s energy of pure belief that will be
necessary to pull remaining humans out of the pall of apocalypse-trau-
ma, to shake them out of nihilism, to challenge pessimistic death-cen-
tric philosophies that will inevitably sprout in the wake of catastrophe.
My playlist was as follows:

Welcome to the Jungle – Guns N’ Roses

Get Right with God – Lucinda Williams
Sign of the Times – Harry Styles
Cry Me a River – Justin Timberlake
Empire State of Mind – Jay-Z & Alicia Keys
War – Bob Marley & The Wailers
Revelations – Yoko Ono & Cat Power

I must cop to the feeling of futility that rises up in me as I attempt to

explain or describe what music feels like in a psychedelic breathwork
trance. It sounds like the most ancient truths, the deepest prophecies,
the great mystery of human DNA made aural. Every stupid inane lyric
suddenly seems to have the most profound wisdom spiralled within it,
a cosmic joke. But trying to elaborate how when Aquarius Axl Rose
screeched If you want it you’re gonna bleed but it’s the price to pay he was
obviously speaking, in the micro, about the way a very sexy girl is bound
to get exploited by her very desires, but also, in the macro, about how
living in a global, capitalist culture, with our yearning for more and
easy, we can taste the bright lights, but won’t get there for free. Axl sounded

72
like the voice of the reaper. Did we think we could go on this way
without a price being exacted? Welcome to the jungle, it gets worse here
every day. Got it. Check.

On to Lucinda Williams, who I had never before listened to, my tastes

running more towards Axl Rose, to be perfectly honest. But many
soulful-seeming people referred to her in a wistful manner throughout
my life so I sunk deeper into the loop of my breath and listened, feeling
my hands’ vibrations intensify, my fingers gnarling, as they do every
time. ‘Cause I want to get right with god, yes, you know you got to get right
with god. With god/dess as the natural order of things and by that I
mean water should be clean, people should have lives that contain more
joy than toil, the many species of the planet should remain here, thrive
here, not die out here. You got to get right with your moral compass.
Micro and macro, as above/so below, I was finally getting what that
meant in my whirling breath trance.

My lip was shrinking up my gums, it’s so grotesque, beautiful Harry

Styles lets it rip in this epic song, I love this song, I think it’s gorgeous,
why are we always stuck and running from the bullets? I mean, don’t you
think it would take an armed revolution to really change things? And
don’t you also think the violence inherent in an armed revolution would
bring a certain cursed energy to the effort, the aftermath? I dunno.
We gotta get away from here, Harry desperately croons to his paramour.
But there’s nowhere to go. Are we going to colonise space? Breaking
through the atmosphere, that’s a very Aquarian idea, as in, it’s out there,
but it would be what we in a certain 12-step program designed to help
problem drinkers call a geographic. Like, when you’re bottoming out
and can’t squarely look at the dysfunctional systems that have put you
exactly where you are, and so you’re like, I Know, I’m Gonna Move To
Chicago, That Will Solve Everything. And then you bring your failed
coping mechanisms and festering communication skills and in the case
of the collective us, our capitalism, our racism. And then we take it to
Mars. At least it’s ugly and unpopulated. Maybe we all deserve to live in
an ugly dome on Mars. We’ve shown very clearly that we can’t have nice
things.

You were my sun, you were my earth, Justin Timberlake starts so literally.
But it’s the chorus, Cry me a river, over and over, mocking the actual

73
tears streaming from the corners of my eyes. All I know to do is cry
about it. Cry and fuss guiltily over, like, paper towels. Cry over the
gorgeous, ferocious survival of Black people in a place designed to kill
them every day, to send Black people, Black men especially, to prison;
cry over the men who have been languishing in Guatanamo for decades,
decades. How can this be someone’s destiny. I want to refuse a world, a
universe that permits such a thing but such things are probably more
common than my own reality: safe, white, living in a house no bomb
will fall on, wringing my hand over paper towels, unable to join an
armed revolution even if one were to miraculously occur because I have
brought a child into this and now I am required to stay alive. Cry me a
river.

This trance, broadcasting from it after the fact, is like that beautiful
stone you find in the river and it dries up and it’s just, like, a rock.
What’s the big deal? But in its element, it glistened. In my element, my
trance, these streets will make you feel brand new, big lights will inspire
you. I admit I put this song in the mix because of the pure joy in the
chorus, it is good to feel a burst of lyrical joy in the psychedelic breath-
work trance. When I took my class in Portland into it it was Lizzo who
finally brought everyone to tears. We need to hold onto the joy, even
if we don’t deserve it — no, The Star would never see it that way: it’s
not about ‘deserve’, a human concept. Though The Star does appear to
be human, she certainly has so much compassion for human foibles; so
much empathy that she is there to help us rebuild our systems after they
took out the entire planet. So, joy. It is the order of the day. Even in the
apocalypse. Especially in the apocalypse. Otherwise you might as well
extinct yourself for good. Otherwise there is no point to any of it.

After joy comes war. Me say war. Dis a war. War in the east. War in the
west. War up north. War down south. The fight to save the planet is the
fight for Black lives, Brown lives, because what is killing the planet
is capitalism and capitalism makes its dough on the broken bodies of
people of color, everyone knows this right? I mean everyone reading
this. I should hope so. Good over evil, yeah. Bob Marley has that
Aquarian energy so perfectly expressed, communicating it so clearly:
until the philosophy which hold one race superior and another inferior is
finally and permanently discredited and abandoned everywhere is war. See?
Fucking SIMPLE. Direct Aquarian clarity. And he thinks we will win.

74
That is the Aquarian, that is The Star. And we know we shall win as we
are confident in the victory of good over good over evil yeah good over evil
good over evil yeah good over evil. An Aquarian mantra.

I always put Yoko Ono’s ‘Revelations’ in my trance playlist. It is my

favorite prayer. It is a blessing, literally a blessing, from a holy person
born on the final day of Aquarius. Bless you for your greed, it’s a sign of
great capacity. Bless you for your fear, it’s a sign of wisdom. You are a sea of
goodness. Bless you, bless you, bless you. Bless you for what you are. This is
what we are. We did this. This is what we are. We were born into this
and have not managed to find a way out of it. Transform the energy to
giving, give as much as you wish to take and you will receive satisfaction.
Evil feeds on your support. Feed not and it will self-destruct. Yoko has been
telling us this for so long. All of this is over if we want it. All of this is
over if we want it or not. On the other side there will be a Star.

75
 The Moon, Navine G. Khan-Dossos

The Moon
James Bridle & Navine G. Khan-Dossos
Landsat is the longest running satellite programme for earth obser-
vation: a continuous stream of images dating back to 1973, shot from
orbit. It’s an extraordinary archive of the planet, and the changes we
have wrought on it. Through Landsat’s cameras, more far-sighted yet
more attentive than any human eye, we can see the shrinking of the
Aral Sea, the wildfires burning in the Amazon, the methane explosions
carving holes out of the tundra, the glaciers marking their slow retreat
towards the ice pack.

These cameras have become ever more advanced in recent years.

Landsat 8, the most recent satellite, launched in 2013, carries a
multispectral sensor of such sophistication that it can peer through
cloud cover, see into the infrared and ultraviolet, determine the health
of plants and the aridity of the soil. Such sensitivity requires careful
calibration: the assurance that the measurements do not drift, fall out of
step, that we do not overlook or overestimate some key factor, that our
readings are still true.

And so once a month at the full moon, Landsat turns around, and takes
a picture of the moon. It is this image which is used to calibrate its
sensors, to ensure their continuing fidelity. While fires scorch the earth,
sea levels rise, rivers shift their course, and deserts creep across the land,
the moon remains the same. That which, earthbound, we think of as
the most changeable, is in truth the most constant and steadfast. Even
our most advanced technologies, the ones we have set up to watch over
us and warn us of the changing world, turn, in the darkness, towards
the moon.

And so do we, awaiting a change we are only just beginning to imagine:

the transformation that approaches. The tools of that transformation
are close at hand, the way is clear: between the gleaming solar panels,
beneath the towering turbines, there is one path that might see us
through. But, under the moon, such tools are silent: no light, no wind,
no charge, no power. Something else is needed too, beyond raw materi-
als, beyond technical proficiency: reflection, thoughtfulness, the ability
to hear as well as speak, to think as well as act. A pause, in which to
gather strength.
Tonight, the moon is new. Its dark side faces the Earth and the lunar
night is unilluminated: a time for reflection, and calibration. In her

77
private journal, in the bleakest months of the First World War, Virginia
Woolf observed that ‘The future is dark, which is the best thing the
future can be, I think.’ As Rebecca Solnit writes in Hope in the Dark,
‘It’s an extraordinary declaration, asserting that the unknown need not
be turned into the known through false divination, or the projection
of grim political or ideological narratives; it’s a celebration of darkness,
willing – as that ‘I think’ indicates – to be uncertain even about its own
assertion.’

So often, the darkness is figured as a place of desolation, and of fear.

A place of danger and death. But the darkness can also be a place of
freedom and possibility. Many have lived in the darkness all their lives:
it is a place of autonomy, of anonymity, of difference and change. To
live in darkness is to reject the false certainties of the light, to remain
radically open to other lives and other forms of being.

Revealed in the shimmering light of The Moon are the waters of the
littoral: the temporary autonomous zone at the edge of the sea, between
high and low water. Defined by both the tidal pull of the moon, and
our own actions in raising sea levels, the littoral is another domain of
possibility: an ever-shifting, ever-changing terrain between land and
sea. As the waters rise around us, we shall have to learn to be littoral
too, and learn from its existing inhabitants. Like the crayfish, symbol of
the unconscious, the unquantifiable and the unknowable, shattering the
calm surface of the sea, urging us to embrace darkness, uncertainty, and
the possibility of change, and to embrace as well our non-human allies,
who learned this lesson long ago.

It’s dark and we know it’s dark; we all feel it. It is dark, and shall be for
some time. And that’s the best thing for the future to be.

78
The Sun
Rebecca Tamás
spell for joy

THESUN THESUN THESUN

nothing can be trusted!

raise up your rinsed hands!
terrible fury and becoming!
take off your clothes!

one colossal owner of the void

brightness folding into itself
again and again vulval or filo

I see a shaking which is total and absolute fear

one day yr gonna die!

the hot impossible apple of

your perfection

you freckled you covered in something

you utter

just open up your face

light’s ice cream cone coming
on the inside of yr eyelids

say yes five thousand times

(o love)

80
Heavenly Body in the Night Sky, Albrecht Dürer

Judgement
Jesse Darling
It was 2012 and the world was about to end. The clickbait press ran
ludic articles about Mayan apocalypse and the death star Nibiru and
I was still clicking on that shit like I didn’t know better. It was the
year of the London Olympics, and the city felt like wartime: gunners
on the roof and KEEP CALM posters on the tube. My friends were
all estranged or busy or out of town. I didn’t have money or a place to
live and was bouncing around between house-sits and couches. And
sometime during that summer, an ambient anxiety began to curdle into
form in my head.

One day in a supermarket, a sudden download of information hit

me like a drug high. As an aggregation of facts the information felt
new, but the facts themselves were familiar. I stood frozen while a
fully-formed picture of the global supply chain crashed into the clarity
of consciousness, like an all-systems-override message from the neural
memory, a tsunami of world unbidden. The thousands upon thousands
of humans and non-humans employed and deployed and ordered and
bordered and subjected and subordinated in a structurally contingent
system of unnatural abundance to deliver all those out-of-season
avocados, packaged greenhouse chilis, heaped gene-bent bananas and
mass-farmed shrink-wrapped subsidised meats to the well-stocked
chain retailers of the global north. I couldn’t remember how to shop
so I stopped eating. Stopped sleeping. Stood on Waterloo Bridge and
watched the river rise and the city fall down, thinking how preposterous
the hubris of empire, prophylactic civilization, modernity in the face
and the fact of certain death.

Later I visited a shrink who described this period as a psychotic episode.

Although still triggered into a kind of paralysis by any mention of
asteroids, aliens, sunspots, global warming, apocalypse, prophecy and
pandemics (then, and sometimes even now), I refused the meds because
I could not fully agree that I had been delusional. Psychosis sees pat-
terns in everything, but it isn’t that (some of) those patterns don’t exist.

Freud was supposed to have said that one’s greatest fear is secretly one’s
greatest desire, or something along those lines. I wouldn’t say I wanted
to die, exactly. But in my life and in the world things were spiraling
and I couldn’t figure out what to do about it. Things had gone on too
long, had gone too wrong. Death would have been one way to solve the

82
problem, but now the world was ending. It felt like the law of Karma.
Something had to give.

The Judgement card tends to come up when one is at a crossroads in

their life, ready to integrate past learning into present self. It is about
awakening, understanding, making change. I think with gratitude of
the ‘episode’ – not my first, nor perhaps my last – as an extraordinary
intervention of the subconscious into a life in which I’d started believing
every story I spun myself about who I was, what I wanted, what I could
handle, and where I was going.

You may know that the word ‘apocalypse’, ἀποκάλυψις in ancient Greek,
simply means ‘uncovering’, or ‘revelation’ – with all the Christological
context that implies. It feels like the present crisis is in part epistemo-
logical, a shift in understanding. The faith structures of the modern
project have all failed to deliver us from our own certain deaths – as
bodies, as ‘people’, but also as a society, a ‘civilization’ in itself. There are
many for whom this fact is self-evident: those to whom the freedoms
and excesses afforded by racialised imperial capitalism were extended
only conditionally, if at all. For others within a collective, or cultural,
consciousness, it feels like the beginning of a new understanding.
Something had to give.

And of course it feels crazy. Of course we’re fucking scared.

In 2013 I was a little better, still alive. I wandered into the Tate Britain
and encountered a painting by John Martin, from a triptych called The
Last Judgement. This was The End of the World, made in 1851. There were
billowing black clouds and the earth rent asunder and rivers of molten
lava flowing red as blood. It was an image of rupture. Of rapture. It is
said that this painting was inspired not by a prophecy of the future, but
by what had already come to pass in the recent and ongoing industriali-
sation of North-East England. All those monstrous new god-machines
in the hammering forges, working through the night black as the
guzzled coal and red as the very fires of hell. Ceaseless as demons, they
worked without wage or sleep to make those tonnes and tonnes of steel
required to build that old vainglorious, victorious, nefarious, precarious
infrastructure of imperial modernity.

83
How long does it take for a story (an empire, a civilization) to die?

There’s another painting I want to tell you about. One made in 1476. It’s
on the back of another painting featuring Saint Jerome, a problematic
favourite of mine. I went for the saint but I stayed for the apocalypse,
for Durer’s Heavenly Body, which is a hot catharsis, exploding comet,
warm blood, a release like orgasm, everything you ever prayed for. You
may have heard the phrase ‘it’s easier to imagine the end of the world
than the end of capitalism’. This, if you consider Freud’s contention that
our worst fears represent our truest desires, is what seems to be happen-
ing in terms of collective storytelling right now. Narrating ‘apocalypse’
seems to be part of what we do from time to time – as species-specific
storytellers – perhaps to get us out of one place, narratively speaking,
and into another. Perhaps the function of ‘apocalypse’ is to aggregate
and give language to a number of significant changes that took place
too quickly, and perhaps too quietly, to make sense of as a single phe-
nomenon. Or perhaps ‘apocalypse’ is just one more magnificent piece
of hubris in the short and magnificently hubristic life of any sovereign
civilization.

In any case, the world has always been just about to end.

Yolo, Yolat, Yolant, Yolamus, Yolatis, Yolant.

(You only live once, at least in this body.)

I invoke the yolosophical aspect now not as a hedonic-nihilist injunction

to pleasure, but as a philosophical promise that you, me, s/he, they and
the four horses we all rode in on are all going to die, sooner or later. It’s
terrifying. It’s beautiful. It’s ineluctably fact and true.

What we’ve got now is the stories we tell around the dying embers of
our epistemological campfires. Stories that produce violence, or try to
prevent it. Stories that help to make a bad lot better. Stories that work
until they don’t. Stories that will make the dying easier. Stories to pass
on to whoever survives us.

All love,
JD

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The World
K Allado-McDowell
Deep inside yourself, beneath the shuttling transport of the conscious
mind, there is a vast black tube of sky, which you fall through. At the
bottom of the fall lies a cold obsidian lake. Its surface is perfect and
unperturbed. You pass into it, like a ghost passes through a wall.

There is pressure here, pressure on the lungs and the skin. Tender flesh
rips at your neck as gills slit open. You inhale deeply and cough, exhal-
ing the last of your air, which dissolves in a thousand tiny worlds.

You sink down. You slow. Your feet touch rough stone – the bottom of
the lake. Under the sole of your left foot a small ache becomes a stab-
bing then an ejection and a release. You bend down to pick up a pebble.

In the darkness you see nothing. Yet the pebble radiates visible empti-
ness. You hold it up to one eye. This is what you perceive:

A haggard caravan trudging through a desert.

A wall that extends for hundreds of miles.

The sneering face of the child who bullied you.

Engineers before computers, their minds running in loops.

You hear the patter of rain on stone. You smell petrichor swirling in
vines. You reach down to stroke your child’s soft skin. On your wrist is
a golden bracelet.
You snap in the leather seat, twisting to face your spouse. The freeway is
a symphony. The windows go dark.

The walls of your cage tremble. The door wrenches open. A balaclavaed
face – run!

A stinging tincture of belladonna dissolves on your tongue. Baroque

harmonies vibrate the air, unfurling. Your neck rolls back and loosens
your gaze. Angels hover high in the cathedral.

Machete in hand, you sweat and hack at sugar cane, beneath a blazing
sun.

86
You pull the brown hood over your head. Potent light streams through
glass stained in red, piercing blue, burning yellow, a flower of life, air
cold with dust.

Everything smells like green tea. You run the customer’s credit card. A
migraine is coming.

You dig through a box of receipts and pay stubs. You remember break-
ing your arm. Your partner grew weary of your need for help. You had
to learn how to wipe with your left hand. Painkillers messed with your
memory.

You woke one day and five chicks had died, their feet caught in wire too
close to the heat lamp. It’s part of farm life but you’re not a farmer. You
were just house-sitting. Death seemed to follow you around that house.

You’re falling asleep in your best friend’s sweater. Your flight leaves at 7
a.m.

A flood washed away the house and the two cows.

You taught the machine to sing. No one liked the way it sounded. You
published the paper anyway.

You were chopping celery to make soup and you wanted to cry because
you felt trapped.

You remembered your first breath of air. You tried to write down what it
tasted like but the words escaped

You swim toward light and the surface. A point pierces the water,
screaming through your spine and gills. A rock crushes your skull.

You are walking down a familiar street, the one that takes you home.
Your calves are sore from running. You count the final steps. Your
hands are stiff. Your mind is a barren landscape, a simple cover for an
exhausted body. You’re hungry. There is food for you. A guest, a secret
lover, cooks in your kitchen. They greet you with a strong shoulder, with

87
fingers that run through your unwashed hair and massage the knots in
your scalp. You relax into their structure.

‘Shower,’ you say. ‘I need a shower.’

You smell cumin toasting in oil. Steam finds its way from the kitchen,
bringing turmeric and frying onion, peppers, the singe of plants on
hot metal, the graceful fragrance of rice. You climb the stairs to your
bedroom. You can’t remember waking this morning. It was decades ago.
Someone else made the bed. Cool linen beckons.

You unzip your uniform, starting at the crown of your head. Your zipper
is a line of light. You draw it over your forehead, feeling fluid release as
your uniform parts in two. It drips down your face and over your eyes.
It is warm, the temperature of blood, but its taste is milk, honey and
salt. You wait to feel the ambient heat, to see the steam. Then you dive
in. You are drenched in the flow. Moving liquid wraps your body like a
ribbon, an ouroboros.

This is The World.

You rise to the peak of a Ferris wheel. Feel yourself freed from gravity.
Cresting the wheel, your body is filled with light. You are cleansed.
Naked, you are complete. You have become what you set out to be. Your
mind is a diamond. You are light.

Then . . .

A downward rush and the perfect force of gravity. Matter rolls you
under, pulling you forward again. The void is a moment drawn behind
you. A future appears to take its place. A hunger, made within you,
is growing within you. Across a distance neither time nor space, your
consort’s touch awaits.

88
 Contributors

Sophia Al-Maria is an artist and writer living and working in London.

Her latest book is Sad Sack (Book Works, 2019), a book of collected
writing taking feminist inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier
Bag Theory of Fiction (Ignota, 2019). She believes she is a Leo born in
1983 but a recent Vedic reading has led to an astrological personality
crisis. If you are an astrologer, please get in touch.

K Allado-McDowell is a writer, speaker, and musician. They are the

author, with GPT-3, of the book Pharmako-AI, and are co-editor, with
Ben Vickers, of the Atlas of Anomalous AI. They record and release music
under the name Qenric. Allado-McDowell established the Artists
+ Machine Intelligence program at Google AI. They are a conference
speaker, educator and consultant to think-tanks and institutions seeking
to align their work with deeper traditions of human understanding.

James Bridle is a writer, artist and technologist. Their artworks have

been commissioned by galleries and institutions and exhibited worldwide
and on the internet. Their writing on literature, culture and networks has
appeared in magazines and newspapers including Wired, the Atlantic,
the New Statesman, the Guardian, and the Observer. They are the author
of New Dark Age (2018) and Ways of Being (2022), and they wrote and
presented ‘New Ways of Seeing’ for BBC Radio 4 in 2019. Their work
can be found at http://jamesbridle.com.

Federico Campagna is an Italian philosopher based in London. He is

the author of Prophetic Culture: Recreation For Adolescents (Bloomsbury,
2021), Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality (Bloomsbury,
2018), and The Last Night: Anti- Work, Atheism, Adventure (Zero, 2013).
He is a lecturer in philosophy at the Royal Academy of Art KABK in the
Hague, and is the rights director at the radical publisher Verso Books.

CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and

ritual since 1975. Their new poems, Listen to the Golden Boomerang
Return, are made into sculptures to stand with humans visiting galleries
in New York City, Lisbon, Santander, Los Angeles, and other cities.
CA’s latestbook is AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration
(Wave Books, 2021). Other titles include While Standing in Line for

89
Death and The Book of Frank. They received a Creative Capital grant, a
Pew Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, and a Believer Magazine
Book Award. They teach at Columbia University in New York City and
Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam. Please visit their website.

Nika Roza Danilova has been recording and performing as Zola Jesus for
more than a decade. As a classically trained opera singer with a penchant
for noisy, avant-garde sounds, she launched her career with a series of
lo-fi releases that pitted her soaring vocals against harsh industrial clatter
and jittery synths. The signature Zola Jesus sound became more hi-fi as
she began to explore her own skewed vision of pop music combining
industrial, classical, electronic, goth and experimental rock influences
on releases like Stridulum, Valusia, Conatus, Versions and Taiga. Her
latest and darkest album Okovi, coincides with her return to both the
Wisconsin woods in which she was raised and her longtime label, Sacred
Bones. It is, in Danilova’s words, ‘a deeply personal snapshot of loss,
reconciliation, and a sympathy for the chains that keep us all grounded
to the unforgiving laws of feral nature.’

Jesse Darling is an artist who writes and works in sculpture, installation,

drawing and text. They live and work in Berlin.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, activist and

a Queer Black Troublemaker, Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an
aspirational cousin to all sentient beings. Her work in this lifetime is
to facilitate infinite, unstoppable ancestral love in practice. Her poetic
work in response to the needs of her cherished communities have held
space for multitudes in mourning and movement. Alexis’s co-edited
volume of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (PM Press,
2016) has shifted the conversation on mothering, parenting and queer
transformation. Alexis has transformed the scope of intellectual, creative
and oracular writing with her triptych of experimental works published
by Duke University Press (Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity in
2016, M Archive: After the End of the World in 2018 and Dub: Finding
Ceremony in 2020.) Alexis is a recipient of the National Endowment for
the Arts Creative Writing Award.

90
Ted Hand is a teaching credential student and independent researcher
working on esotericism who lives in Sonoma, California. He is the co-
creator of the Philip K. Dick tarot deck.

Johanna Hedva (they/them) is a Korean-American writer, artist, and

musician, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and
now lives between LA and Berlin. Hedva is the author of Minerva the
Miscarriage of the Brain (Sming Sming/Wolfman 2020), a collection of
poems, performances, and essays, and the novel On Hell (Sator/Two
Dollar Radio 2018). Their album Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th
House, a doom-metal guitar and voice performance influenced by Korean
shamanist ritual, was released in January 2021, and their 2019 album The
Sun and the Moon had two of its tracks played on the moon. Their work
has been shown in Berlin at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Klosterruine,
and Institute of Cultural Inquiry; The Institute of Contemporary Arts in
London; Performance Space New York; the LA Architecture and Design
Museum; and the Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon. Their
writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, frieze, The White Review, and is
anthologised in Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art. Their essay
‘Sick Woman Theory’, published in 2016 in Mask, has been translated
into ten languages.

Caspar Heinemann is an artist and writer living in Glasgow. His

interests include counterculture, animism, springtime, and the twentieth
century folk revival. His solo exhibitions have been held at Cell Project
Space, London; Outpost Gallery, Norwich; Almanac, London; and
Kevin Space, Vienna, and recent group exhibitions include La Casa
Encendida, Madrid; Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna; ICA, London; and
Cabinet, London. He makes theatre in collaboration with Alex Margo
Arden, and his first poetry collection Novelty Theory was published in
2019 by The 87Press.

Jenny Hval is a singer-songwriter, record producer, musician, and

novelist. Her albums include Viscera (2011), Innocence Is Kinky (2013);
Apocalypse, girl (2015); Blood Bitch (2016); and The Long Sleep EP (2018).
Published novels include Perlebryggeriet (2009) and Paradise Rot (2018).

Bhanu Kapil is a writer and Fellow of Churchill College. She is the

author of several books, most recently How To Wash A Heart (Pavilion

91
Poetry), winner of the 2020 TS Eliot Prize, and Incubation: A Space for
Monsters (a new edition, forthcoming from Kelsey Street Press in 2021).

Hoa Nguyen is the author of several books including Red Juice: Poems
1998 - 2008 and the Griffin Prize nominated Violet Energy Ingots. Her
latest collection of poems, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure is the
winner of the Canada Book Award and finalist for a 2021 National Book
Award and the General Governor’s Literary Award for Poetry. In 2019,
her body of work was nominated for a Neustadt Prize for Literature, a
prestigious international literary award often compared with the Nobel
Prize in Literature. Born in the Mekong Delta and raised and educated
in the United States, Hoa lives in Tkaronto with her family.

Nisha Ramayya grew up in Glasgow and now lives in London. Her

poetry collection States of the Body Produced by Love (2019) is published
by Ignota Books. Recent poems and essays can be found online in CCA
Annex, JUF, and Spam Zine; and in print in Wasafiri and Magma. She
teaches Creative Writing at Queen Mary University of London.

Ariana Reines is an American poet, playwright, performance artist,

and translator. Her books of poetry include A Sand Book (2019), Thursday
(2012), Mercury (2011), Coeur de Lion (2007) and The Cow (2006), which
won the Alberta Prize from Fence Books.

Himali Singh Soin is a writer and artist based between London and
Delhi. She uses metaphors from outer space and the natural environment
to construct imaginary cosmologies of ecological loss and the loss of home,
seeking shelter somewhere in the radicality of love. Her book ancestors of
the blue moon (2021), comprises flash fictions from the perspectives of lost
deities in the Himalayan canon.

Rebecca Tamás is an editor, with Sarah Shin, of the anthology Spells:

21st-Century Occult Poetry (2018). Her collection of poetry, WITCH,
came out from Penned in the Margins in 2019. Her essay collection
Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman, was published by Makina
Books in October 2020, and was longlisted for the 2021 Rathbones
Folio Prize. She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at York St John
University.

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Bones Tan-Jones is an artist traversing pop music, sculpture, alter-egos,
digital image and video. Tan-Jones is the co-founder of Shadow Sistxrs
Fight Club, and founder of Fertile Souls. YaYa Bones is their musical
alter ego. Their debut EP EARTHEART was released in 2020.

Michelle Tea is the author of eleven books of poetry, memoir and fiction
that explore the queer, feminist, working class experience in the United
States.

Suzanne Treister lives and works in London and the French Pyrenees.
She has been a pioneer in the digital/new media/web-based field since
the late 1980s, when she began developing projects about video games,
virtual reality and software. In 1995 Treister made her first web project
and invented a time-travelling avatar, the subject of an interactive CD-
ROM. An ongoing focus of her work is the relationship between emerging
technologies, society, alternative belief systems and the potential futures of
humanity. Recent projects include HEXEN 2.0 (2011), Post-Surveillance
Art (2014), HFT The Gardener (2015), SURVIVOR (F) (2016–19) and
The Escapist BHST (Black Hole Spacetime) (2018–19).

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 First published by Ignota 2019–20
This selection © Ignota 2019
The contributions © the contributors 2019
The book in this form © Ignota 2022

‘The Fool’ by Jenny Hval was originally published on 24 January 2020 for
the New Moon in Aquarius.

‘The Magician’ by CAConrad was originally published on 16 July 2019

for the Full Moon and partial lunar eclipse in Capricorn.

‘The High Priestess’ by Zola Jesus was originally published on 30 August

2019 for the New Moon in Virgo.

‘The Empress’ by Sophia Al-Maria was originally published on 9

February 2020 for the Full Moon in Leo.

‘The Emperor’ by Bhanu Kapil was originally published on 31 July/1

August 2019 for the New Moon in Leo.

‘The Hierophant’ by Ted Hand was originally published on 13 October

2019 for the Full Moon in Aries.

‘The Lovers’ by Federico Campagna was originally published on 27

October 2019 for the New Moon in Scorpio.

‘The Chariot’ by Hoa Nguyen was originally published on 12 December

2019 for the Full Moon in Gemini.

‘Strength’ by Ayesha Tan-Jones was originally published on 22 April

2020 for the New Moon in Taurus.

‘The Hermit’ by Alexis Pauline Gumbs was originally published on 7

May 2020 for the Full Moon in Scorpio.

‘The Wheel of Fortune’ by Nisha Ramayya was published on 26

November 2019 for the New Moon in Sagittarius. The poem is taken
from Ramayya’s debut book States of the Body Produced by Love published
by Ignota in 2019.

‘Justice’ by Himali Singh Soin was originally published on 24 March

2020 for the New Moon in Aries.

‘The Hanged One’ by Nā-kojā-Ābād was originally published on 22 May

2020 for the New Moon in Gemini.

94
‘Death’ by Ariana Reines was originally published on 10 January 2020
for the Full Moon in Cancer.

‘Temperance’ by Suzanne Treister was originally published on 7 April

2020 for the Full Moon in Libra.

‘The Devil’ by Caspar Heinemann was originally published on 9 March

2020 for the Full Moon in Virgo.

‘The Tower’ by Johanna Hedva was originally published on 15 August

2019 for the Full Moon in Aquarius.

‘The Star’ by Michelle Tea was originally published on 26 December

2019 for the New Moon in Capricorn.

‘The Moon’ by James Bridle and Navine G. Khan-Dossos was originally

published on 28 September 2019 for the New Moon in Libra.

‘The Sun’ by Rebecca Tamás was originally published on 23 February

2020 for the New Moon in Pisces.

‘Judgement’ by Jesse Darling was originally published on 22 September

2019 for the Last Quarter Moon in Virgo.

‘The World’ by K Allado-McDowell was originally published on 12

November 2019 for the Full Moon in Taurus.

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Copyediting by Jay Drinkall

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photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior
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95