Turning Things Around: The Inner Tarot Revolution Week 23
Getting busy
Real quick before I get started this week: I just wanted to point out that this is Week 23, and that 23 is a special number owing to its connections with certain magical currents (which I wrote about in The Wisdom Eye, along with a few other places here); and that this past Sunday (7/23, a date combining two magically potent sacred numbers) was “Cosmic Trigger Day,” commemorating the date Robert Anton Wilson entered into this current himself (see the Liberty Island article, Pulling Your Cosmic Trigger: Why July 23 Is Robert Anton Wilson Day). It falls in the midst of the “Dog Days” of summer, named due to the heliacal rising of Sirius, the Dog Star, at this time of the year.
And I just thought that was cool. “Auspicious,” even. Another reason I linked to The Wisdom Eye above is because this week, I will be weaving my work as Gogo Bordello in my World of Ruin posts into this series.
Last week’s post was pivotal in that I summarized my work thus far at Dark Twins, and painted a very clear and unapologetic picture of the fact that I see myself as working on behalf of the being known variously as Satan, Set, and the Prince of Darkness, but whom I have taken to acknowledging as the Princess of Darkness. And actually, since we’re weaving Zelda into this and I took my Oath to Her at Impa’s house in Breath of the Wild, I think I might just start calling Her “The Twilight Princess,” especially since so much of my work involves a blending of light and darkness, and the combination of many other extremes and contrasts, ever hugging the Liminal. It fits better, and it just makes sense.
Besides, the whole association of the Left Hand Path, so emphatically, with “darkness” is getting kind of tired and worn out (about as tired and worn out as an inherently gendered framing of “the Set entity”). As an aesthetic choice, sure, I get it—but it’s doing more of a disservice than anything by now (which is another reason for The Rainbow Flame). I think the Left Hand Path just might have matured past its “teenage goth phase;” not to knock the goth subculture and aesthetic, which I do enjoy myself, but it’s a very limited set of clothing for something like the Left Hand Path to wear, and is serving to confuse newer Initiates into thinking they have to be that way in order to walk this path…and in this stage of history, they just don’t.
Anyway. I ramble.
Last week’s post spoke eloquently to the sense of doubt that has pervaded pretty much all of my work so far. There is more to my self-doubt than a lack of confidence in myself, however; there are very good reasons for it, some of which I will be speaking to later in this post. The question of my fitness for this work revolves around its consequences. Socially, we live in precarious and polarized times right now, and I have a very strict balance to strike in order for my work to be successful: I believe strongly in individual freedoms, especially in freedom of speech, but I also value things like integrity, kindness, and, in case I haven’t yet made that clear enough, diversity. Unfortunately, as I have observed in posts such as the recent None of Your Business, any place such values are staunchly upheld has the potential to inadvertently incubate and even promote harmful ideologies with goals that are in fact antithetical to (my understanding of) the Left Hand Path; if you want to rid the world of brown or Asian people, or gay or trans people, or poor or disabled people, then you don’t really hold values that are compatible with the modern LHP.
However, from the strictly LHP perspective, this also means you can’t exactly define any “outgroup” as an exception to the rule and still remain philosophically consistent; if you believe people should be true to themselves, that includes some horrible people even if you wouldn’t promote their ideas yourself. The only other course of action we have is to speak, act, and work towards the world we do want, and among other things, this means affirming, much more positively and clearly, that diversity is beautiful and beneficial to us all.
This is part of why I believe the Twilight Princess has tapped me on the shoulder to help cast Her with a feminine face and in rainbow colors. And I don’t care who disagrees with it or thinks it’s cheesy, I am promoting that image. I have no organizational traditions to bend over for, which is why I have been kept outside of so many groups. It is simply a fact that human organizations grow ossified, and very rarely stray far from their roots; most prominent LHP organizations were founded before these issues began to take the form they are taking today.
While it’s important to be mindful of such ethical concerns and to be careful what I say and do so that I am not contributing to the hate that is attempting to consume this world, it’s also important that I don’t let that paralyze me completely, which is why this week’s Sun Card—Three of Disks: Work—is so timely. It’s time to get to work and stop holding back. As such, the common theme for this week’s pair of cards is:
Just Do It
Another issue that last week’s post raised was a twin specter that social media and other technological means of communication raises, and it’s one that often benefits those spreading hate: Misinformation. I admitted that my understanding of some of the currents in which I am involved needs some work and study, and as such, I announced at the end of the post that I would be slowing down the pace of my posting in this series. Now, I am not so sure about that, though I will get into the story of how that turn came about in an upcoming post. I do need to do the requisite study, it’s true, but what I’m saying is that doesn’t mean I can’t keep moving here. What it means is that I need to step up the pace of my work to keep up, and need to spend more of my time productively.
I was in a different, much more weakened condition when I first began writing Dark Twins; I’ve written about it extensively in earlier posts, but to make a long story short, I was floundering in a living situation that hampered my ability to be productive or effective in the world, and it was one that anyone would have found…challenging. I carried a lot of guilt because of the ways in which, I knew, I was also choosing that situation as a “holding pattern” of sorts that would get me to the one I am in now. It didn’t help matters that I was drinking and doing drugs, which is evident even in the sloppier style of my earlier writings. My days were not productive, and I could have been making much better use of my time; I tried it and didn’t manage it, and rather than either making excuses for it or belaboring it, I’m just going to move forward now because what’s done is done.
At any rate, instead of medicating it away as I had been doing in prior months, I sat with the array of difficult feelings and inner conflicts invoked by my writing that post, and allowed them to motivate me to make some changes. I’ve since set in place a new daily routine that I am very happy to be pulling off for once now that I’m in a better environment, including daily spiritual practices, and daily reading. Every day, bit by bit, I am growing in ways that I had previously been stagnating. I am confident that the results of this will bear substantial fruit over time. I just need to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Either way, doing something is better than doing nothing, and coming up next, I will discuss how that played out this week in some new insights regarding Songs (see Song of Hermekate for an explainer on Songs).
Let’s do cards.
Top/Sun Card
Some of the chapters in Lon Milo DuQuette’s Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot are more useful for this series than others; this week, both chapters seem to focus more on trivia related to the symbolism of these cards than on actually fleshing out their meaning, though things went a bit better with the Magus than with this card. DuQuette’s chapter on this card is very short and the main useful idea I took away from it was where he points out the alchemical symbols for Salt, Sulphur and Mercury at the hubs of the three wheels in the card. He also mentions that the wavy background is meant to depict shifting sands that illustrate the sea of Binah, sometimes more overtly than others. The net result is that, to me, this card kind of makes me think of some kind of “pyramidal hovercraft” making its way across said seas, which, of course, dwell beyond Da’ath on the Tree of Life. This calls to mind the self-initiatory working I am doing in the game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: The Trial of the Sword.
To provide some context if you haven’t read any of my posts from World of Ruin, after a lull in the madness I described in The Temple of Madness: A Chapel Perilous Journey, the level of synchronicity in my life started getting wild again, and it seemed to center around what was then the latest installment in the Zelda franchise; I started seeing so much symbolism (and experiencing so many weird coincidences) in the game that I decided to make a special, intentional playthrough of the game in Master Mode to test some ideas about self-Initiation from within the context of video games. I mentioned a lot of that context in The Wisdom Eye, which I linked to above, but the post Turning Things Around is where I explain the intention behind the working most clearly. The major highlight so far has been the eerie moment I made my oath to the Twilight Princess (in other words, the Devil) and She acknowledged it.
So, how am I doing on that trial? Well, as it turns out, this week, I hit a milestone: I made it to Floor 10 (out of 54), which is pretty much unanimously agreed to be the hardest floor in Master Mode—to the point that many fans of this franchise (if they aren’t the kind of gamers who are also into Dark Souls, anyway) consider it simply unfair. A lot of people skip it entirely or cheat their way through it.
I first entered the Trial of the Sword on June 4th, and for much of the time since then (I give myself a pass because I was also getting ready to move cross-country) I have been procrastinating. As soon as I made my first attempt at the Trials, I knew it was going to be a very difficult task for me and I immediately began regretting making this magical working contingent on it.
For those unfamiliar, the Trial of the Sword is an endurance trial, a gauntlet in which the normal rules of the game don’t apply. Link (the main character) enters the trials with no equipment at all, cannot use his Champion Abilities if he has them, and the only weapons he access to are the sparse and relatively chintzy ones he finds within the trial itself. His only saving grace, really, is that he can still use his Runes, which include unlimited Bombs and the Stasis ability that he can use to freeze monsters for a short time.
In Master Mode, not only are all of the monsters classed one rank higher (meaning harder to kill) than in Normal Mode, but they are also still susceptible to health regeneration if you go long enough without damaging them. This is the real killer when it comes to Floor 10.
Even among the people who pull it off, almost nobody does it without going onto Reddit in frustration to find a working strategy. Even once you do, it’s harder to actually pull off than one might think.
I am learning a lot by taking this stupid game seriously and applying myself to it, and I feel that the Twilight Princess had some specific things in mind for me when it comes to this task.
The first and most obvious lesson for me here is in the art of applying myself and the principle of “practice makes perfect.” I’ve been out of touch with this for a while because I’ve been avoiding that kind of thing for years; I’ve had no hobbies that demand such things of me, and I’ve been generally able to skate in life without having to do it if I don’t want to. Sad (in a way) but true. I am getting a hard lesson in building basic skills through mind-numbing repetition. The way the trials are structured is tedious; the 54 Floors are divided into three sections: The Beginning Trials (12 Floors), the Middle Trials (16 Floors), and the Final Trials (23 Floors—there’s that number again). You cannot save your game in the middle of the trials, so when you inevitably fail, you have to start over again from the bottom of whichever tier you’re on. The deeper you make it into a trial, the more you have to repeat the next time you fail…meaning that in a sense, progress is punished here.
This challenge has made me sick of an otherwise very fun game.
But I’ve hit the learning curve, as the majority of my time spent on this so far has been focused on the first few trials, as I have worked to build up basic skills like controller dexterity, along with building into muscle memory factors like Bomb’s explosion radius and the physics of aiming and throwing bombs at monsters. For a while, I’d make a few attempts at the Trial and then set the Nintendo Switch aside for a week or two because I was so sick of the drudgery. Now I’ve reached a point where every time over the past 5 or 6 attempts, I’ve made it a little bit farther into the Beginning Trials, and as such, I’ve now decided to incorporate it into my daily practice. I’ll work at this a little bit each day.
The next lesson from this Trial is one that is qualitatively serving as a serious Left Hand Path act of Initiation: Focusing on my own work and development, and ignoring what others are up to. This is hard for me to do, but is an important skill for me to have given the strangeness of my work as compared to others. This kind of concern has been one of the main sources of my doubt, because having the Devil’s influence in my life from such a young age means my path will be pretty unique, even as compared to many other people who also walk the Left Hand Path. I’ve gotten hung up so many times because of the ways in which the Twilight Princess has me doing things differently, as I discussed in the previous post in this series.
You see, when I started in on this, not knowing how hard this trial would be, I knew the game was basically doable in Master Mode; if not for this trial, I’d be done by now. I also knew that this game’s sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, was due to be released in a few months, and I was planning to cover this ceremony extensively here at Dark Twins. I was sure I’d be done in plenty of time to finish it before the sequel came out.
Now that it’s out, the rest of the world is pretty much done with Breath of the Wild. I’ve read whole articles about how the only bad thing about the new game is the fact that it makes this one completely obsolete, because it takes place on the same map, but is a whole lot bigger, with a lot of new toys for Link to play with. This takes away a lot of the novelty out of my intention to cover the game.
But that works out because on the Left Hand Path, it’s not our concern what everyone else is doing; so this is now challenging me to focus on the deeper purpose of this work, and to revise my plans to share deeply about my experience, because it’s my personal experience to have. In fact, most people on the LHP don’t talk about their personal Initiatory experiences at all except perhaps with a very small handful of close intimates.
The last major lesson, which overlaps with the second one, is that of emotional control, which, as a sufferer of Borderline Personality Disorder, has always been a challenge for me (people with BPD have under-active frontal lobes and over-active amygdalas, which translates to a basic physical deficit in emotional control). As I play through this trial, I am constantly having to suppress the sense that I’m in some kind of big hurry to finish this thing; I know it’s gonna take a while, so I can’t let that get the best of me. Secondly, that same emotional control will be necessary for me to succeed at all, because when you suck at video games like I do and you’re on the verge of overcoming an obstacle that’s been giving you hell, it’s easy to get so excited that you totally blow it at the crucial moment.
It’s like this Initiation was tailor-made for me. Thanks, Princess. :)
That same sense of urgency is something else I am facing in all other aspects of my work and has been one of my obstacles to organizing a daily practice: It all feels very urgent, to the extent that I am trying to do everything at once and freezing instead. In order to find success, I am learning a lesson many people learn in formal LHP Schools like Temple of Set: The efficacy of small steps taken with great consistency. A little bit, but every day, and we will get where we need to go.
In this connection, Gerd Zeigler’s thoughts about this card in Tarot: Mirror of the Soul are much more relevant than DuQuette’s:
Clarity arises (crystal). The heavens begin to open. The clouds of uncertainty may repeatedly blur your clear vision of the goal. But your unshakable affirmation of the work you have begun gives you the power to overcome temporary doubts. This assures your gradual progress.
p. 161
Shadow Card
This week’s Shadow Card is Atu I: The Magus, and it has a few different meanings.
In last week’s post, I made specific mention of the Grade of Magus, which is a fairly lofty title. Many people practice magic, and as such, are magicians by definition; relatively few people can truthfully claim to be Magi. This is a title that means something, and while the criteria for it differ from one esoteric group to another, there are some fairly specific guidelines defining it. This alludes to the fact that while a rank held within some group is nothing more, in the end, than a human construct, true Initiation is a real phenomenon with some fairly clear benchmarks; Initiation leads to a qualitative change in consciousness, and the Grade of Magus represents a fairly specific state of mind. You either embody that state of mind or you don’t.
It is because I have long known, from what Ilyas and Rose had always told me (see When They Talk Back to learn about them, but they are basically manifestations of my “Holy Guardian Angel” or daimon), that my work in this lifetime centers upon this Grade, that it was once very important to me to join a solid, reputable Order that could actually mark this progress for me. I had my heart set at one point on Temple of Set specifically due to their approach to handling this: In most other esoteric Schools that I had heard of, you reach a given grade by basically jumping through some hoops involving memorizing a bunch of knowledge and performing some concrete task. In addition, those schools handle this by conferring such a grade first, before you actually set upon the work of that grade. By contrast, Temple of Set calls their process “Recognition,” wherein a person of the Grade in question, who already fully embodies it, can assess you and determine that you do the same. It’s called “Recognition” because that person has seen and lived the territory, and thus recognizes the relevant markers in you. This is a lot more meaningful in terms of true attainment (though, of course, it is less “standardized” and thus a bit more susceptible to personal biases than the more typical form of progress; I should probably bite my tongue about the fact that this probably means there have been people who are Magi, but never got the due recognition, for reasons such as internal politics or other basic human fallibility—but I won’t, I just said it!).
However, since my own Word is meant to shake things up so much, as I discussed in Song of Hermekate, and because I am working directly with the Twilight Princess, I’ve had to make that call myself. If you understand this corner of occulture, it goes without saying that this is highly controversial, and for this reason alone, there are many who will never acknowledge me as a Magus.
Fuck ‘em. This isn’t really about Recognition anyway. Recognition is just one of the signs that I’m starting to get where I’m trying to go.
If you’d like to learn more about this grade, I can do no better than to direct you to the book Overthrowing the Old Gods by Don Webb, which I believe in my heart of hearts he wrote in anticipation of a world in which Magi regularly flower and flourish outside of formal schools (but don’t let me put words in his mouth, okay? It’s just my theory).
Anyway, all of the above should explain pretty well why this card fits like a glove in my Shadow stack. But there’s something even more important I wanted to address here that is completely separate from such issues, and this is where DuQuette’s words about this card will come in handy.
It’s been a longstanding issue with my work (but not only my work, as I’ve learned from some discussions with a close friend) that can’t really be helped, especially given the highly-polarized political charge that so characterizes these times: If you view it through certain lenses, it sometimes looks pretty bad. For starters, there’s the fact that my logo, “the VSigil,” can be construed as resembling a swastika (especially a circular form that has been used specifically by some hate groups). Ironically, this is somewhat by design, but the swastika has been appropriated and corrupted by the Nazis whereas it has existed for centuries in Hindu and Buddhist contexts that have specific spiritual meanings having nothing to do with Nazism. There’s the fact that, if you’re looking for certain dog whistles, you will find resonant symbolism in my work (I often work with and reference the symbolism of fire, which is apparently code for fascism nowadays). There are comments I have made about how it’s wrong to put politics above esotericism, which is an argument often made by occultists who do align with racist ideologies. My recent post, None of Your Business, uses an image of the Joker, which is a prominent symbol in the “manosphere" that is often used by fascists as a pathway to radicalization, and the fact that I speak against cancel culture and say some things that are critical of the way the political left tends to handle this stuff these days. Those are all considered red flags nowadays.
But no, I’m not a fascist. You’d think openly advocating for LGBTQIA+ inclusion and pushing a concept like the Rainbow Flame would be enough to establish that, but again, people are damn jumpy these days. People are also full of surprises.
As I said in None of Your Business, I get it, because I was like that a couple of years ago myself. I did a lot of work to wriggle out of the knee-jerk reactions that were ingrained by looking around me at all the other political leftists and succumbing to herd mentality, mostly out of fear of being cast as a covert member of the right if I didn’t do so, because that’s what people do nowadays.
But no. I’m not a fascist. And even though I have passionate feelings about fascists, I’m not going to compromise my stance just to toe a party line. I think humanity is better than that, and all other things being equal, I think it’s more important to protect independent thought because any stance taken without sufficient thought can be leveraged to harm people, on either the right or the left. The political left is not without its own foibles (and once more, sometimes criticizing the left at all sends the signal that one must, by process of elimination, lean to the right).
Anyway, I wanted to relate this by way of a sync that happened this morning.
In a discussion forum based on the Left Hand Path, a prominent member of the community shared this video addressing the topic of radicalization (the title is The Alt-Right Playbook: How to Radicalize a Normie, and given its adult age restriction, it will not be visible in the thumbnail link below and you’ll need to click through to YouTube to view it):
In the very beginning, it starts going into the pivotal role played by the tactic of decentralization in turning Joe Schmoe into a Nazi, and it also highlights some other concepts I’ve made use of here at Dark Twins. I immediately thought about None of Your Business and last week’s entry in this series and choked on my Kool-Aid because I talked up decentralization in that post, too. “Man,” I thought, “this really does look bad.”
Then, because I have an attention deficit, I picked up DuQuette’s book to read the chapter about the Magus while the video played, and as the video was dropping these bombs about making my work look bad, I read this passage, pertaining to the ape depicted on the card:
Behind the right wing is the Cynolcephalus, the Ape of Thoth. This creature, who seems to be groping its way up from the lower right-hand corner of the card, is the personification of an ironic curse that afflicts Thoth-Mercury and all who attain the grade of Magus. Because falsehood and misunderstanding are inherent in all speech and writing, it is the cosmic duty of the Ape of Thoth to constantly mock the work of the Magus and distort his words. As Crowley points out, “Manifestation implies illusion.”
p. 100
That’s when I knew that I would be writing this post today. The phenomena surrounding the so-called Curse of the Magus, which Webb describes very well in Overthrowing the Old Gods, are probably the major source of the doubt I have experienced as an obstacle. I can’t help but think I would be doing much better if I did have the support of a formal magical school and some oath-bound comrades to help me through it, but such is life.
Ziegler adds to this thought (though without reference to the Curse) in his treatment on the card in Tarot: Mirror of the Soul:
In his duality, Mercury stands for truth and falsehood. He brings all set ideas and judgements into question, which often makes him appear in a questionable light himself. As a creative creature, he knows no conscience. He uses all tools, all methods, to arrive at his goal. The temptation to misuse his talents is great. His ability and skill lend him superiority and power. He moves on the narrow border between white and black magic. This means he needs constant self-examination. He can use his talents in a self-seeking manner, or in the service of love and light.
p. 16
In reference to the statements above, I must say, as a Magus, that it’s very sad that a concept like “decentralization” has been so successfully co-opted and used by the right that mere mention of it can trigger some people into thinking that they smell smoke indicating a fascist fire (I am laughing now because even the main image for last week’s post in this series featured both smoke AND fire—not to mention a position just over the right wing of the airplane), because decentralization is really a neutral mode of operation closely related to this age’s communications technology, and it has advantages that anyone can use. Instead of attributing it to a political wing like a bunch of scared children, those on the left who are concerned about right radicalization should probably start learning to use it themselves.
[EDIT 1/23/2025: I bet some of them have been this whole time. Ha!]
So no, when I was talking about how decentralization is related to my work and the phenomenon of the Song, it was not a dogwhistle and I was not talking about fascism.
In an upcoming post, I will relate some experiences I had this week by way of explaining what I did mean. Stay tuned. In the meantime, enjoy this closing ditty with an eminently leftist take on the lighting of fires:
Next week’s cards:
Top Sun Card: 10 of Disks - Wealth
Top Shadow Card: 10 of Wands - Oppression