Leaders of the spiritual cosmos

The Young Peach Seller by Giovanni Sottocornola (1888)

“If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.”

― Albert Camus, The Rebel

Disease can ruin a peach long before its harvest.

While a blemish or bruise may be indicative of spoiling, brown rot festers from the inside out, sometimes even with the fruit still attached to the tree. Oftentimes we view symptoms as the disease itself, where its true causes are unseen to the observer; a consequence of prior and seemingly harmless conditions.

Fruit rots as it grows, from the inside out.

As a heuristic for the unseen nature of growth and decay, this simple statement reflects a unity of opposites, since disease is the growth of decay, which for a peach is the colonial expansion of hungry microorganisms. Similarly, the purple haired rainbow mind is also like a peach, whose rotten behaviour is caused by a colony of diseased ideas. Psychology follows this heuristic rather well, but is less apparent than physical decay, needing a trained clinician with a keen eye to advise treatments for mental illnesses, because diseases of the mind are hidden and wrapped behind layers of symptoms. Like the fruit, behaviour emerges and festers from the inside out.

But does this heuristic apply to another scale beyond the examples above?

Modern art by Creepy Substack AI

The cosmos is dead; murdered by science.

Isaac Newton revolutionized science, paving the way for the Age of Enlightenment which inspired movements like liberalism and socialism, but also doctrines like individual liberty and religious tolerance. In The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Newton calculated planetary motion with a higher accuracy than Kepler’s empirically derived first and second laws. While a striking scientific achievement, propelling technology into new realms, his work had an unseen side effect, because in the public mind the Solar System had solidified into matter; the gods petrified.

Planets were a pivotal component of the Babylonian belief system.

Although much of Mesopotamia’s history has vanished to dust, some artifacts remain, like religious texts depicting connections between the stars and earthly phenomena, and possible relationships to man. For example, the scales constellation Libra symbolized “justice” as a balancing scale, similar to Greece’s mythological Dike, the goddess of justice also appearing in the Libra constellation.¹

Cupid Presenting Psyche to the Gods by Andrea Schiavone (ca. 1540–45)

Ancient Egypt inherited a similar view. Imagined as a familial constellation of gods, their mythology was centred around the zodiac, the “two luminaries,” the Sun and Moon, and the “five living stars,” the planets Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Mercury and Venus. Thus formed Egypt’s ancient religious worldview, which adorned monuments and temples through extensive visual iconography.² In like manner, the Romans and Greeks also devoted great practice to their own unique pantheon of celestial gods.

But where is divine lady justice? As a court jester appears to have stolen her throne.

Much like the siblings and the children of the gods, these ancient ideas have been murdered by matter; divided, mechanized and controlled by the rulers of the material world through prestigious technological advance.

It’s not just time that has sped up as technology advances. There is an increasing intensity toward “solidification” by which the material world increasingly becomes more real and the spiritual world is increasingly disconnected from life.

— Technology as the accelerator of time,

Neoliberal Feudalism

Perhaps the god of time, the black sun of this world, has long since opened its jaws to devour its own children, and possibly time itself.

Seven, Saturn & the Black Cube

Saturn Devouring his Child by Giulia Lama (1681-1747)

Cosmological narratives heavily influence societies and individuals.

Newton and his technical achievements altered the cosmological narrative, profoundly impacting the human psyche. Through a gradual replacement of traditional beliefs, the “enlightened” could utilize reducible knowledge to navigate the world by dismissing the cosmos as another predictable thing. Religion’s grip on the mind had loosened and now lay in balance with rationalist thought. Tragically so, mystery disappeared from the heavens as it transformed into the sky with its many atmospheric layers. Rationalism stole the flame from the gods by jailing it behind equations and diagrams; now relinquished to a tinkering and computable toy.

As a belief system, deterministic knowledge offers nothing but the surety of decay. In our tempest of nihilism, the new spiritual elite advance a hollow conquest to rape the lifeless corpse of the cosmos, like grave robbers pillaging for loot, while offering eternal life through the etheric net of silicon that integrates minds and bodies with machines. Cosmological nihilism poisoned the masses and sentenced them to death. If the stars have long since died out, then it should be no marvel that inspiration and vigour now smoulder like a suffocating ember. The ugliness of the modern world reflects the ugliness of the modern mind; rotting from the inside out.

The stars have fallen from grace and now helplessly flail in the mud.

Falling star in the mud by Creepy Substack AI

“Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window, and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.”

― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Scientific theories, models and instrumentation readings are not suitable schemes for worldviews and belief systems; these are tools, and when tools are worshipped they inevitably become gods. How many actually use Newtonian physics or evolutionary principles to cultivate bacteria? None of these systems are of particular utility outside their scope. Blind faith in the mechanical clock-like cosmos must be renounced, otherwise death will appear as a miraculous yet kind blessing.

Technical tools must be thrown off the altar and placed back on the shelf.

Temples of men represent the mind of society, and whatever controls the temple controls society. Modern institutions fit this description, but their leaders have been ensnared by purse strings and are now possessed like an evil anthropomorphic golem. And much like fruit, these organizations grow and die from within, until the fruit becomes too rotten to digest and followers search for a new cosmology, which is where we find ourselves now.

The social narrative has died while an invisible prism divides us like light.

The Spirit of The Rainbow by Henry Mosler (1912-1919)

Newton was a practitioner of alchemy, an ancient branch of natural philosophy.

Colloquially referred to as “turning lead into gold,” alchemy is an esoteric practice that transmutes the mind using specialized mental techniques, which would ultimately produce a reflection in the physical world. Newton succumbed to these alchemical pursuits from an eventual mercury poisoning, however few recognize his marvellous yet disastrous success with these ideas.³

Newton’s scientific feats were the result of the esoteric application of nigredo, alchemical peutrificiation and decomposition infinitely applied to a mathematical structure now called a limit, which yielded modern differential operators. It would appear this esoteric idea successfully reflected into the physical world, on scale, through the widespread surge of mechanized technology, but has subsequently contaminated the social mind resulting in mass peutrificiation, causing society to become “lost in the uncomfortable night of nothing.”⁴

However, in alchemy there’s a clear next step to this cancer.

Alchemy consists of four steps: nigredo, albedo, citrinitas and rubedo, where these four steps represent magnum opus: The Great Work.⁵ The reason it feels like we’re in someone’s experiment, is because we are: to be divided, purified, cured and refined. However, Jungian psychology also employs this idea, not as a means to ascend to godhood, but as a method to heal the mind, and our diseased society needs healing.⁶

Real purpose is not found by staring at the sky or by scrolling through the etheric realm. Purpose requires a journey within, beneath the layers of nigredo, where the core of your being awaits. Whilst washing away impurities under intense pressures, a new star will ignite and breath spirit back into the newly revived cosmos.

Art and science are opposite ends of the same substance; shadows of an invisible animating spirit. No amount of material or political struggle will liberate us from the nihilist hell realm devouring society, because the solution is a spiritual renaissance where we burn bright and purify the materialist mind. Divine lady justice must return to her throne, and a cosmological narrative shall be reborn through inspired artistic expressions and novel scientific revelations, reflective of our intense inner journeys.

Change comes from the inside out. That is our Great Work.

1. Kasak, E., & Veede, R. (2001). Understanding planets in ancient Mesopotamia. Folklore Electronic Journal of Folklore, 16, 7–34. https://doi.org/10.7592/fejf2001.16.planets

2. Quack, J. F. (2019). The planets in ancient Egypt. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Planetary Science. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190647926.013.61

3. Weisstein, Eric. (2006). Newton, Isaac (1642–1727). Eric Weisstein's World of Biography. http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Newton.html.

4. Browne, T. (2012). Sir Thomas browne’s works (volume 3); Including his life and correspondence. General Books. p.509

5. Needham , Joseph. (1974). Science & Civilisation in China: Chemistry and chemical technology. Spagyrical discovery and invention: magisteries of gold and immortality. Cambridge. p.23

6. McGee, Gary. (2022). Jung’s Four Stages of Character Transformation. The New Agora. https://newagora.ca/jungs-four-stages-of-character-transformation/