In the opening of Lost, the first track on Neurosis’ Enemy of the Sun (1993), the grave voice of Paul Bowles asks: “Are you lost?”. The sample, taken from Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky, drifts through the track like an old voice amiss in an electric desert. To be lost is the necessary vertigo before…
It is Christmas. Right now, in small Bulgarian, Armenian, or Georgian churches, lost in remote villages, the vigil happens. There is no comfort. No electric lighting. No staged décor. There is cold, stone, aching feet, repetition, hours standing upright. The incense weighs on the air. The Pantocrator dominates the dome: an asymmetric face, one side…
I visited the Kulminator in Antwerp on a cold afternoon around 2017 or 2018. The place was discreet, with the modest charm of a tavern that time had forgotten. At the entrance, the owner, an elderly man with a severe face and eyes that missed nothing, stopped us before we could step inside. “To drink…
The Hebrew word נִקְפָּה (nikpáh), translated as rope, girdle, or braided cord, derives from the triliteral root נק״ף (naqaf). The semantic field points to the act of circling, surrounding, or encircling. In Scripture, naqaf describes the movement of going around a city (Joshua 6:3) and also the gesture of forming a ritual circle. The image…
At the dawn of the sixteenth century, Portugal was a kingdom that sought the Omphalos, the navel of the world, the sacred centre where Heaven and Earth could converge. The old Knights Templar, reborn as the Order of Christ in Portuguese territory, had exchanged the horse for the caravel, carrying the Cross across the seas…
Venus is closing today, November 26, her Luciferian cycle, of the Light that precedes the rise of the day, and enters the invisible heart of the Sun. This is known as the Morning Setting, and it happens today at 24° of Scorpio, the moment when the Goddess ceases to be seen in the sky before…
It is interesting to observe the layout of Berghain’s Funktion-One sound system. The stacks are profiled exactly like the columns of Carcer. Geomantically, Carcer is the figure of Saturn in Capricorn, domiciled, cold and dry, where matter closes upon itself. The stacks stand aligned like votive stones of an underground temple, projecting waves that shape…
The entrance of Venus into Scorpio today reactivates one of the great paradoxes of the zodiac: the principle of union subjected to the principle of division. The goddess of charm and attraction swims in the poison, blood, and instinct, where love ceases to be harmony and becomes possession, control, the urge to devour the Other…
Psalm 91 is the psalm of absolute trust, of the protective power of the Name, used since antiquity as a verbal amulet against visible and invisible evil. It appears in the final section of the fourth Book of the Psalter (Psalms 90–106), traditionally tied to Moses. It mirrors Psalm 90, which laments human frailty before…
Languages do not die. The words uttered in temples and deserts remain suspended in the subtle air, their syllables repeating themselves in the invisible. Each sacred tongue becomes a vessel of vibration; through long use it condenses into a presence, a field of memory. The prayers of the dead stratify the astral atmosphere, forming egregores.…
