There is a sentimental image of the monk as a fragile old man hiding in a monastery, running from the world out of tiredness, fear, or inability to live. It comes from not understanding what asceticism is. This is clear in the word itself. Asceticism comes from the Greek áskesis. It is training, exercise, discipline.…
Today, the Bizantine Church celebrates Saint Maximus the Confessor, the theologian who united in his own body the Word and the Cross. Amid the Monothelite controversy, Maximus defended to the point of martyrdom that in Christ there coexist two wills (the Divine and the human) reconciled in Love. Far from being only theoretical, the doctrine…
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…
My natal chart is born with a structural inversion that alters the entire logic of the zodiacal wheel. Where the common course begins in Aries in the First House, mine begins in Libra, and everything unfolds as a mirror. This inversion means that what normally culminates in Capricorn in the Tenth House – the point…
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 letter Tau (Τ) occupies the nineteenth place in the Greek alphabet and contains one of the most ancient seals of consecration in the sapiential tradition. From the prophets to the initiates, its cross-shaped form is a sign of election, boundary, and passage. In Ezekiel 9:4, the Lord commands the angel: “Go through the city,…
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…
Today is the November 29, Saturday. In Judaism, this is the day when almost all activities are suspended, especially those tied to labour and production. It is the day of Saturn, the planet of restraint and limitation, when time seems to thicken and grow heavier. There is a particular gravitas to this day, a slowness…
Omphalos (ὀμφαλός) literally means navel. However, in ancient Greek, the word carried a meaning broader than a mere anatomical organ: it designated the point of connection between the inner and the outer, the mother and the child, as well as the cosmos and its origin. When Delphi is called omphalos tēs gēs – the navel…
