#shit from literally nothing i swear its not unique to religion.

[snekdood]

the problem with vaush’s anti theist argument is he assumes that people just blindly follow whatever a book or religious leader tells us the gods want rather than ever thinking on our own also he’s heavily relying on an argument that religious ppl think their gods word isn’t anything you can go against ever so if they tell you to rape and murder people then its fine to do so but like.... i really dont think any religious person is like this?????? i dont even think rapey serial killer religious people are like this??? like religion is always a front or a justification for their actions i dont think they genuinely believe god came down and told them it was fine i think they know they twisted what they heard/read to their benefit. the problem is with manipulative ppl who are able to take leadership of some sort over a group of people and twist the narrative to their benefit for whatever they’re gathering for, which can obviously happen in literally any kind of setting

[arcanalogue]

Notes on the Tetractys: Vol. 1

I have promised to do some writing about the Tetractys, so here it goes.

The first time this symbol blipped onto my radar was in 2009, when I learned about the it via somebody else’s artwork. At that point I had studied a bit of Greek philosophy and a heap of that Hebrew-adjacent mysticism that modern occultists appear to have bet everything on.

There’s literally no end to the amount of information out there about all of my favorite subjects, just waiting to be learned! This is why it’s so daunting for beginners who want to connect to certain magickal traditions: you want to know your shit, but we’re talking about areas of study which are notoriously difficult to access, and in many cases have been selected against in the great evolutionary arms-race of education. And then there are the gatekeepers upon gatekeepers upon gatekeepers...

The internet is an amazing tool for educating oneself, but there are so many ways to use it, and not a lot of instructions (just endless corrections). It takes a dexterous and inquisitive mind to exercise its potential in any focused way — to know what there even is to search for in the first place, and then how to search for it, how to dig into the crevices you find between related subjects and mine them for additional information... which informs future searches, etc.

But we still have it so much easier than anyone who came before us! Reading about the ways in which knowledge was passed down from teacher to student, from generation to generation, during the times of Pythagoras and other Greek philosophers is just fascinating to me. How did they manage to keep the chain from breaking? 

Then you realize how many chains did break along the way. Those we have access to are just the ones which gained a critical mass of interest, or happened to be preserved, or managed to survive all the historical incidents that have wiped out massive amounts of history. 

We gradually realize that at virtually any point during its existence, a thing can be lost. Sometimes these things are lost on purpose, other times they slip through our fingers as we reach for other things. And then in some rare instances, a lost thing can be found again. So there’s often a continuity in a thing’s existence that isn’t evident in our historical record — which, from a distance, could probably be visualized as a string of lights blinking on and off again as various things (ideas, objects, people) are lost, forgotten, rediscovered, and then lost again, blipping across humankind’s awareness and then retreating, over and over across centuries.

Basically we humans are playing a giant “don’t let the balloon touch the floor” game with our own history, except with billions of people and balloons in play at once, and some of the players unfairly seem to be armed with pointy sticks. It’s an absurdly clumsy scenario, and no matter how well we try to play together... suffice to say, there will be casualties.

The Greeks knew this. They’d already seen it! Which is why some of the traditions you read about were so strict, or so eccentrically intense. These teachers knew their entire body of work could go up in smoke, literally anytime. In many cases they’d observed it firsthand. In some instances, they’d personally wielded the torches! Since the very dawn of technology, probably pre-dating language itself, humans have been engaged in informational warfare.

This is one way that teachers, inventors and explorers actually manage to change the course of history: by determining who can be trusted with emerging information. That’s why security and access remain central to conversations about technology to this very day. What is beneficial to keep secret, and what should be made available to the public? 

Some make these choices wisely, others choose unwisely, and everything we see around us is basically the grand result of all those choices.

Wait, wasn’t this supposed to be about the Tetractys? 

*bops balloon back toward ceiling*

There’s a reason why certain symbols and designs from antiquity remain in play today, thousands of years later. It’s the same reason that creators are constantly trying to create new ones, or in some cases just scooping up old symbols, dusting them off, remixing and repurposing them for a new mission.

Symbols and patterns are sticky. We like looking at them, thinking about them, playing with them. Remember how you did this as a child, over and over: encountering a new symbol, you would draw it, repeat it. As a product of embedding it in your own memory, you leave it where it may be found by someone else. As a technology, symbols are uniquely equipped for longevity in the human world.

The human eye and brain are linked in a way that’s predisposed to recognize patterns, and pattern recognition is key to learning (among many other things) mathematics.

Mathematics (which I’m terrible at, so don’t worry, this isn’t about to become a math blog) will always the key to understanding the reality we inherited, and to seeing its potential as we gradually fabricate a new one.

The Tetractys is both a symbol and a pattern, which makes it especially sticky and especially fun to play with. With very little explanation, its layers of meaning begin to unfold in the mind. It teases, it reveals, it obscures. The Tetractys nudges us new toward thresholds of awareness, echoing the cascading effect of reality’s formation described in the Tetractys itself.

As such, it remains its own best recommendation. Is it any wonder that Pythagoreans flipped their collective lids over it?

The author at Organelle writes:

“What [Pythagoras] was gave us is nothing like what it at first appears to be. This is why people were swearing by his name for having brought this simple diagram into the world of human experience: a toy which none could own, and anyone with a stick and some dirt could instantly play with. It requires no manufacture — it cannot not be stolen or co-opted, and ‘giving it away’ causes the giver and the gifted to become ‘exponentially more wealthy’ — in ongoing progressions.“

As early mathematicians fleshed out new concepts, and invented new symbols to represent their discoveries, they were basically just skipping stones further down the stream, packaging ideas in ways that other humans would be able to recognize and access and build upon. Sometimes this was done in full public view, but often they worked in secret, because their bodies of work (as well as their actual bodies) were vulnerable to being dismantled by anyone who found them threatening.

The reason I chose to begin writing about the Tetractys this way was to highlight that there are many different forms of information, many forms of teaching, many forms of learning. And, as we have finally proven, the world is also full of different kinds of human intelligence, capable of many different things. We’re slowly digging out from preconceptions imposed on us by minds that were overly concerned with ideals; any deviations from the ideal were considered to be of lesser value, selected against.

That’s one consequence of hierarchical religious thinking, and it’s not hard to see how even the Tetractys — with its depiction of reality cascading downward from a perfected “monad” state to an earthly “tetrad” — could end up appearing to confirm earlier humans’ preconceptions about what human perfection ought to look like, sound like, be like. Contemplating the pure language of mathematics, or seeking the pure spiritual experience, we crave to reform ourselves and our world to reflect this pursuit. 

Science and religion were conjoined for so long in our ancient history, it’s not surprising that notions conflating scientific purity and spiritual purity still turn up everywhere you look. We’re hooked on them! You see it a lot in New Age thought, and the desire to find confirmation of our spiritual beliefs in “natural” phenomena; the dreaded quest for “authenticy.”

I wanted to start by pointing out that I am not qualified to teach others in the formal sense. I have no accreditation. My academic pedigree is limited to... well, words written in a blog post, however thoughtfully I manage to string them together.

To learn tarot and other various practices, first I had to learn how to learn. For the most part, my education was missing this crucial step. I’ve always been quite naturally absorbent, but the moment my curiosity in any subject was satisfied, I considered my work done. 

That’s probably how most people function when left to their own conclusions... unless survival dictates otherwise. But some of us discover we simply have to keep evolving, keep looking for answers, in order to endure. How do I adapt to survive in this world? What are its qualities? Where are its boundaries? What am I actually capable of?

Taking responsibility for my own education in the longer term is one of the greatest accomplishments in my life. I never thought so before; it’s been too easy to focus on everything I’m still lacking. But now that I’m looking back from my forties, I see a surprising amount of continuity and steady progress. By now I’ve also noted the way knowledge fades when it’s seldom-used, so that means I’m often stuck with the humbling, non-glamorous chore of re-learning everything that used to be right at my mental fingertips.

The Tetractys flickered in and out of my awareness back in 2009, and then lit up again years later when I was working on a series of instructional posts about the minor arcana cards. 

This was the phase in my own practice when I began to leave the Tree of Life and other Qabalistic studies behind; the deeper I’d dug into them, the more I had to admit that my questions weren’t being answered — and in the meantime, I was being inundated with information that I had no practical use for. And as a non-Jewish person who reads and discusses the tarot quite often, I became uncomfortable relying on concepts related to the Hebrew alphabet that had been passed down by Western occultists.

At best, I had to admit that it was no longer helping me survive in this world.

Researching the overlapping history of the Tree of Life and the Tetractys, I realized this was a much firmer basis for my own personal investigations. The history of numbers and of symbolism has no direct path! But it’s very easy to end up sticking to the most well-trod path, even if it’s not going exactly where you’d hoped.

The Tetractys jewelry I created with Azamel was a way of marking that commitment with a reminder to keep learning, to question and refine my own interest in the subjects that appeal to me. I must be willing to adjust course, even if it means wandering through grass higher than my head. That feeling of ignorance and vulnerability is reminiscent of being child again, and comes with all of the wonder and discovery of childhood, as well as the requisite bumps and mistakes and redundancies.

In upcoming posts, I will share some of what I’ve learned from the Tetractys and how I’ve reinvested that into my tarot practice. I’m not “teaching” you how to use the Tetractys in your tarot practice, but I’m happy to help give the balloon another bump, and point to sources that might give you that delightful cascading sense of awareness. 

By now I know many of you personally (even if just a bit!) and I know that our love of that feeling is one that knits us together. It also unites us with all the teachers and students of past traditions, many of whom made tremendous sacrifices just to be able to pursue and relive that feeling.

Thanks for reading! And special thanks to those who snapped up this bit of jewelry early on, it has meant the world to have SOME small thing to show for the long months sitting here in the vast semi-darkness of 2020. Developing the consecration ritual for the Tetractys jewelry, I felt almost like I was visiting people, imagining their surroundings, their cards, their questions.

It’s comforting to be surrounded by so many who are still searching, still learning. I do not believe this ever ends, even after death.