Showing posts with label comics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label comics. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 16, 2025

The Abyss - Down in a hole

I bought the collected works of Promethea by Alan Moore, which is like a Qabalah primer, and unfortunately upon delivery it was made clear that book number four was no longer available. This book is apparently only available second hand now and at pretty high prices. So I had to read a downloaded version and ironically this book also handles Daath, the 'false Sephira'.


While trying to cross the abyss they mention "It's like a black hole", meanwhile I was listening to Alice in Chains on a whim. I had never really listened to their albums, so I decided to listen to the album Dirt while reading as I had the amazing song Would in my head before I started reading. When I got to the Black Hole part in the comic the song 'Down in a Hole' was playing. 

Down in a hole, feeling so small
Down in a hole, losing my soul
I'd like to fly,
But my wings have been so denied

At first I thought the song was called Sickman, which I thought was apt as I am suffering from chronic illness, but it appeared my album mp3 tags were mislabeled. The song Sickman played a track later and had these lyrics:

I can feel the wheel, but I can't steer
When my thoughts become my biggest fear

Daath, the so-called "false sephira" of the Tree of Life, is often described as a paradox. It is not a stable sphere like Chesed or Geburah but a kind of hollow gate: a place of knowledge without wisdom, a point where intellect severs itself from the living current of the Tree. It is the Abyss that divides the supernal triad above from the rest of the Tree.

To fall into Daath is not merely to stumble into error but to become sick in the soul. It is the fever of alienation, the madness of sterile intellect, the despair of being cut off from the flow of life. Qabalists sometimes speak of the Abyss as a place of annihilation. Crossed wrongly, it leads to delusion, madness, or spiritual death.

"Down in a Hole" speaks of isolation and entombment, of being buried away from light. "Sickman" is about corruption and decay, a body or mind turning against itself. Both are Abyss imagery: the hole is Daath as the pit of separation, while the sickness is Daath as pathology of the soul. The mislabeling was not just a tech error but a symbolic echo of what Daath represents, the sickness of false knowledge, the wound of disconnection.


In Promethea, Daath features a black hole, the circle or Pi 3.14... , between Sephira 3 Binah and Sephira 4 Chesed. The sephira that "is not there." It is a cosmic ulcer in the Tree. And yet, as in all myths, the wound is also a gate. The Abyss is terrifying because it exposes the fragility of our meaning-making, but it is also the threshold that must be crossed to move beyond.

The sync between "Sickman" and Daath reminds me that even error, even sickness, has a voice. Mislabeling becomes oracle. The Abyss is not avoided by ignoring it, but by naming it, enduring it, and walking through.


Daath is called Knowledge, and that name itself is a paradox. It is not book learning or accumulated facts, but experiential knowledge, gnosis that floods the soul with direct encounter. Without understanding or wisdom to balance it, this kind of raw knowing can become a trap. In the Tree, Daath sits at the crossing point between the supernal triad (Kether, Chokmah, Binah) and the lower sephirot. It is the "bridge" that is not really a bridge, the throat that does not breathe, the hole that mimics a gate.



In Promethea, Daath is associated with Pi, the infinite number that begins 3.14 and stretches on forever. Pi is the key to the circle. A perfect circle is never fully knowable, it requires an endless calculation. In this sense, Pi stands as the unbridgeable gap between the perfect world above and the imperfect reflections below. The supernal triad rests in the realm of the archetypal, the pure forms. The lower seven sephirot live in the realm of expression, manifestation, and limit.


Daath lies exactly on that line. To approach the Abyss is to try to cross from the finite to the infinite. To mistake Daath for a real sephira is to think you can close the circle perfectly, when in truth the calculation never ends. Pi shows us that the circle always slips beyond full containment. The supernals are the perfect circle; the lower sephirot are the broken or incomplete attempt to mirror it. Daath is the illusion that you can "solve" that gap with knowledge alone.

That is why it is sickness, and why it is also initiation. To encounter Daath is to meet the limit of human knowing. It shows that intellect alone cannot take you across the Abyss. Only when knowledge is surrendered into understanding and wisdom can the circle become whole again.

Saturday, January 18, 2014

Stories

Stories are not always a fiction
From He-Man and the Masters of the Universe 

 There is more truth in myth than in history.

Thursday, January 16, 2014

My calm is exceeded only by my cool. Which is total.


I'm totally calm, and I'm totally cool. 
My calm is exceeded only by my cool. 
Which is total.

Astonishing X-Men by Joss Whedon
(Glad I saved this, fitting after the last post...)

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

I want to dream some NOISE!

I dream myself to life. I sleep and make me over and over and over and over-- 

 I want to dream some NOISE!

From Astonishing X-Men by Joss Whedon

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Surpass imagination's greatest paragons

Imitation is man's nature and if he but wills it, so shall he surpass even imagination's greatest paragons.
 All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison

Monday, January 13, 2014

A potential source of near limitless power


Magic is a fact of life in Eternia. Here on Earth? There are, what? A few dozen active mages on the entire world? The essence here is barely tapped. Earth's font is a rich resource, a potential source of near limitless power.

From He-man and the Masters of the Universe

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Astonishing X-Men and the Media


The news isn't there to tell you what happened. It's there to tell you what it wants you to hear, or what it thinks you want to hear. They already have their stories worked out. They just wait for events to fill in the blanks. When they don't fit, they get sidelined or twisted till they do. 
Cyclops explains how the Media works. 


What if it backfires? What if the press brands us a menace? 
Then you'll get a much more interesting bunch of groupies, kid. 
Astonishing X-Men by Joss Whedon

Saturday, January 11, 2014

Now it's as easy as humming a favorite song.


I can still remember how difficult it once seemed to think the suit into a higher vibrational key.
Now it's as easy as humming a favorite song.
Aztek by Grant Morrison

Sunday, September 29, 2013

F*ck Yeah! It's more from Grant Morrison!

 
I knew I didn't remember the cartoon to be as mindblowing as the comic's writing!

 Seriously
 What happens when the unstoppable force meets the immovable object?
 They surrender.
 Jimmy is a reality tunnel explorer in All-Star Superman
Bruce Wayne has a point here. (from Batman 656)

Saturday, September 28, 2013

Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman

 Fear is the sauce on the steak of life!
Don't let Engine Failure hold you back!
 Tiphareth the Solar Fire


 I always write the Superman headlines before they happen

"These things that we’re experiencing right now are sections through time. Everyone here is a section through time. But in actual fact, you’re not experiencing your real body. What is your real body? Your real body is a process. It starts when you’re born, and it moves forward until you die. That is you. Seen from outside, that’s what you look like. You look like a gigantic centipede, spread around all the little things that you always do: up and down through your house, up the stairs, down to the store and back – and it’s a centipede, and it’s us. It starts as a little baby and it comes out of your mother’s womb, and it gets bigger." Grant Morrison

 Take a trip to the sun via the Middle Pillar Ritual or any other means
and see your strength, curiosity, imagination and creativity triple.

Beware that your robot doesn't succumb to visual distortions and extreme paranoid reactions while synthesizing your alien chemicals.

I'm reading everything Grant Morrison has ever done from now on.

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Quality Life Hack from Flashpoint - Batman Knight of Vengeance

It's that simple! This is an awesome trilogy. I also love ComicRack for Android, I really dislike reading comics on a widescreen on pc. Glad I finally found a way to enjoy comics digitally.

Thursday, September 19, 2013

18 DAYS by Grant Morrison



The video series is just snippits to warm you up for the graphic novel.

18 Days, is a re-imagining of the great eastern myth, Mahabharata and follows the course of the climactic war that concludes the age of the gods and begins the age of man. It is the prototype for every war ever fought. The scale is epic, wherein the biggest armies ever conceived of face one another across the ultimate battlefield to decide the fate of the future. Featuring the complete illustrated 144-page script book from Liquid Comics and will allow readers a first glimpse into the mythic animated series being developed by Morrison. The book reveals the inner workings of the acclaimed writer's process and features the original animation scripts, story bibles, character descriptions and commentaries. Grant's groundbreaking story is matched perfectly with original illustrations created by acclaimed artist, Mukesh Singh (Devi, Gamekeeper, Shadow Hunter).

"18 Days is a labor of love made all the more exciting by having a collaborator as original and groundbreaking as Mukesh. His techno-Vedic superheroes and spectacular scenes of cosmic warfare bring a dazzling new and contemporary dimension to one of the world's greatest stories."
- Author, Grant Morrison

"Grant Morrison is a post-modern myth-maker."
- Deepak Chopra, from the introduction

"Readers are immediately cast into the inner workings of Morrison's mind and there is little time to take pause and reorient oneself. Yet, this feeling of being thrown deep into the creative waters is not disorienting as Morrison's skills as a craftsman and storyteller are vividly apparent from the inception. Adding to this comfort in unfamiliar territory are the stellar visualizations and designs by Mukesh Singh."
- Broken Frontier
 
via Alienpunk

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Fisheye Placebo by Yuumei (Wenqing Yan) Cyberpunk webcomic


The first part of Fisheye Placebo is finally out! :D Thank you all for being so patient while I worked on the research and preparations. The next part will be coming out soon in a week! (If the image is not loading for whatever reason, try this tapastic.com/episode/2139 )

Here are some of the inspirations for this intro yuumei.deviantart.com/art/Insp…

Fisheye Placebo

:bulletblue:Original webcomic by Yuumei (Wenqing Yan)
:bulletblue:Genre: Cyberpunk, Cypherpunk, Fiction, Psychological

_______________________________________________

Living under an authoritarian regime is not fun. Extensive censorship meant no Facebook, no Youtube, and no porn.

Fortunately for Vance, being a hacker makes scaling the Great Firewall a walk in the park. With the free web at his fingertips, Vance should be happy but he’s not. Maybe there’s something missing in his life that porn just cannot replace.

Maybe it’s a girlfriend.

So it’s not weird at all to hack into the university to assign himself a hot female roommate, right? That’s just taking fate into your own hands, or something along those lines, right?

Too bad fate had other plans in mind and Vance is dragged into a crazy conspiracy to overthrow the government by his most-definitely-not-female roommate.

College is meant to be exciting, but not this exciting. Between failed dates, failed grades, and maybe not quite failed hacks, Vance will slowly come to question the morality of his actions and the true price of freedom.

Is this what democracy looks like?

Monday, March 12, 2012

Wizards, Workings and Walk-Ins on the Secret Sun

Check out Chris Knowles' great 4 parter Wizards, Workings and Walk-Ins and Therion Rising in 2 parts and Paul Weston's blog and book site. I know it's a bit silly - and you'll have to read four to six articles and maybe more to understand what the heaven I'm getting at so maybe wait to read on - but I can't help sharing that somehow I find this related, seen through the eyes of the synchromystic, Aleister Crowley had to be whatever we needed him to be at the time. And how does the trailer for the new movie The Dark Knight Rises start "Oh say can you see, by the dawn (of the new Aeon)'s early light..." or this one, "if you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, then you become something else entirely, a legend." "What if he doesn't exist anymore?" "He must, he must."

Monday, March 5, 2012

Promethea is/was/will-be glorious

Do yourself a huge favor and read/buy/borrow/download/absorb this amazing Comic Book Series/Magick Primer/Artwork asap.