Stanley Kubrick
Songlines, elder councils, consensus across the longest continuous civilisation on Earth
The rabbi who marched with King
The map of every voice
The same map, addressed by hands
Chinese medical tradition
Clinical condition · about 5-7% of children, perhaps 4% of adults · the unfortunately named variation that is mostly about uneven attention regulation rather than attention deficit
Non-Dual Hindu Philosophy
Susan Sontag
Do not harm any living thing
On falling in love with a language model · the curator is honest
The Sunflower Seeds, the Sichuan earthquake names, the man the Chinese state has tried and failed to silence
The eighteenth dynasty pharaoh who, for seventeen extraordinary years in the fourteenth century BCE, attempted to abolish the entire Egyptian pantheon and replace it with the worship of a single god, the disk of the sun.
First Muslim philosopher
Physician and philosophical heretic
The Beast, the Magician, the Poet
The Scottish doctor who went on holiday and came back to find the cure for everything
Married John Coltrane, was widowed at thirty, became a Hindu swami, founded an ashram, made music unlike anything else.
The first woman to direct a film · the first person of any gender to direct a narrative film
bell hooks
Hermetic tradition · ancient roots, 1908 distillation · the most ambitious sentence in Western esotericism
The Beat poet who heard Blake in a Harlem apartment and never stopped listening
Japanese sun goddess · ancestor of the Imperial line · the figure who hid in the cave
Akan / West African tradition
The language of philosophy
Our nearest large galaxy · visible to the naked eye on a dark night · approaching us at 110 km/s · will collide with the Milky Way in about 4.5 billion years
The Factory · Marilyn
Survived the FBI most-wanted list and went back to teaching philosophy
Beings of light, of intelligence, of intercession. Older than the religions that named them. Quietly returning to the Western imagination after a long century of being told they were superstition.
United Kingdom · born 1972 · the controlled-hallucination theorist of perception and self
It turns out we are not alone in here. We were just very loud and not paying attention.
The eye fills in the life. Magic by frame.
The world is full of persons, only some of whom are human
Requiem composed in her head
Leo Tolstoy · in his late forties, in his great middle period, before his religious crisis
The classicist who broke the line between scholarship and poetry
The seventeenth-century philosopher Leibniz quietly read
The woman who classified the stars
Yosemite · the Zone System
The Theosophical lineage that walked off and built things
Portugal / United States · born 1944 · the neurologist who put the body back inside the mind
The lion-eagle of the Mesopotamian sky · thief of the Tablet of Destinies · the bird in the branches of the Huluppu tree
Named in 2015 · the condition of having no inner picture
The way of negation · saying what God is not
The language Jesus spoke
The orange elder of Boötes the Herdsman · the star Polynesian wayfinders called Hokūleʻa
Deep ecology · the Self with a capital S
Twelve-tone · the rupture · Moses und Aron
Multiple traditions
Anonymous
The most fundamental form of manifestation. The steepest path on the Tree.
She painted Judith because she was Judith
Fell silent for eight years. Emerged with a new musical language built from triads and bells.
The body in its bed, the awareness somewhere else
Cleisthenes, the Pnyx, the lottery, the jury
The continent that will not sink
Plato
The wild young man from North Africa who wrote the first autobiography in Western literature
The greatest English magician of the twentieth century, who chose to be poor and forgotten on purpose
Pick up the pen. Let go of the pen. Watch what arrives.
Persian polymath · the Floating Man
A brew of two plants that should not work together · one carrying DMT, the other the enzyme inhibitor that lets it cross into the body · preserved in unbroken Amazonian lineages and now spreading carefully into the wider world
Vedic tradition · half a million practitioners today
Mexica tradition
Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking
David Hume
Kwame Gyekye
James Joyce · in his early thirties, working out his own autobiography as a Catholic Irish artist breaking free
Leonardo da Vinci · compiled by his pupil Francesco Melzi after his death
Mary Wollstonecraft
Edward Bach · thirty-eight flowers for thirty-eight states of mind
Fugues as cosmology
The geneticist who discovered jumping genes
Old pond. Frog jumps in. Sound of water. Seventeen syllables to hold one moment exactly.
Ram Dass
Mary Midgley
Three women, a stolen election, the largest protests in the country's history
Aspect, Clauser, Zeilinger
The free Black mathematician who calculated the almanacs and wrote to Jefferson
United States · born 1946 · the architect of the most influential framework in the cognitive science of consciousness
Netherlands / United States · born 1943 · the psychiatrist who taught medicine to listen to the body again
Red supergiant in Orion · the shoulder of the hunter · the supernova on the long fuse
Devotion · the path open to anyone
What the company can patent gets developed… what the rainforest already grows often does not
The Great Mother · the womb of form
Play one frequency in the left ear and a slightly different one in the right. The brain produces a third frequency that exists nowhere except inside the listener.
It turns out the homework was already done. We just had to look.
E.O. Wilson
Keeper of the sacred hoop
Three Black women, a hashtag, the largest civil-rights protest mobilisation in modern American history
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Multiple traditions
Quit Roxy Music in 1973 and spent the next fifty years quietly inventing how the modern listener listens.
The Tuatha came in ships of cloud. They lost the island and went underground, becoming the Sidhe.
Voices a semitone apart. Held. Letting the dissonance ring until it stops being dissonance.
The mark is permanent. There is no correction.
Voltaire
Switzerland · 1875–1961 · the man who took the inner life seriously enough to spend his own on it
Alexander Carmichael · gathered 1855–1899
The first woman in Britain ever paid for scientific work
A great cathedral has a reverberation time of six to ten seconds. The architecture was designed for that.
The first language
She proved the stars are made of hydrogen
Various sources
The pot is the eldest of arts. It feeds, it pours, it holds the dead.
Robes, swords, circles, decades of practice
Believe in nothing, including this. Try anything that works.
Jane Eyre · the Yorkshire moors
Loving kindness · the right arm of the divine
Born as Chaturanga
The rare modern attempt to write a popular new constitution from scratch
Pictures that became writing
Seven silk strings. Played by a single scholar in a quiet room, often for no audience but the room itself.
Things Fall Apart
The lightning flash · the divine Father
Germany / United States · born 1956 · the Crick collaborator who followed the data into IIT
Zhuang Zhou · the laughing fourth-century BCE Chinese sage who turned philosophy into stories
The Ukrainian-Jewish refugee who became the great mystic novelist of Brazil
A medium that is also the engine that runs it
United Kingdom · born 1950 · the philosopher who proposed that the human mind is constitutionally unable to solve the hard problem
A torn newspaper edge next to a photograph next to a piece of fabric
The story happens in the gaps between them
Wassily Kandinsky
Augustine of Hippo · the brilliant, sensual, North African bishop turning his life inward as prayer
Tolkien, Klingon, Dothraki & beyond
Max Tegmark
Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan
William Sutherland · John Upledger
New tongues from collision
Fyodor Dostoevsky · gambling debts piled up, racing his deadlines, writing the book that would make his name
Jennifer Doudna & Emmanuelle Charpentier
Immanuel Kant
Ancient traditions
The mountain learning to speak through your hand
A single author dreamed him a century ago · and the dread he was built from is the oldest one there is
The clave is its heart. Almost all popular music since the 1930s descends from it.
Nicholas Culpeper
Nicholas Culpeper’s 1652 The English Physitian, later expanded as the Complete Herbal… an irreverent astrology-and-medicine handbook by a Puritan radical who wanted ordinary people to know what was in the apothecary’s drawers and how to grow it themselves.
The door that does not open · BITE model · the spectrum from tradition into capture
The first writing
Western culture inherited the idea that time runs in a straight line from creation to end. Most other cultures have understood it as a wheel.
Hans Jenny & CymaScope
The Captive Mind · Nobel 1980
The Athenian master craftsman · builder of the Cretan labyrinth · maker of the wax wings · the original mythological figure of the brilliant inventor whose own cleverness makes his life impossible
King James VI of Scotland, later James I of England
The most ephemeral of all the art forms
United States · 1942–2024 · the wittiest defender of the materialist position the twentieth century produced
The exiled Florentine who walked through every circle of the afterlife
Zwicky, Rubin, the unsolved universe
Vera Rubin
The Hard Problem of consciousness
Teacher of contemporary Kabbalah
Knowledge as union · the Sephirah that is not a Sephirah
The end of the magus
The French Revolution's founding text
Jacques Derrida
A formal practice of sustained sonic attention. Listening as a skill that can be cultivated.
The ideal speech situation, in practice
The temple of Apollo on Mount Parnassus
John Dewey
Omeros · the sea, the empire, the inheritance
Every goddess is her
Hindu · Buddhist · Jain
The photograph as encounter
The German Lutheran pastor and theologian who refused to make peace with the Third Reich, joined a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, was arrested in 1943, and was hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp two weeks before its liberation.
The most sober ceremonial magician of the twentieth century
The long-forgotten movement · Judy Heumann and the Section 504 sit-ins
Eris & the Principia Discordia
The molecule that occurs in hundreds of plants · and in the human body itself · the ‘spirit molecule’ of Rick Strassman’s 1990s research
The molecule that writes you into existence, four letters at a time
United States · born 1955 · the cognitive scientist who argues evolution did not select for accurate perception
The first Black supervisor in NACA/NASA history
The sister whose journals William used as raw material
The constellation that hides between the bears · long, coiling, serpentine · the dragon who once held the pole · the as-above of the serpent at the roots of the world tree
Every continent grew one · guardian of the hoard · the oldest fear and the oldest wonder, wearing scales
When the dream is not just a dream
James Joyce · in his twenties, writing the city he had left into a book before he could let it go
Rainer Maria Rilke · the poet who waited ten years for the rest of the cycle to come back to him
The master smiths who forged the gods their weapons · and how one of them ended up on your nan's lawn with a fishing rod
Cognitive variation · about 10% of the population, often unrecognised · the variation in how the brain processes written language, with real costs and real gifts
Mexican tradition
Time is being. Being is time. The most rigorous philosophical statement of the eternal now in any tradition.
Sustained rhythmic movement until the dancer crosses into a non-ordinary state.
Teresa Benedicta of the Cross
The country doctor who listened to a milkmaid and ended smallpox
Dee's medium, accused alchemist, complicated man
Roger Callahan · Gary Craig · the meridian psychology
Time is not separate from space. There is one woven fabric called spacetime, and the past and future are as physically real as the room you are in.
Abdus Salam
The French magus · the Baphomet
The light ones and the dark ones · the hidden folk Iceland still builds its roads around
Wuthering Heights · the strangest novel in English
The agitator · deportation
The fight to keep speaking
The umbrella over Reiki, Pranic, Therapeutic Touch, Polarity, Brennan, Theta and more
The first named author in world literature
Merlin Sheldrake
Various researchers
Sister of Inanna · queen of Irkalla · the original underworld goddess in any human written record
Discovered 2005 · the dwarf planet who demoted Pluto · named for the Greek goddess of strife · patron of the Discordians
Wave equation · the cat · What Is Life?
L. L. Zamenhof
Ralph Waldo Emerson · thirty-eight, at the height of his powers, drawing the essays from five years of lecturing
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza
The geometer whose textbook ran the world for two thousand years
Leonhard Euler
Hugh Everett III
Heraclitus of Ephesus
Jean-Paul Sartre
The river Chebar · the throne-chariot
The Harlem painter who turned a women's craft into history painting
Annihilation of the self in God · the Sufi summit
Soren Kierkegaard
Thomas Hobbes
The Lisbon clerk who was also four of the greatest poets of his language, simultaneously
The slow trick of getting one mind into another’s chair
A dark room full of strangers, all dreaming the same dream at the same time
Graham Hancock
The lady with the lamp… and the lady with the pie chart
Once the earth was covered in vegetation. Then the first flower bloomed. For a long time it was alone. Then the flowers were everywhere.
The magic of villages, hedges, kitchens
From Sinai to the supermarket
The medicine the trees have been giving away free
Benoit Mandelbrot
Heraclitus
United Kingdom · 1916–2004 · the DNA co-discoverer who turned to consciousness in his last twenty-five years
The insurance clerk who wrote the terror of the twentieth century before it had happened
The autobiographer of freedom
Hedy Lamarr
The self-portrait as survival
Polish exile · the nocturnes · the heart in the jar
The novelist who stood before a firing squad and was spared in time to write the soul’s terror
Hungary / Canada · born 1944 · the physician whose first question is not why the addiction but why the pain
The Colombian journalist who invented Macondo and gave a whole continent its narrative voice
United Kingdom · born 1952 · the philosopher whose argument that you cannot get experience out of non-experience helped revive panpsychism
A small Italian astronomer pointed a homemade telescope at the sky and demoted the Earth from the centre of the cosmos. The species has been adjusting ever since.
No single player has the melody. The melody emerges from the interlocking of many parts.
Seven days. A garden. A serpent. Two trees. The cosmological story that shaped most of Western imagination.
When the Earth turns its compass inside out, and what the mystics have always suspected
The Anglican bishop and philosopher who pushed empiricism to its strangest and most logically consistent conclusion… that there is no such thing as matter at all, only ideas, and that the world exists because God is continuously thinking it.
Middlemarch · sympathy as method
The desert as form
The Jesuit priest who invented a new rhythm for English and hid his poems in a desk drawer
Strength · judgement · the left arm of the divine
Infinite worlds · burned in Rome 1600
Rabindranath Tagore
Italy / United States · born 1960 · the neuroscientist who put consciousness into equations
The most reckless of all the materials
Direct knowledge · the kind that saves
One of the Four Arts of the Scholar
Andrew Collins
Life magazine's first Black staff photographer; first Black director of a major studio film
Philosopher, mathematician, diplomat, librarian, theologian, historian, geologist, jurist, logician, inventor of the calculus (independently of Newton), of binary arithmetic (centuries before computers), and of the optimistic philosophical thesis that this is the best of all possible worlds (which Voltaire never let him forget).
The TikTok ‘leaked CIA cheat codes’ · the actual Russian founder · the Beslan grief · what numbers actually do in the brain
Simone Weil
Catholic monastic tradition
Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm
Southeast Turkey
The recluse who invented cosmic horror · died unknown, now everywhere
Three lines. Seventeen syllables in the original Japanese, looser in translation. A single image of the natural world. A small jolt of recognition. The seventeenth century Japanese poetic form that has become, in our era, perhaps the most widely practised poetic form on earth.
William Shakespeare · written somewhere around the death of his own father
Sixth king of the First Babylonian Dynasty · author of one of the earliest law codes in human history · the man whose stele still stands in the Louvre
The Baal Shem Tov and the dynasties
Fifth pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty · one of the only women to rule Egypt as full pharaoh in her own right · builder of Deir el-Bahari, one of the architectural masterpieces of the ancient world
When the right to be cared for becomes a thing you have to buy
The language that came back
The Greek personification of the sun · the charioteer who drives his fiery chariot from east to west across the sky every day · the god the Colossus of Rhodes was raised to honour
The decisive moment · Magnum
The yardstick of the universe
The man who built a cabin in the woods to find out what living actually cost
The smith of the gods · husband of Aphrodite · cast out of Olympus · the wounded craftsman whose work is more beautiful than any of his uninjured kin can produce
Plants as medicine. Plants as teachers. Plants as the great quiet apothecary every culture in the world has known about, named, drawn pictures of, and passed down through grandmothers for as long as humans have lived alongside roots.
The composite figure of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth · reputed author of the Emerald Tablet and the Hermetica · the founding figure under the entire Western esoteric tradition
The fifteen-year flowering that systematised Western magic for a century
As above, so below…and meaning it
Hesiod
Translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White (1914)
Stillness · the Jesus Prayer · the contemplative tradition the West almost forgot
Pictures that learned to speak
Abbess. Composer. Visionary. Herbalist. Theologian. Diplomat. The most original mind of the twelfth century, and the only one who happened to be a woman writing in her own name.
Visionary, healer, composer, polymath
The first abstract painter
Here I am · the deepest three syllables in any sacred tradition
The new star Hipparchus saw appear in the sky in 134 BCE · the observation that prompted him to compile the first known star catalogue · the single bright moment that gave us a science
King Hiram I of Tyre, ally of Solomon · and Hiram Abiff, the master craftsman who cast the bronze and cedar of the Temple · the father-figure of the entire Western building tradition
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Thucydides · the Athenian general turned exiled historian
Form · articulation · the left leg
The intensive breathing practice developed by Stanislav and Christina Grof in the 1970s, designed to produce non ordinary states of consciousness without drugs, originally as a legal substitute for the LSD therapy work that had been outlawed.
Samuel Hahnemann · like cures like
A name that may belong to a person, or to a tradition, or to both
The most disciplined democratic uprising of the twenty-first century
A miracle in slow motion
To make right · the Hawaiian practice of reconciliation
Hypatia
Titan of heavenly light · father of the sun, the moon and the dawn
Named by Adam Zeman’s laboratory · the condition of having mental imagery so vivid it is indistinguishable from perception
What the brain does when it lets go · plus the quantum question
An insult, on closer inspection, that turns out to be the highest compliment physics can pay
Erin Werley
Eheyeh asher Eheyeh · the answer the voice gave Moses
Scotland · born 1953 · the master, the emissary, and the long argument for both
Al-Shaykh al-Akbar… the Greatest Master. The thirteenth century Andalusian Sufi who unified the entire metaphysical inheritance of the Mediterranean and produced, in the process, what may be the most ambitious mystical synthesis ever written by a single human being.
What we would lose · what would collapse · print one thing tonight
The thought experiment · the seven-day claim · the kettle that won't boil
a stray essay, for stray souls
Vizier to Pharaoh Djoser · architect of the first pyramid · physician, scribe, priest, polymath · one of very few human beings in any tradition to be deified across two millennia after his death
Buddhist teaching
Logos, the keystone, the cosmic punchline
Queen of Heaven and Earth, descender into the underworld
Zulu, Xhosa, Akan and beyond · talk-until-you-agree
The forgotten republics of ancient India
A raga is not a tune. A raga is a mood, a time, a season, a state of being.
The first tongues of the land
The Zapatistas, Bolivia, Standing Rock
Vedic king of the gods · slayer of Vritra · wielder of the vajra · the figure of perhaps a quarter of the Rig Veda hymns
The room becomes part of the work
Developed by Richard Schwartz from the 1980s · United States · the model in which the inner family of parts and the underlying Self meet each other gently
Inca sun god · supreme deity of the Andean empire · the figure whose son the Sapa Inca was
Survival-based collective decision-making
Aliens, higher beings, the disclosures, the Arcturians
The Ari · Tzimtzum, Shevirat HaKelim, Tikkun Olam
Cambridge mathematician · Master of the Mint · alchemist · biblical chronologer
The infinite in tile and stone
The man who broke the secrecy and gave the Golden Dawn to anyone who wanted it
A Lutheran cantor who wrote the most mathematically perfect music in Western history.
Jabir ibn Hayyan (Geber)
The Migration Series
The essayist’s essayist
United States · 1926–2011 · the post-Jungian who said the soul is not in the body, the body is in the soul
The exile who carried Dublin inside him and rewrote it until it became the world
Six novels · the ironic eye
A bamboo flute. Played by Zen monks as meditation rather than music.
Wrote a tone poem about a black swan that swims on the river of the dead. Then stopped composing for thirty years.
SAMO ©, the crown, the eight-year career that ended at twenty-seven
Alan Moore
Jocelyn Bell Burnell
United Kingdom · 1907–1990 · the psychiatrist who insisted, against his profession, that the bond between child and caregiver is primary
Wrote a piece consisting entirely of silence. The teacher who asked the twentieth century to listen to what was already there.
A North Carolina saxophonist who turned jazz into prayer.
Mathematician, astrologer, conjurer of angels
England · 1632–1704 · the philosopher who first defined consciousness as the perception of what passes in the mind
The blind republican who dictated Paradise Lost to his daughters and gave English its grandest epic voice
Yosemite · the Sierra Club
The blind librarian who dreamed a universe shaped like a library and then wrote its floor plan
Tried for ‘social parasitism’ · Nobel 1987
Wu Cheng'en
United States · 1920–1997 · the Princeton psychologist who said modern self-reflective consciousness is only three thousand years old
All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. An anchoress in a cell on the side of a parish church. A near-death vision. A small book that is, by general consent, the deepest theological text ever written in English.
The largest planet in the solar system · the Latin name of the Greek Zeus · the lightning-bringer that swept across the night sky every year and was named the king
The whole tradition · an umbrella
United Kingdom · born 1959 · the most influential theoretical neuroscientist of the last fifty years
Action · and the long memory of the universe
The man who painted Obama, then painted Black men of the present in the postures of European masters
United Kingdom · born 1962 · the philosopher who formalised the illusionist position and gave it its name
Mary the Jewess · Zosimos · Cleopatra the Alchemist · the Khemitology question
The painter who insisted Black bodies belonged in the great tradition of European history painting — and proved it
The unsayable beginning
A voice begins. The room answers.
She who hears the cries of the world
The coiled light at the base of the spine
Narcissus, Myers-Briggs, the TikTok diagnosis, and the boundary that is actually an instruction
The blues as poetry
The fluency under the floor
The language that became five
Sir Thomas Malory
Walt Whitman · the Brooklyn journalist who set the first edition in type himself, then spent the rest of his life revising it
Walt Whitman
Blavatsky, Churchward & others
The count who became a peasant and tried to empty the world of violence
The lyre-player who became the painter
Celtic mythology in paint
Rainer Maria Rilke · in his late twenties, writing back to a stranger’s urgent letter
Seneca
The neurological cost of being lied to · epigenetic ripples · a brief dystopia
The speech the body finds when the mind goes quiet
The dark woman of the Huluppu trunk · Adam’s first wife who would not lie beneath him · the queen of the wild places
One cracked, one still silent
Vote-delegation systems for the wired age
Bertrand Russell
The Word · the rational structure of the cosmos
The spider mothers, the hanging cells, the seven decades before the world caught up
Titus Lucretius Carus · c.99–c.55 BCE · the Roman who turned Epicurean atomism into the longest sustained philosophical poem ever written
The deafness and the late quartets
Edward Witten
William Shakespeare · the play written for the king who had written the witch-hunters’ manual
The bridge across which the modern West first received Eastern religion
Graham Hancock
King John, the barons, and the seed of the rule of law
The Rambam · philosopher, codifier, physician
Discovered just after Easter 2005 · dwarf planet named for the creator deity of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) · second largest body in the classical Kuiper belt
The autodidact who taught himself in a prison library and then taught a generation
The world · the Shekhinah · the divine feminine in exile
Seeds in Pits
The circle that holds the cosmos
Hermetic, Christian, Buddhist, New Thought, contemporary · the practice of working with thought, attention and intention
One word. Repeated until the mind learns the shape.
Fountain · the readymade
Margaret Hamilton
The brewer's wife who dictated the first autobiography in English
The Saigon childhood, the spare prose that taught a generation what to leave out
The first American woman astronomer
Switzerland · 1915–1998 · Jung’s closest collaborator and the world’s great reader of fairy tales
The goddess archaeologist of Old Europe
The Florentine who restarted Western mystical philosophy
Boston PhD, Letter from Birmingham Jail, the radical late King the establishment forgets
NASA’s first Black female engineer
Apostle to the apostles
The poet who walked out into the fields and asked the world the only question that matters
Eighteen years old, bereaved, sleepless · she dreamed an entire novel that invented science fiction
Maria Prophetissa
Theotokos · the bearer of God
The woman who dared to suggest that women were human beings
María Sabina Magdalena García · 1894–1985 · Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca, Mexico · the Mazatec healer who let the West in, and was the first to say afterward that something irreplaceable had been broken
Karen Uhlenbeck
The poet who walked the narrow road to the deep north
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Truth, justice, cosmic order · the feather against which the heart is weighed
Ecclesiastes · quantum · the bread of shame · the tikkun you chose
The Flowing Light of the Godhead
Sitting still on purpose. Attending to what is here. Watching the mind do its small habitual things, and slowly, slowly, beginning not to be those things… the simplest practice in the world. The hardest. The one every contemplative tradition eventually reaches the same room through.
Marcus Aurelius
René Descartes
The German Dominican preacher and theologian whose sermons in the Middle High German vernacular went so deep into the apophatic tradition that the Pope condemned twenty eight propositions from his work the year after he died, and whose readers have been quietly arguing back ever since.
Meister Eckhart
One sings you onto the rocks, one combs her hair on them · and the world quietly swapped the two
Ovid · the witty, sensual, brilliant Roman poet exiled by Augustus to the Black Sea
The complete reversal of consciousness
Aristotle
Aristotle
Derived from the Fruit of Life
United States · born 1967 · the Princeton neuroscientist who proposed that consciousness is the brain’s model of its own attention
Titaness of Memory
Liberation · the fourth and final goal of human life
Current neuroscience
The small idea fully explored
Mahatma Gandhi
Bertrand Russell · mathematician, philosopher, pacifist, just dismissed from Cambridge for opposing the war
F. Hadland Davis · the Edwardian compiler who gave English readers the Japanese spirit-world
Lewis Spence · Scottish folklorist, journalist, prolific compiler of mythological surveys
Collective decision-making in the meeting house
Sound is the absolute. The world is sound.
Cherokee, Lakota, Pueblo and beyond · the deep continent
Ralph Waldo Emerson · thirty-three, recently widowed, just beginning the work that would shape a generation
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The book that does not need ink
Navajo tradition
Compiled by Washington Matthews from his work with Diné singers
The country doctor who became the most-translated Arab writer of her century
United States · born 1942 · the philosopher who taught the field to keep its terms straight
Discovered 1846 by Le Verrier’s pen and Galle’s telescope · the deep blue ice giant of dreams, dissolution, and the sea
Endurance · victory · the right leg
Different operating systems
Isaac Newton
The conjectural twelfth planet of Sumerian-mystic tradition · held with equal grace alongside the conventional sky · the library does not adjudicate
Aristotle
Niels Bohr
The magus of electricity
The blowing out · the unconditioned peace
The shortest essay in the library
Emmy Noether
Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen / Bell
Six-octave range. The voice that opened qawwali to the world.
Saigon to Hartford to T.S. Eliot Prize
The science fiction of Black survival
Norse all-father · the one-eyed king · the hanged god · the figure who paid an eye for wisdom and hung on a tree for the runes
England · 1933–2015 · the doctor who took every patient as a full human being
The astronomer who reformed a calendar, solved cubic equations, and wrote quatrains about wine and the end of all things
Three sounds in one breath. The hum the universe is said to be making, always, when nobody is listening.
Held with care · biology, culture, the magical thread
John Stuart Mill
Charles Darwin · the patient naturalist of Down House, Kent
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
When language sounds like the thing
Isaac Newton · older now, Master of the Royal Mint, finally publishing the optical work of his Cambridge years
Roger Penrose & Stuart Hameroff
The hunter who walks across the winter sky from December to April · the constellation almost every human civilisation has noticed and named · the figure aligned with the Great Pyramid
The poet of transformation, exiled to the Black Sea for a poem and a mistake he never named
The Chilean railway-man’s son who wrote love poems and a continent-sized epic and won the Nobel
The hand finds the brush before the brush finds the canvas
The artist who painted the Rider-Waite Tarot · uncredited for 116 years
From a great egg of chaos a giant emerged. He pushed the heavens up and the earth down for 18,000 years. When he died his body became the world.
Physician, alchemist, magus of the Reformation
John Milton · blind, defeated, dictating to his daughters
John Milton
From one Brazilian city to over eleven thousand cities worldwide
Jacques Vallée
Canada / United States · both born 1942 · the philosophical couple who proposed that folk psychology will eventually be replaced by neuroscience
Todesfuge · the Seine
A Texan accordionist who turned listening itself into a discipline.
Paulo Freire
The man who synthesised cortisone from soybeans · whose Oak Park bedroom was dynamited twice
The body itself, gone again as soon as it’s done
Thucydides (reporting Pericles)
Twelve modal systems. Hundreds of melodic phrases inherited across centuries.
Mutual Aid · the anarchist prince
United States · born 1942 · the medical biophysicist who learned from prey animals how trauma is meant to be released
A small spineless cactus that grows in a narrow band of desert from southern Texas down into central Mexico · sacrament of the Huichol, the Tarahumara, the Apache, and the Native American Church · legally protected as a religious practice in the United States since 1978
Plato
United Kingdom · born 1979 · the philosopher who rehabilitated panpsychism for the contemporary academy
Karl Marx
Rosalind Franklin
A click. A light captured. A moment that will never come again, kept.
Unknown Gnostic author
Predicted in 2016 by Batygin and Brown from orbital perturbations · estimated five to ten Earth masses · not yet directly seen
Plato
The bridge from Plato to every mysticism that came after
Discovered 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh · the underworld god of the outer solar system · reclassified as dwarf planet in 2006 and never quite forgiven
Aristotle · the most influential dry lecture notes ever taken
A handful of words. The right ones. In the right order.
The North Star · the still point · 433 light-years away
The integrative healing system developed by Randolph Stone in the 1940s and 50s, drawing on Ayurvedic energetics, osteopathy, naturopathy, and his own clinical observation that the body holds and releases subtle currents which can be palpated and rebalanced by trained hands.
Michel Foucault
Kabbalah Maasit, the Kabbalah that does things
Master Choa Kok Sui · the IKEA manual for the subtle body
The practice every culture has independently invented
The democracy of the press
The Titan who loved humanity
The hidden author who baptised Plotinus into Christianity
The active compound in roughly 200 species of mushrooms across every inhabited continent · sacrament of the Mazatec, the medicine of the modern psychedelic renaissance, and quite possibly growing in your own pasture this autumn
Carl Gustav Jung
Spiritual emergence in the locked ward
The sixth century BCE Greek philosopher and mystic who founded the brotherhood that gave us the theorem still bearing his name, and a great deal more besides… the harmony of the spheres, the sacredness of number, the long shape of every later esoteric tradition in the West.
The mathematics of consonance
The mathematical mystery school of Croton
Chinese tradition
Decision by silence, listening and unity
The radical Christian movement that emerged in seventeenth century England with the conviction that there is that of God in everyone, that no priest is needed between the soul and the divine, and that the truth is best discerned by sitting in silence together until someone is moved to speak.
Various researchers
Deepak Chopra & the school of the field
Light bodies, activations, the cousin of quantum healing that took the photons literally
Gambini & Pullin
The body work is excellent. The physics is mostly poetry.
Discovered 2002 from Palomar · dwarf planet named for the creator deity of the Tongva, the indigenous people of the Los Angeles basin
The recitation
Egyptian sun god · supreme creator · the sailor of the solar boat · the figure under three thousand years of Egyptian theology
The woman who loved God without reward
Cornel West
Silent Spring
The poet who heard the angels speak in a storm off the Adriatic and spent ten years writing down what they said
The minister who walked out of the church and spent the rest of his life looking for God in the woods
The Bengali sitarist who taught the West how to listen to the raga.
The pagan economy is older than money
The foot as a map of the body
Mikao Usui
Albert Einstein
The alchemist-painter
France · 1596–1650 · the founder who made the inner point of view the central problem of modern philosophy
United States · contemporary · the therapist who brought the trauma framework into the racial-justice conversation
Julian of Norwich · the anchoress in the cell at St Julian’s, whose real name we do not know
Julian of Norwich
If God made the world in seven days… could we unmake the harm in seven, by walking it backwards?
Diagrams · bongos · the Challenger O-ring
The Ring · Bayreuth · the Gesamtkunstwerk
Vedic seers
The poet who recovered the White Goddess
United Kingdom · born 1979 · the central figure of the second wave of psychedelic science
The Harlem songbook in cut paper
The silenced systems
Founder of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids
Omar Khayyam (eleventh century) translated and arranged by Edward FitzGerald (1859)
Jalal ad-Din Rumi
Twenty-four shapes that were a language, an oracle, and a power, all at once
Translated by W. R. S. Ralston, drawing on the Afanas’ev collection
Edited by Max Müller, Oxford 1879–1910
Leonardo da Vinci
The wheel of wandering-on · the world as it turns
The perfect language
The Tenth Muse of Lesbos
The seeing into one's own true nature
The slowest of the planets visible to the naked eye · the planet of rings · the celestial figure of memory, limitation, time, persistence and stone
Every culture has a god of time. Most are old, slow, devouring, and a little terrible.
Rare condition · documented across centuries · the cognitive variation in which one narrow ability is developed to a level that asks the species to reconsider what brains can do
Erwin Schrödinger
Hubbard the pulp writer · the e-meter · Xenu and the volcanoes · the church that sues
Look into the surface long enough and the surface looks back
The slow removal of everything that is not the figure
Discovered 2003 · far-distant dwarf planet on an enormously eccentric orbit · named for the Inuit goddess whose severed fingers became the seals and the whales
Attributed to Abraham
Greek moon goddess · sister of the sun and the dawn
The seal who becomes a woman on the shore · and the man who hides the skin so she cannot go home
A historical Assyrian queen-regent who became one of the most famous legendary queens of the ancient world · named in classical sources as the builder of Babylon and her Hanging Gardens
The Oldest Board Game
The full inventory
The deliberate practice of meeting, naming, and integrating the parts of oneself that the conscious personality has disowned. Carl Jung’s central contribution to depth psychology, and the most uncomfortable necessary work most people will ever undertake.
One hundred and fifty-four poems, three mysterious characters, and the greatest love sequence in English
Indigenous traditions
Cross-cultural · the original physicians · the men and women who could travel between worlds
Yoruba lightning king · deified fourth Alaafin of Old Oyo · the orisha of thunder · the figure carried across the Atlantic during the slave trade and worshipped today in Cuba, Brazil, Trinidad and the wider African diaspora
The Kabbalistic teaching of the breaking of the vessels · Isaac Luria, 1534–1572 · the foundational story under the entire library
Japanese tradition
The first Black woman to take a doctorate from MIT · the physicist whose work runs through your phone
Dōgen Zenji
Two zodiacs, 24 degrees apart
Galileo Galilei
A wish folded into a shape, given to the dark
Full languages of the hand
Rachel Carson
When you sing, your body is the instrument. There is no other physical practice that does what singing does to the human nervous system.
The Dog Star · Egyptian Sopdet, the celestial form of Isis · the brightest single star visible from Earth · the timekeeper of the ancient Nile flood
Audre Lorde
Perun, Veles, Mokosh, the rusalki, the leshy, the domovoy. The least documented of the major European mythologies.
Slavic tradition
The Path to Liberation
She walked out of slavery and gave America one of its great moral voices
Six frequencies a contemporary movement uses for healing meditation.
Three Latin words. Two of them verbs.
The plant whose name became a god whose name became a planet (the moon) whose identity has been lost · the divine drink of the early Vedic religion · one of the great unsolved mysteries in the history of religion
The bards before the books
William Blake · engraver, mystic, prophet, married to Catherine, alone in Lambeth
She who was present at creation
From the Pnyx to citizens' assemblies in Ireland and France
Multiple traditions
The patient liberation struggle of the twentieth century
From military dictatorship to constitutional democracy in seven years
Einstein's miracle year
The Man Who Knew Infinity
France · born 1965 · the careful experimentalist of conscious access
Czechoslovakia / United States · born 1931 · the careful clinician of the territory mainstream psychology refused to enter
Co-founder of the Reclaiming tradition
United States · born 1945 · the psychophysiologist whose theory reshaped the entire trauma field
United States · 1957–2024 · the journalist who rewrote the history of autism and named the neurodiversity movement
Salisbury Plain, England
The night the patrons fought back
Done by morning, gone by next month, the work was here
A women-led revolution · the kandakas
The build. The build. The clap. The voice that pulls the room out of its chair.
The listening. The whirling. Rumi’s spinning prayer.
The world's inventors
The first recorded popular assembly
Thomas Aquinas
Hindu sun god · the seven-horse charioteer · the figure of the Gayatri mantra
United Kingdom · born 1951 · the parapsychologist who became the rigorous sceptic and the rigorous Zen meditator
Open-air cantonal assemblies still running today
The creature Paracelsus made out of nothing but air · and a poet turned into a word for slenderness
About four percent of the population · the condition where one sense reliably triggers another
Scheherazade & anonymous authors
The year half of Europe rose at once
Five revolutions in a single year
Modern Western music tunes A to 440. A vocal community argues the natural frequency is 432.
A cosmology not in the past but in a parallel temporal layer that intersects the present continually. The ancestral beings who sang the world into being are still singing.
Virgil · the Mantuan poet who spent the last decade of his life writing Rome’s national epic on commission for Augustus
The water-bearer pouring
Two thousand years of the fish
The acceleration we are inside · possibly guided
The colonies that decided to leave
Confucius
William Blake
Egyptian · Mesopotamian · Greek · Zoroastrian · Norse · Yoruba · Mesoamerican
Various physicists
Unknown Greek workshop
Sumerian tradition
Unknown Gnostic author
Plato
A fruit-seller in Tunisia, a wave across a region
Guido Reni
Jung's summation, gathered late · the book that named the patterns
Plato of Athens
Sun Tzu
The teachers who finished, and stayed close enough to keep teaching
Conjunction · opposition · trine · square · sextile
Taurus · Aries · Pisces · Aquarius
Not a bringer of death but a herald of it · the family spirit who weeps so that you will not have to grieve alone
Aleister Crowley, the most controversial magician of the modern age
Muse of Epic Poetry
A women’s movement outside the convent
Fifteen bright stars systematised by Cornelius Agrippa · each with a herb, a planet, and a sigil · the load-bearing stars of medieval astrological magic
Strike. The bell speaks once, and then it speaks for a long time after.
Attributed to Vyasa
Lemaître, Hubble, Gamow & the cosmic microwave background
Sumerian scribes
Dark-skinned images of Mary across Europe
Minkowski & Einstein
The book that taught a generation how to listen to itself
Zhuangzi
Ancient Egypt
Anonymous, ascribed to Enoch the antediluvian patriarch (Genesis 5:24)
Attributed to Enoch, great-grandfather of Noah
Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen)
The book that explained the fourth dimension by turning a boy inside out
Sunni · Shi’a · Sufi · Ibadi · the madhhabs · the tariqas
Fyodor Dostoevsky · in his late fifties, terminally ill, completing the book of his life
Moses at Horeb
Byung-Chul Han
The foundational document a state writes about its own people
Wheels of light along the spine
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
MK-Ultra · the Stargate Project · the Gateway Process · the cost · what TikTok keeps mixing up
A hundred years between the formal right and the actual one
The anonymous fourteenth century English contemplative classic that instructs the reader to gather all of God’s names, all theological concepts, all images, all categories, and to push them up into a cloud of forgetting between oneself and them, so that one may meet God beyond all knowing.
Anonymous English mystic
Anonymous English mystic
Chares of Lindos
Emily Dickinson · the woman in the white dress in the upstairs room in Amherst, Massachusetts
One breath. One sound that carries miles over water.
Farid ud-Din Attar
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius · Roman senator, Christian, philosopher, condemned to death at forty-four
Boethius
Attributed to Hermes Trismegistus
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Michelangelo
Adi Shankara
St John of the Cross
Thomas Jefferson, with revisions by Franklin, Adams, and the Continental Congress
Sumerian tradition
The Buddha’s teachings, gathered into 423 verses on the path of awakening · one of the most loved and most read sacred texts in the world
Buddhist canon
Attributed to the Buddha
A short Mahayana sutra on the perfection of wisdom · the world’s oldest dated printed book
Attributed to the Buddha
A hollow eucalyptus branch. Termites did the hollowing. The drone has not stopped for forty thousand years.
Dante Alighieri · the great Florentine poet, in exile from his city, writing the soul’s map
Dante Alighieri
Binah · the receptive principle (with shadow: toxic femininity)
Chokmah · the active principle (with shadow: toxic masculinity)
Thomas Young / Modern physics
Frank Drake
Australian Aboriginal tradition · The Everywhen
The honest reckoning
Strike a stretched skin. The first heartbeat outside the body.
A circle of people. Each with a drum. The circle becomes one organism.
Poetic Edda & Prose Edda · 13th-century Iceland
The collected spells and prayers Egyptians were buried with, addressed to the gods of the Duat
Various authors
Ancient Egyptian scribes
Ancient Egyptian tradition
The middle way · the treatment prescribed
Ancient Greek tradition
Attributed to Hermes Trismegistus
Epictetus
Plotinus
The tongue of angels
Friendship, grief, mortality
Ancient Mesopotamia
Ancient Sumerian scribes
Einstein's last great challenge to quantum theory
Baruch Spinoza · lens-grinder, excommunicated, the gentlest and most dangerous philosopher of his century
From bone flute to laptop, in fifty thousand years
Baruch Spinoza
Chien-Shiung Wu
Not the Disney fairy with the wand · the older, taller, more dangerous neighbours you were taught to be polite to
René Descartes
Socrates of Athens
Mae Jemison
Ada Lovelace
Lao Tzu of Chu
The architecture of a Muslim life
Found in temples worldwide
A bone, hollowed, with a few holes punched in it.
Music wants to happen. Music will use whatever the day gave you.
Fire · Earth · Air · Water
The Buddha’s first sermon at Sarnath
Martha Nussbaum
Bertrand Russell
The decade that rewrote what was politically possible
Nagarjuna
James Lovelock
Hunab Ku tradition
AS ABOVE SO BELOW · an experiment in 1978
Epicurus of Samos
Joseph Gikatilla
Friedrich Nietzsche
Hermann Hesse's novel about a game played with all of human knowledge
Sethian · Valentinian · Manichaean · Mandaean · Cathar · Modern
Seventy-two demons. The chamber would be dishonest to skip it.
James George Frazer
φ = 1.618033988749...
What runs through every language
Shaped from river mud and woken by a word · the oldest story we have about making a servant that might not stay one
A large hammered metal disc, struck with a padded mallet. The sound enters the body before it enters the ear.
Attributed to Mary Magdalene
Unknown Gnostic author
Unknown Gnostic author
Attributed to Valentinus
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Attributed to Pharaoh Khufu
Seven modes. Each one a different mood. The same notes rearranged into a different feeling.
Found across European traditions
King of beasts and king of birds in one body · guarding a hoard of gold that, it turns out, was guarded by real bones all along
Folk magic learned to write
Moses Maimonides
The only successful slave revolution in recorded history
Attributed to Nebuchadnezzar II
David Chalmers
The instrument the angels are always pictured holding. Five thousand years of plucked light.
The women who mapped the stars
Reiki, Yoga, Qigong, Sound Healing, Acupuncture & the World's Traditions of Restoring Wholeness
CERN / Peter Higgs
Trait identified by Elaine Aron in 1996 · about 15-20% of the population · the stable temperamental variation found in over a hundred animal species
The Four Yugas
Hippocrates & school
The oldest formal pledge in Western medicine · do no harm · the moral skeleton of the vocation
Juan Maldacena
Thirty-three Greek hymns to the gods
Benjamin Lee Whorf & beyond
Inanna’s tree · planted on the banks of the Euphrates · the prequel to every Tree of Life that came after
Hannah Arendt
3.2 billion base pairs · the entire book of human life
The V-shaped face of the bull · the closest open star cluster to Earth · the daughters of Atlas, sisters of the Pleiades
The voice of Odin himself
A book that asks you back
The world's oldest continuously functioning parliament
Homer (or whoever Homer was) · the first great poem of the Western tradition
David Bohm
Ibn Rushd (Averroes)
Al-Ghazali
Four thousand inscriptions, no Rosetta
Sigmund Freud · the Vienna physician who turned the night side of the mind into a discipline
Sigmund Freud
Tesla, compiled by T. C. Martin in 1894
A revolution captured by its smallest disciplined faction within twelve months
Haudenosaunee tradition
The hidden ones, made of smokeless fire · older and stranger than the lamp · the unseen who share the world with us
Christian David Ginsburg · the Polish-born Hebrew scholar who introduced the Jewish mystical tradition to English-speaking readers
Compiled by Elias Lönnrot from the folk-songs of Finland and Karelia
David Hume
The monster the sailors swore they saw · and then, one day, the sea actually produced him
Seven principles … one universe
Three Initiates
Ada Lovelace to the present
From latitude to What3Words
Four letters, every living thing
The first global pictograph
The script the universe writes in
What every culture says without words
Birdsong, mycelium, weather
Gesture, posture, the unsaid
The radical seed of the English Civil War
Ptolemy II Philadelphus
From the Latin limen, the threshold of a doorway
A foundation building a clock that ticks once a year, chimes once a century, and is designed to last 10,000 years.
Rebbe Nachman of Breslov · the first of the Sippurei Maasiyot · the story the library was built to carry
A small frame, a few strings, a sound-box made of a tortoise shell.
Eleven medieval Welsh prose tales
Translated by Lady Charlotte Guest (1838–1849)
Enid Blyton · the tree where a different world arrives at the top each time you climb
Nigredo · Albedo · Citrinitas · Rubedo
Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris · Thoth Deck
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Jagadish Chandra Bose
Orthodox · Catholic · Protestant · Pentecostal · Mystical
Jalal ad-Din Rumi
Jalal ad-Din Rumi
Queen Artemisia II
Astronomers and mathematicians · still here
The Long Count & the turn of the baktun
Rupert Sheldrake
Franz Kafka · in his late twenties, working in the insurance office by day and writing this novella in three weeks at night
Thich Nhat Hanh
Uranus · Neptune · Pluto
Pythagorean · Platonic · Plotinian · Kabbalistic · the oldest answer to the oldest question
The only natural satellite of Earth · the timekeeper of every lunar calendar in human history · the goddess Artemis, Selene, Isis, Tsukuyomi, Mama Killa, Chang’e, and a hundred other names · the figure that women’s blood has kept time with for as long as women have had blood
Keeper of Cosmic Memory
Keeper of the Laugh
The Body's Memory
Keeper of the Public Record
Keeper of the Beloved's Name
Keeper of the Vanishing Note
The Veiled One
Keeper of Grief in Form
Pythagorean & Keplerian harmony
Mark Twain · in his last decade, after the deaths of his daughter Susy and his wife Olivia, writing in a darker key than the world expected from him
Mark Twain
Albert Camus
Charles Squire · Edwardian compiler of one of the most influential English popular Celtic mythologies
Lewis Spence · the Scottish folklorist working through the surviving fragments of two destroyed religious traditions
Various Gnostic authors
McTaggart, Augustine, Einstein
Nazca, Peru
Genesis & the Book of Enoch · the fallen ones, and the angels who came down to make them
Gnosis returning · Eckhart Tolle · the fifth dimension
King James Version · 1611
Eighty years before Salem, on a small assize circuit in the English Midlands.
Leonardo da Vinci · the original universal genius, writing in mirror-script for his own eyes only
Why the number keeps showing up
Homer · the second of the two great Homeric epics
Homer
Homer
King James Version · 1611
Creepypasta, the lamp, the Slender Man · how the internet grows its own myths
The institutional vessel of Thelema
A mystery older than writing
Translated by Thomas Taylor (1792)
Translated by Thomas Taylor (1792)
Tanzimat reforms · women voting at half-weight, ahead of the West
Frank White
Bhakti · Karma · Jnana · Raja
The dark twin of The People Said No
A five volume Greek anthology, compiled in the late eighteenth century from a thousand years of Eastern Christian monastic writing, that became the operating manual for the renewal of hesychast practice and the heart of contemporary Orthodox spirituality.
Aristotle of Stagira
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
Friedrich Nietzsche
Plato to Rawls to Habermas
The one creature whose whole life is its own funeral and its own birthday · on the same morning, in the same fire
A love letter to the workshop bench
Rupert Sheldrake & Matthew Fox
Eighty-eight keys. Two hundred and thirty strings. The instrument the entire Western tradition rebuilt itself around.
As above, so below
The seven sisters of Greek mythology · M45 in modern astronomy · the open star cluster almost every culture in human history has named
The Fullness · the realm of divine light from which we fell
Translated by Henry Adams Bellows (1923)
Samoan and Tongan village councils · the matai system
Anonymous K’iche’ Maya, recorded c.1554–1558
K'iche' Maya
K'iche' Maya
Charles Darwin
Eckhart Tolle
The future and the past already exist in your head. The now is the only place anything has ever happened.
The Great Year · 25,772 years
William James
Snorri Sturluson
Snorri Sturluson
Snorri Sturluson, translated by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916)
How meaning happens in a head
How Dee was written out of history
Max Planck
Martin Heidegger
John Locke
The word of God as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad
When the mob came for the library
Plato
SPQR · consuls, tribunes and the slow fall
British Museum / Irving Finkel
Two revolutions in one year · what worked, what went horribly wrong
Immanuel Kant
The little creature said to live in flame · Paracelsus' elemental of fire · the beast that does not burn
Two children convulsing in a parsonage. Two hundred accused by autumn. Nineteen hanged.
Reindeer-herding democracy · the Sámediggi today
Does language shape thought?
Theravada · Mahayana · Vajrayana · Zen · Pure Land · Nichiren · Western
Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Hasidic, Renewal, Humanistic
7.83 hertz. The earth has a fundamental tone. It has been ringing since before life began.
Cross-cultural tradition
Simone de Beauvoir
Frances Hodgson Burnett · the Anglo-American novelist whose Yorkshire was always more her real home than the America she lived in
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Book of Creation
Beyond the famous five
Sun · Moon · Mercury · Venus · Mars · Jupiter · Saturn
Truth… justice… harmony… balance… order… reciprocity… propriety
Compiled by Antipater of Sidon and Philo of Byzantium in the 2nd century BCE · the Hellenistic Mediterranean’s list of the seven most awe-inducing structures the human hand had ever raised
Abu’l Qasim Ferdowsi · the Persian poet who spent thirty years saving his language
Ferdowsi
The feminine face of God in Kabbalah
A horn. A ram’s horn. Not pretty. Not refined.
The most famous of the ten Sibyls of classical antiquity · oracle of Apollo at Cumae · the prophetess Aeneas consulted before he descended into the underworld
The voice as the first and last instrument
John Stuart Mill
Iris Murdoch
Three and a half centuries. A state apparatus dressed as a religious tribunal.
Vedic tradition
Vincent van Gogh
Phidias
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Epictetus of Hierapolis
Classical, Lurianic, Hasidic, Hermetic
Heathenry · Druidry · Hellenismos · Religio Romana · Slavic & Baltic revivals · folk witchery · Reclaiming
Philosophical and Religious Taoism
Two centuries of women fighting for the vote
The single star at the centre of our solar system · the figure under almost every religion humanity has ever practised · the source, the giver, the king, the god, the eye, the wheel, the disc
Robert Moog built the first one in upstate New York in 1964. Within ten years it had transformed every popular music genre.
Taoist tradition
The Way that cannot be named, only walked
Eighty one short chapters. Five thousand Chinese characters. A book that fits in the palm and contains a way of being in the world that two and a half thousand years have not exhausted.
Lao Tzu
Lao Tzu
The swift liberator
Seventy eight cards. A Major Arcana of twenty two trumps that walks the Fool from the cliff edge to the World, and four suits of fourteen cards that rehearse the elemental dance of wands, cups, swords, and pentacles. A picture book that asks the reader back.
There is no god but God
The communication without words
William Shakespeare · the play that ends with the magician breaking his staff and drowning his book
United States · born 1947 · the autistic animal scientist who taught the world what neurodivergent perception actually is
Croesus of Lydia
The West’s first hospitals · patients slept in the temple, the god came to them in dreams
Doctor of the Church, founder of the Discalced Carmelites
The body in front of the body, with no equipment in between
Hesiod · the Greek farmer-poet of Boeotia, roughly contemporary with Homer
Two hands waving in the air, never touching anything.
Verses of the elder nuns
Vianna Stibal · the brainwave between waking and dreaming
United States · born 1937 · the philosopher whose twenty patient pages on a bat opened the modern question
Norse god of thunder · wielder of Mjolnir · defender of humanity against the giants · the most popular god of the Viking age
Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris
Anonymous, gathered across many centuries from many languages
Cardinal · Fixed · Mutable
A single human throat, producing two notes at once. Sometimes three.
Indigenous North American thunder-bird · the principal sky-being of many North American traditions · whose wing-beats make thunder and whose eyes flash lightning
Friedrich Nietzsche
Attributed to Padmasambhava
Attributed to Padmasambhava
Harmony · the heart of the Tree
Repair of the world · the gathering of sparks
Plato · in his late seventies, working out the structure of the cosmos and inventing Atlantis on the side
Michael Crichton · the novel that insists it is not time travel… the past is simply another universe, sitting next door
Aztec sun god of the present (fifth) age · the figure who required human hearts to move across the sky
The editor who became the greatest novelist of her generation and placed the American novel permanently on a new foundation
The sentence as architecture
Written and Oral Torah
Hebrew tradition
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ancient Chinese tradition
World Health Organisation
The bridge that is never finished
Confucius of Lu
What happens to the deepest layer of the self when an experience too large to integrate arrives. The slow work of return. The library’s standing reminder that the contemplative traditions and the trauma research community are, increasingly, talking about the same territory in different vocabularies.
Ten Sephirot. Twenty two paths. The Etz Chaim.
Franz Kafka · the Prague insurance clerk who wrote at night and died telling Max Brod to burn everything
Maiden, Mother, Crone
Turned to stone by the sunrise · and the only folklore creature whose name we gave to the worst of ourselves
The Chinese scientist who read a 1,600-year-old text and found the cure for malaria
The twelve rooms of a life
Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite, Hephaestus, Hermes, Dionysus (or Hestia)
Hesiod's Theogony
The wheel of archetypes
Marie Curie
The divine self-contraction
Too pure to be caught by force · and the long, strange story of the only trap that ever worked on him
Thomas Jefferson et al.
Various Vedic sages
William James · America’s greatest psychologist-philosopher, taking the mystics seriously
William James
The womb of geometry
The closest the wood gets to the human voice.
Carl Sagan & team
Samhain · Yule · Imbolc · Ostara · Beltane · Litha · Lughnasadh · Mabon
The foolish fire that walks ahead of you across the bog · corpse candle · jack o' lantern
Alan Watts
Katherine Johnson
Rose, Leah, Maria, and the others
It turns out the forest is gossiping. It has been for four hundred million years.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Frantz Fanon
Zhuang Zhou
Active · Receptive · six and six
Book of Splendour · thirteenth century
Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai
Southern African tradition
James Joyce · the exiled Dubliner working in poverty across Europe for seven years to write his city back into existence
Lon Milo DuQuette
The water-spirit who longs for a soul · and the water-horse who longs for you under · the elemental of water, gentle and deadly
Eleanor Roosevelt & the drafting committee · thirty articles for everyone
Discovered 1781 by William Herschel · the planet who broke the seven-planet sky · the ice giant tilted on her side
The novelist who proved that a fantasy world could hold more truth than the evening news
The blue-white queen of Lyra · she has held the pole before, and she will hold it again
The farmer’s son who wrote the founding poem of the Roman Empire and asked to have it burned
The novelist who gave English fiction the inside of a mind
The traditional indigenous practice of solitary fasting in the wilderness in expectation of a guiding vision · many tribal lineages, one ancient pattern
The Irish poet who was also a magician, a senator, and the reluctant inventor of modern poetry
The Souls of Black Folk
Henry David Thoreau · the strange, prickly, beloved Concord pencil-maker who walked daily and wrote in a borrowed cabin
Henry David Thoreau
The carpenter’s son who wrote the first scripture of American democracy and called it a song
Wangari Maathai
Leo Tolstoy · in his late thirties, just married, writing the novel that would consume seven years
The hand finding its way through the threads, one row at a time
Werner Heisenberg
William H. Barker and Cecilia Sinclair · Edwardian compilers working with Akan-speaking communities of the Gold Coast
Three rhythms. Four. Five. None of them in the same metre. All of them happening at once.
The dream hypothesis · across the traditions and the physics
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The art world has a problem. The art does not.
Small talk, the voice in your head, the labels we collect, the universal lonely thought
A craft as old as the hills, given a name in 1954
G. K. Chesterton · the great paradoxical Edwardian Catholic critic, taking Blake seriously when most of his contemporaries did not
Pragmatism · the stream of consciousness
The Scottish housekeeper who classified ten thousand stars
Voltaire
A practice older than every church that tried to burn it
The Magic Flute and the Requiem
Vera Rubin, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Margaret Hamilton, Emmy Noether & Karen Uhlenbeck … the ones who changed everything
Where the suffragists' work is still being done
Doing by not-doing · the river’s way
The polka dots, the infinity rooms, the artist who has lived in a Tokyo psychiatric hospital by choice since 1977
The pelvis of the divine · the lunar imagination
A vast ash tree at the centre of the cosmos. Nine worlds nested in its branches and roots. The Norse axis mundi.
The Chinese principle that all phenomena arise from the dynamic interplay of two complementary forces. Not opposites in conflict. Two faces of one thing, dancing.
Ancient Indian tradition
Yoruba tradition