Episode 153: Celestial Machine: On the Temperance Card in the Tarot

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 10:30:00 -0400

Even learned commentators on the tarot are likely to point out at the fourteenth major arcana, Temperance, is a bit of a boring card. At least, it comes off as dull until you look at it closely, as JF and Phil do in this episode. What they find is that the Temperance card is actually a diagram, a kind of blueprint for a celestial machine that underlies human technology, beckoning us to restore even the most mechanical contraption to the raw weirdness at the source of everything.

Header image by Rolf Dietrich Brecher via Wikimedia Commons

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SHOW NOTES

Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot
Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth
Adrien Lyne, Jacob’s Ladder
Weeping Angels, Dr. Who creatures
Joel Schumacher, Flatliners
Lawrence Halprin, The RSVP Cycles
Gregory Bateson, Steps To an Ecology of Mind
Hesychasm, monastic practice
Yoav Ben-Dov, Tarot: the Open Reading
The Gnostic Tarot
Jeffrey Kripal, Authors of the Impossible
Nagarjuna, Verses of the Middle Way

Episode 47: Machines of Loving Grace: Technology and the Unabomber

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 22 May 2019 10:30:00 -0400

Made in 2003, Lutz Dammbeck's documentary The Net: The Unabomber, LSD, and the Internet is a film about many things, but the gist of it is something like what William Burroughs called the doctrine of control. We live in a world governed by technologies designed with a particular idea of society in mind, one that has its roots in the trauma of global war and the utopian dreams of modern thinkers. The viability of this ideal is, of course, an important question, and it was made all the more urgent by recent developments at the intersection of technology and politics. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss the doctrine of control as imagined by one of its fiercest -- and most insane -- critics: Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber. Kaczynski's thoughts on technological society form the through-line of Dammbeck's film, which in turn serves as a through-line for this jam on everything from one-world government and cybernetics to the archetype of the magus and the Whole Earth Catalog.

REFERENCES

Lutz Dammbeck (director), The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet (2003)
Chuck Klosterman, "FAIL" in Eating the Dinosaur
Jacques Ellul, French theorist
Suzanne Treister, HEXEN Tarot Deck
-- Seven of Swords
-- Justice
-- The Sun
Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine and The Human Use of Human Beings
Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants
Weird Studies Episode 2: Garmonbozia
Stewart Brand, writer and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog
Ursula Le Guin, Always Coming Home
Gary Snyder's idea that "we are primitives of an unknown culture" is explored in Phil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture
Richard Brautigan, "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" (poem)
San Francisco Oracle
Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology

Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Cybernetics”

Episode 153: Celestial Machine: On the Temperance Card in the Tarot

Episode 47: Machines of Loving Grace: Technology and the Unabomber