Elite power structures converge on metaphysical frameworks that provide non-redemptive theology, infinite interpretive flexibility, and ontological hierarchy with exploitable lower tiers. The Talmudic/Kabbalistic tradition uniquely provides all three, which explains why elites would adopt, instrumentalize, or converge toward it.

Welcome back. This is a post which will argue that the upper elites instrumentalize a Talmudic/Kabbalistic framework as legitimation technology. This is not an essentialist argument – it is not about Jews as Jews, and the far-right understanding is a two dimensional cartoon image, which speaks to its unseriousness – rather, this is a structural and psychological argument, that the upper elites are incentivized in certain ways and in certain directions, both from power and psychological reasons that lead to this conclusion. My analysis is structural and observational rather than textually exhaustive; I focus here on external behavior patterns and metaphysical architecture rather than detailed ritual exegesis.

This post assumes the following background knowledge:

1. that the world is structured hierarchically with the central bank owners at the top, followed by their administrative arms (World Economic Forum, U.N., Trilateral Commission, CFR, etc.) and the enforcement arms (transnational security elite), with nations underneath these layers. I discussed it here, and the hierarchy looks like this,
2. an understanding how the central bank system was set up, with the Rothschilds, Warburgs, Millers, Schiff’s, etc, discussed here,
3. an understanding that events do not unfold organically, that it is not simply the egalitarian ratchet effect at play – if that were the case, we would not have seen a rigidly enforced draconian and totalitarian rollout worldwide of shutdowns followed by forced vaccinations during so-called COVID in almost every nation on earth, including so-called enemies like Russia, China, Iran, etc.

Readers who reject this hierarchical model may find this essay unpersuasive; those open to it as a working hypothesis can evaluate whether the framework I propose has explanatory power. The question analyzed here is not whether this hierarchy exists but rather that, assuming it does, which metaphysical framework would best serve its requirements. This analysis is explicitly conditional: IF such an elite hierarchy exists, THEN which metaphysical framework would best serve its needs? Readers who reject the premise can evaluate the IF-THEN logic independently of accepting the IF.

Purely material or structuralist analysis – mapping institutions, resources, and incentives – cannot generate predictive insight into multi-generational elite strategy. Recursive modeling of metaphysical or symbolic frameworks is necessary to anticipate how elites coordinate, justify, and adapt their actions across time. Without it, explanations remain descriptive, not predictive.

Now, I have no concrete knowledge of the inner workings of the upper elites. As far as I can tell, they allow no publications on their inner workings – some speculate that there is a Committee of 300 – so instead one starts from the outside and asks: based upon the manifestations of politics and culture over time, how threats to the establishment are dealt with, the particular strategies involved in their control of the noetic commons manifesting in the Current Thing, all based on a long-term recursive prediction model, what must the upper elites believe, what is their worldview? What would be their psychology? Based upon my understanding of human nature, their concerns would be primarily about maintaining power against outsiders, ensuring that their inner circle does not fracture, destroying threats to their rule, and expanding their power, all with a multi-generational outlook. The very worst thing that could happen would be splits between their ranks, which could shatter the whole project. They would need some glue, some ideology or belief, which would hold them together throughout the ages; the desire and expectation for even more control and power would be one such method, but it is insufficient. People need some sort of metaphysical belief to remain psychologically functional; they need to believe they are the “good” guys fighting “evil”, that they are making the world a better place (for themselves and their kind), and that their views are in line with a higher power that might benefit them in the afterlife. Very few people want to look at themselves as “evil” and predatory without moral, ethical, and religious justification. Such a belief would very likely be religious because we have seen in the 20th and 21st century how weak secular ideologies are – communism is in the dustbin, capitalism is well on its way out, secularism and nihilism have brutally hollowed out society. It must be religious, not ideological, or the binding glue would be too weak. Furthermore, they would need some method of understanding, labeling, and controlling their endless enemies – after all, they are parasitizing off the vast majority of humanity, which has a wide variety of perspectives, strengths and weaknesses – in order to keep them under control. This method must be flexible and able to adapt to changing circumstances; it must be able to analyze a matter from every angle without being held back by morality or other blind spots.

Historical precedent supports this analysis. Every durable elite system – Roman imperial cult, medieval Christendom, Islamic caliphates, Marxist-Leninist states – combined power with transcendent justification. Purely cynical or secular regimes (late Soviet Union, Maoist China post-cult-of-personality, contemporary technocracy) suffer legitimacy crises and internal fracture. The pattern suggests that elite cohesion across generations requires metaphysical binding, not just material incentive.

Elite legitimation framework

Putting this together, elite legitimization requires a framework that provides:

1. Internal cohesion which binds elites together across generations despite individual differences;
2. Justification for rule which explains why their dominance is necessary, beneficial, or divinely sanctioned;
3. Justification for predation which permits exploitation or destruction of enemies without moral contradiction;
4. Interpretive flexibility which allows creative adaptation to changing circumstances without abandoning core principles;
5. Transcendent authority which grounds legitimacy in something beyond human consensus (God, History, Nature, Reason); and
6. Dialectical sophistication which enables understanding and manipulation of enemy worldviews.

As mentioned, secular ideologies have proven insufficient: communism collapsed, capitalism is delegitimizing, nihilism hollows out rather than binds. The framework must be religious to provide durable metaphysical grounding.

A critical clarification on mechanism: This framework does not require conscious coordination, ideological uniformity, or explicit agreement among all elites. Rather, it operates through selection pressure across generational timescales. Elites who lack efficient legitimation frameworks are more vulnerable to internal fracture (competing factions without shared metaphysical binding), legitimacy crises (inability to justify rule when challenged), and competitive disadvantage (losing to rivals with more cohesive systems). The framework need not be universally believed, consciously adopted, or ideologically pure, it need only be functionally convergent among those who survive long-term elite competition. This is not conspiracy but convergent evolution: different actors, facing similar structural problems, independently arrive at similar solutions because those solutions work. Just as states independently converged on central banking (most efficient credit extraction) and militaries converged on combined arms doctrine (most efficient force projection), elites facing legitimation problems would converge on the most efficient metaphysical framework whether through adoption, instrumentalization, or alliance with those who already carry it.

Having established what elite legitimation requires, we can now evaluate existing Western frameworks against these criteria. If one looks at the various religions in the West, Christianity is a pretty weak fit; it focuses on spiritual salvation and not power, it is universal, it justifies “turn the other cheek” instead of domination. Yes, plenty of Christians aim for domination, and the religion does classify people into believers vs. unbelievers where unbelievers are destined to Hell, but the overall direction of the beliefs cuts against the ideology and textual support within the New Testament itself, it is not furthered by it, so it creates friction and drag. More fundamentally, Christianity’s privatio boni framework – inherited from Neoplatonism and formalized by Augustine – treats evil as absence, corruption, or deprivation of the Good. This means domination always requires justification via redemptive outcomes: civilizing barbarians, saving souls, spreading enlightenment. Power cannot be its own justification; it must promise correction toward the Good. This creates constant legitimation friction. Furthermore, Christianity is weak dialectically; its adherents have a pretty poor understanding of opposing views, it basically steamrolled Hellenism via ressentiment. Christianity’s universalist morality and emphasis on humility/suffering as virtue reflects what Nietzsche termed ‘slave morality’ – a revaluation arising from powerlessness rather than strength. This made it effective as a popular movement but weak as an elite ideology.

Islam is stronger than Christianity in terms of upper elite justification – it breaks down the world into believers vs. unbelievers as well in a much more ideologically militant way than Christianity with Dar-al-Islam (the land of Islam) vs. Dar-al-Harb (the land of war) and the dhimmi system, as well as a belief that descendants of Mohammad are justified by God toward perpetual rule. However, Islam isn’t a great fit either, even though Allah justifies expansion and war and provides a natural elite, because it is clumsy – it is very weak dialectically; Sunni jurisprudence has historically favored taqlid (adherence to established schools) over ijtihad (independent reasoning), creating comparative interpretive rigidity relative to Talmudic dialectical culture. While modern reformist movements challenge this, traditional Islamic legal systems resist radical reinterpretation without schism. This interpretive closure is observable: Islamic states struggle to adapt Sharia to modern conditions without appearing to violate divine law, leading either to rigid traditionalism (Taliban, Saudi Wahhabism) or fracturing into competing schools (Sunni/Shia/Sufi divisions). Additionally, Islam’s universalism means converts become full members of the ummah – dhimmi status is legal, not ontological. There is no permanent exploitable underclass with divine sanction.

To be clear, both Christianity and Islam have historically served elite power effectively – the Byzantine Empire, Holy Roman Empire, and Ottoman Caliphate all used religious frameworks for legitimation and maintained hierarchical rule for centuries. The distinction I’m arguing is not that Talmudic-Kabbalistic frameworks are uniquely capable of this, but that they provide it more efficiently. Christianity requires ongoing hypocrisy (elites acting against the universalist and redemptive theology they espouse), Islam requires careful navigation of specific Quranic permissions (bounded by fixed sacred text), while Talmudic-Kabbalistic frameworks directly provide what elites need – non-redemptive theology, infinite interpretive flexibility, and ontological hierarchy without theological contradiction or interpretive friction. It’s not that other traditions cannot serve elite power, but that this one does so with less structural resistance.

When we turn structurally to Talmudic, Kabbalistic Judaism, it neatly checks off the boxes of upper elite requirements. The Talmudic-Kabbalistic tradition provides a belief system that unifies elites (the Chosen People doing the will of Hashem through mitzvot, bringing the light of Torah to the world) while establishing firm hierarchy: rabbinical leadership at the apex, Jewish masses below, ‘righteous among the nations’ (gentiles who further the system) in the third tier, and kelipot (gentiles who resist) at the bottom. Kelipot represent ontologically inferior entities in the cosmic hierarchy. While Lurianic Kabbalah describes sparks trapped in husks, later Chabad interpretations (particularly Tanya) distinguish between Jewish souls – containing a divine portion (nefesh Elokit) – and gentile souls, which derive from kelipot and possess only the animal soul (nefesh habahamit). This creates essential rather than contingent hierarchy: moral obligations are mediated through rabbinical authority rather than universal, and the status of kelipot is not changed by conversion in the same way dhimmi status changes in Islam.

Furthermore, centuries in exile as weak minorities under physical domination from hostile majority nations furthered and encouraged an intense focus toward dialectics – understanding and arguing any and every side of an issue so long as it ultimately is in accordance with the Torah. This dialectical sophistication, honed over centuries of minority status under hostile majorities, produces what might be called adversarial hermeneutics: the ability to argue any side of an issue, understand enemy logic from within, and reframe opposition as serving ultimate purpose. The Talmudic method (pilpul) is not just debate but infinite interpretive recursion – any text can generate endless commentary, any position can be supported or refuted depending on need.

Three Structural Features: Comparative Analysis

Feature 1: Non-Privatio Boni Theology

The God-image of Yahweh in the Tanakh is not privatio boni – not ‘all Good with evil as absence’ – but rather an arbitrary, capricious deity containing both love and destruction, covenant and punishment. This is evident in texts where God commands genocide (Deuteronomy 7:2, 1 Samuel 15:3), brings disaster on the faithful (Job), and explicitly declares: ‘I form light and create darkness, I make peace and create evil’ (Isaiah 45:7).

This theological structure resembles Abraxas more than the Christian God (although they are not the same thing1): it permits power and destruction as divine expressions rather than deviations. Where Christianity must always justify domination as corrective (saving souls, civilizing barbarians), a Yahwist framework permits domination as divine will itself. This eliminates legitimation friction.

This theological realism appears in Judaism’s foundational texts millennia before European philosophical pessimism. Job (circa 6th-4th century BC) presents suffering without moral resolution – God as arbitrary, overwhelming power who offers no explanation, only submission. Ecclesiastes articulates cyclical futility: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” – pleasure is fleeting, work is meaningless, death erases all. Psalms contain not just praise but rage at divine abandonment: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This is existential pessimism 2,400 years before Schopenhauer. What Judaism did – and this is the decisive move – was contain pessimism within covenant and law rather than resolve it. Not “suffering will end” or “God is purely good,” but “this is the structure – follow it anyway.” Europe didn’t need philosophical pessimism until Enlightenment hopes collapsed (18th-19th century); Judaism needed it from the beginning because history forced it (exile, persecution, powerlessness). This early confrontation with irredeemable suffering, combined with non-privatio boni theology, created a framework that doesn’t require optimism to function, which is a critical advantage for elite legitimation across catastrophic historical cycles.

Feature 2: Tikkun Olam as Perpetual Legitimation Engine

Lurianic Kabbalah introduces the concept of shevirat ha-kelim (shattering of the vessels): when God contracted to create the world, the divine light shattered the vessels meant to contain it, scattering sparks of holiness into material reality. The task of repair (tikkun olam) falls to the Jewish people through fulfillment of mitzvot – ritual commandments – as intermediated by rabbinical authority.

This creates a legitimation structure with no endpoint: the world is permanently broken, repair is perpetual, and any action can be reframed as tikkun if it aligns with rabbinical interpretation. Combined with Talmudic pilpul (infinite dialectical recursion), this produces unlimited flexibility: nothing is final, everything can be re-argued, and all actions can be justified as serving ultimate repair.

Compare this to Christianity (redemption completed in Christ, further action is application), Islam (law fixed in Quran/Hadith, gates of ijtihad closed), or Marxism (revolution ends the dialectic, after which only administration remains). Only the Kabbalistic framework provides permanent incompletion plus infinite interpretive flexibility plus cosmic mandate.

Feature 3: Ontological Hierarchy with Exploitable Lower Tier

The kelipot (literally ‘husks’ or ‘shells’) are not merely unbelievers or misguided souls but ontologically inferior with differential moral standing – Tanya distinguishes Jewish souls (nefesh Elokit) from gentile souls (from kelipot, possessing only nefesh behamit), creating essential rather than contingent hierarchy where ethical obligations are mediated through rabbinical interpretation. They can be exploited, manipulated, or destroyed without moral consequence because they actively resist Hashem’s order and therefore have no inherent sanctity.

This is categorically different from Christianity (every human has an immortal soul; hierarchy is institutional, not metaphysical), Islam (conversion grants full membership in ummah; dhimmi status is legal, temporary), liberalism (all humans have equal rights by nature) or Marxism (class enemies are historically contingent, not ontologically fixed). Only the Talmudic-Kabbalistic framework provides essential, ineradicable ontological stratification with divine sanction for bottom-tier exploitation.

Now, let’s step back a bit. The God image of Yahweh is an arbitrary and capricious God, both loving and destructive, in a covenant with the Jewish people but willing to punish them at any time for transgressions; this is not a privatio boni God – God as all Good, with evil a deprivation of God – it is a terrifying God of all opposites, much similar to Abraxas than the Christian God image is, but with a critical difference. This point should be emphasized: if God is all good and all evil, it dramatically decreases the need to “do good” for reward in the afterlife, at least without a compensatory scheme. It opens up the horrors of the Void – if God is everything, then what separates someone who does good from someone who does evil? This is where we see the rise of Sabbateans and Frankism strains of Judaism with what they believed were God -sanctioned moral transgressions, but both ultimately became marginal because their results were so horrifying. Sabbatai Zevi’s mass apostasy and Jacob Frank’s antinomian excesses – including ritual orgy and claimed redemption through sin – demonstrated the danger of a God of totality without mediating structure.

Chabad, alternatively, succeeded longterm because it channeled the same non-privatio boni God-image through rigorous rabbinical control. Chabad flourished, and the reason it flourished was through its metaphysical understanding. It believes that God “shattered” when he created the world and that by fulfilling the mitzvot and by doing the will of Hashem, as intermediated by the rabbinical authorities, one was doing “Tikkun olam”. In other words, Chabad took the correct understanding of philosophical pessimism underlying this reality – that the world is predatory and malevolent, that existence is painful, and that we are either chasing objects or bored – and channeled that pessimism into a structure that furthered the increased power of the religion, using endless dialectics to understand every side of an issue in order to exploit it for maximum gain. The critical difference between Yahweh-as-intermediated-by-rabbis and Abraxas-as-individuated is structural: Talmudic Kabbalism externalizes the crucifixion of opposites to rabbinical authority who mediate between individual and cosmos, while Jungian individuation internalizes it: each person must hold the tension of opposites within themselves until the transcendent function emerges. The former creates elite capture and power consolidation, while the latter creates individual sovereignty but no binding hierarchy; there is no Chosen people, no rabbinical mediation between the Self and reality, one has to grapple with the horrors of a limit condition God image containing all good and all evil oneself. But this then evolves into internalized paganism as a critical coping mechanism as one cannot live at the Abraxas level of totality indefinitely, discussed in detail in this three part series.2

Given elite requirements for (1) non-redemptive theology, (2) infinite interpretive flexibility, and (3) ontological hierarchy with exploitable lower tiers, the Talmudic-Kabbalistic framework is structurally optimal. It is not that ‘Jews control the world’ – it is that elites seeking maximum legitimation efficiency would converge on this framework regardless of ethnic background, either by adoption, instrumentalization, or alliance with those who carry it. It justifies their rule, justifies domination over the masses, it provides incredible dialectical fluency and flexibility while providing justification (whether consciously adopted, unconsciously absorbed, or instrumentally deployed) for elite rule, creating convergent selection pressure toward those who carry, internalize, or ally with its interpretive authorities. Christianity and Islam do not have the same degree of binding glue, and secular ideologies are too weak to hold this group together.

Let’s summarize this:

1. Elite power requires legitimation frameworks with three features: (1) non-redemptive theology (power doesn’t need to justify itself via outcomes), (2) infinite interpretive flexibility (any action can be reframed as necessary), (3) ontological hierarchy (exploitable lower tiers without moral contradiction).
2. Most Western traditions lack one or more of these: (1) Christianity: redemptive, universalist, weak dialectically, (2) Islam: redemptive, interpretively closed, universalist ummah, (3) Marxism: redemptive (classless society), ends at revolution, (4) Liberalism: redemptive (progress), denies hierarchy.
3. The Talmudic/Kabbalistic framework uniquely provides all three: (1) Yahweh as Abraxian God-image (destruction is divine, not error), (2) Tikkun olam + pilpul (permanent incompletion + infinite recursion), (3) Rabbis → Jews → Righteous Gentiles → Kelipot (ontological stratification).3

Therefore, elites seeking maximum power-legitimation would converge on this framework not because of ethnic conspiracy but because it’s structurally optimal for their needs.

The Cost

This is a mediated God image system containing all good and all evil (rabbinical interpretation replaces self-individuation), which trades consciousness expansion for power consolidation.

Some examples: (1) back in 2023, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen declared that “Europe is the values of the Talmud.” This was not a gaffe or isolated statement but reflects observable elite discourse: repeated invocation of tikkun olam, ‘light unto nations,’ and similar Talmudic-Kabbalistic concepts in policy framing, NGO missions, and international governance rhetoric. (2) Chabad Lubavitch maintains documented relationships with major power centers: Jared Kushner’s close ties to Chabad leadership (I resonated with a niche online argument that he has replaced Jeffrey Epstein’s as representing the higher level Rothschilds, although Joshua Stylman believes such intermediaries may no longer be needed in the digital age), Chabad’s institutional presence in Russia (including influence over Putin’s inner circle), and Chabad centers in nearly every major city globally functioning as diplomatic, financial, and cultural nexuses. Furthermore, (3) the WEF’s “Restorist” Narrative: Klaus Schwab’s The Great Reset explicitly frames the world as “broken” and “suboptimal,” requiring a total “reboot” through stakeholder capitalism – a secular parallel to Tikkun Olam where the “repair” is an infinite, elite-managed process – and (4) UN Agenda 2030 as messianic mandate: the preamble to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), titled “Transforming Our World,” uses messianic language to pledge the “healing” of the planet and the “freedom of the human race,” positioning UN technocrats as the ultimate interpretive authorities of a “new universal Agenda.”

The fundamental distinction between Yahweh-as-mediated and Abraxas-as-individuated reveals why elite systems converge on the former. Jungian individuation requires each person to hold the crucifixion of opposites internally – to contain both good and evil, creation and destruction, without resolution until the transcendent function emerges. This process cannot be externalized to authority, cannot be standardized across populations, cannot guarantee outcomes aligned with power, and produces psychological sovereignty incompatible with hierarchy.

Talmudic Kabbalism solves these organizational and psychological problems by externalizing the tension to rabbinical authority, who mediate between individual and cosmos. The individual need not hold unbearable opposites – the rabbis hold them and provide interpretation. This creates predictable moral frameworks (determined by interpretive authority), elite cohesion (shared submission to rabbinical mediation), population management (masses follow interpretation, don’t individuate), and power consolidation (moral legitimacy flows through interpretive monopoly).

It’s crucial to understand this is not a moral judgment but a structural trade-off. Rabbinical mediation provides genuine psychological relief – the unbearable tension of holding all opposites within oneself is genuinely unbearable for most people – as well as social cohesion and shared moral framework. The cost is individual sovereignty: one accepts external interpretive authority rather than confronting the divine directly. Jungian individuation provides consciousness expansion and authentic self-knowledge but at the cost of isolation, unbearable psychic tension, and inability to create stable collective structures. Elites converge on mediated systems not because they are ‘evil’ but because they enable predictable population management – shared moral frameworks, coordinated action, and hierarchical stability. Individuation, by its very nature, cannot provide these things: it produces sovereign individuals who cannot be reliably directed or unified under common interpretation.

The cost of the Talmudic/Kabbalistic approach, then, is consciousness contraction – one gains external power by surrendering internal sovereignty. The elite become spiritually smaller even as they dominate materially. This is why the most efficient framework for domination is also the most spiritually constrictive: it maximizes control by minimizing the unbearable freedom of unmediated confrontation with the divine.

The choice between domination and consciousness also has a temporal component that matters for elite stability. Domination optimizes for short-term control: immediate security, reduction of complexity, clear hierarchies, and insulation from uncertainty. Consciousness optimizes for long-term adaptability: symbolic richness, contact with reality, flexibility under changing conditions, and resilience to existential crisis.

This creates an elite paradox: elites who seek multi-generational stability (long time horizon) adopt domination technologies (short-term optimization), producing consciousness contraction that makes them less adaptable over time. They become optimized for maintaining current conditions but brittle when conditions change. Historical examples include the French aristocracy pre-1789 (optimized for hierarchy, lost contact with emerging social forces, guillotined), the Soviet nomenklatura (optimized for internal control, lost economic adaptability, collapsed), and the late Roman imperial system (optimized for stability, lost dynamism, fragmented).

The Talmudic-Kabbalistic framework is maximally efficient for medium term elite cohesion (it solves coordination problems that other frameworks cannot), but the consciousness contraction it produces may make elite systems suboptimally adapted for surviving genuine existential transitions. Elites trade wholeness for control, and this works until the environment shifts faster than their contracted consciousness can process. Their intense focus on dialectics dramatically improves flexibility to address threats, but the consciousness contraction remains a fundamental problem regardless.

To summarize this section, a fundamental tension exists between metabolic power (the ability to direct resources and populations) and noetic clarity (unmediated contact with the divine/reality). These appear to be inverse properties. To achieve the infinite interpretive flexibility required to manage a global hierarchy, an individual or group discards the “anchors” of objective truth and universal empathy. This creates a closed loop:

1. Selection: The structure filters for those willing to trade internal sovereignty for external dominance;
2. Transformation: The occupant of the high-tier office is reshaped by the metaphysical affordances of the role; and
3. Convergence: Even a revolutionary elite motivated by “good” or “liberation” finds that without adopting non-redemptive theology and ontological stratification, they lack the binding glue to prevent their own movement from fracturing.

The tragedy is not that “evil” people have seized the framework, but that the framework is the only one capable of holding the apex. Any hand that reaches for the scepter must first wither.

This leads to a profound philosophical pessimism: history is not a progress toward enlightenment, but a series of “Succession Crises of the Blind.” If consciousness and power are opposites, then every New World Order is a fresh regression into deeper contraction. The selection pressure ensures that the most spiritually hollow group always wins the competition for the top tier. In this view, civilization is a machine that systematically converts human consciousness into hierarchical stability until the resulting spiritual brittleness triggers a systemic collapse.

Several potential misreadings should be addressed directly:

1. “This is antisemitic.” No. This analysis is about structural features of a religious-philosophical framework, not about Jewish people. Many Jews reject Talmudic authority entirely; many non-Jews could adopt this framework. The argument is functional, not ethnic.

2. “You’re claiming Jews control everything.” No. The claim is that elites of any background seeking optimal legitimation would converge on this framework because it uniquely provides necessary features. This is selection logic, not conspiracy.

3. “You lack textual expertise.” Partially true. This is a structural analysis from external observation rather than rabbinic scholarship. However, the three core claims (non-privatio boni theology, tikkun olam perpetuity, ontological hierarchy) are textually grounded and verifiable.

4. “This contradicts your Abraxian metaphysics.” No. The argument is that Talmudic Kabbalism is a mediated version of Abraxian theology – externalizing the crucifixion of opposites to rabbinical authority rather than requiring individual integration. It’s structurally powerful for elites precisely because it avoids the difficulty of genuine individuation.

5. “Why not just say ‘elites use religion generally’?” Because different religious structures have different affordances. The three features identified here do not appear together in Christianity, Islam, Marxism, or liberalism. The specificity matters for explanatory precision.

6. “This gives elites too much credit for coherence.” Perhaps, but the argument doesn’t require conscious coordination or ideological purity. It only requires that elites facing similar legitimation problems would converge on similar solutions over time through selection, imitation, and institutional reinforcement. Convergent evolution, not conspiracy.

7. “You’re cherry-picking the most power-efficient elements while ignoring Judaism’s egalitarian currents.” This is correct, and it is by design. This analysis explicitly focuses on power-efficient strands, not on Judaism as lived by most adherents or on its most ethically admirable interpretations. The existence of strong egalitarian and social justice currents within Judaism – the prophetic tradition’s emphasis on caring for the widow and orphan, Hillel’s teaching that “what is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow,” Tikkun Olam interpreted as progressive social repair – is real, important, and widespread. None of that contradicts the claim that other strands within the same tradition provide superior elite legitimation infrastructure. Just as analyzing Crusader theology doesn’t require discussing Franciscan poverty movements, or analyzing Wahhabi Islam doesn’t require treating Sufi mysticism, analyzing elite-optimal frameworks doesn’t require comprehensive coverage of all theological strands. The question is not “what do most Jews believe?” but “which frameworks, if instrumentalized by elites, provide maximum legitimation efficiency?” Those are different questions with different answers.

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1 See footnote 2 here: “Yahweh in his story shares several overlapping characteristics with Abraxas, but is not the same thing: both are unconscious, use humanity as the vessel through which God becomes conscious, and both involve how the God-image evolves historically. Crucially, though, Yahweh is not the totality of opposites. He is one-sided, identified with power, sovereignty, and righteousness, split off from his own shadow (which appears as Satan), reactive rather than encompassing. Satan, in Job, is not integrated into Yahweh, he is externalized. That alone disqualifies Yahweh from being Abraxas – Abraxas contains Satan, Yahweh argues with him. That difference is decisive. Jung knew Abraxas early in his decades-earlier unpublished Liber Novus, but deliberately did not present Abraxas directly in Answer to Job. Instead, he staged a transitional myth that moves readers toward Abraxas without naming him. It destabilizes the privatio boni without removing the moral scaffold entirely.”

2 A critical question emerges: if Abraxian theology (God containing all opposites) is more metaphysically accurate than privatio boni, why don’t individuals simply adopt it directly rather than requiring rabbinical mediation?

The answer is psychological survivability. Holding all opposites simultaneously without any differentiation – absolute good and absolute evil, creation and destruction, meaning and meaninglessness, all collapsed into single undifferentiated totality – produces psychotic break, inflation, or ego dissolution. The human psyche cannot dwell permanently in this limit condition.

This is why Abraxian consciousness naturally differentiates into internal polytheism: the psyche self-protects by distributing the unbearable totality across multiple personified centers (what Jung called archetypes, what pagans called gods). This is psychological necessity – the psyche needs multiple stable points to hold contradictions that would annihilate consciousness if held as pure undifferentiated unity.

The Tree of Life in Kabbalistic tradition serves exactly this function: it spatializes contradictions (Chesed ↔ Gevurah, Chochmah ↔ Binah), distributes tension across sefirot, and allows traversal between opposites rather than total identification with any single pole or with the crushing totality itself. This is Jung before Jung – recognizing that undifferentiated opposites destroy consciousness, so differentiation protects while maintaining symbolic truth.

The critical difference between Talmudic-Kabbalistic mediation and Jungian individuation is where the differentiation occurs:

• Talmudic-Kabbalistic: Differentiation is externalized to rabbinical authority and textual tradition (the Tree of Life as collective map, traversal guided by interpretive authorities) while
• Jungian: Differentiation is internalized as personal psychological work (internal gods/archetypes arising spontaneously through active imagination, dreams, and individuation process).

Both recognize that raw Abraxian totality is uninhabitable. The question is whether the stabilizing differentiation is provided by external authority (elite-optimal, produces collective coherence and power consolidation) or internal psychological work (individual-optimal, produces consciousness expansion but no collective binding).

As mentioned, this explains why antinomian movements (Sabbateans, Frankists) failed: they tried to enact Abraxian contradiction behaviorally (transgressing law, sacralizing excess) rather than holding it symbolically. The result was psychological destruction and social horror. Chabad succeeded by containing the same non-privatio boni God-image through rigorous mediation – externalizing the unbearable tension to rabbinical control rather than demanding individuals bear it directly.

3 This metaphysical “perpetual engine” has a direct mirror in the structural mechanics of the financial system. The current model of money creation functions as a secularized ritual of “permanent incompletion”: money is issued as debt, which carries a requirement for growth that can never be fully satisfied. This creates a material “Tikkun Olam” – a world that is structurally “broken” (in debt) and requires an infinite process of “repair” (repayment and growth) managed by central authorities.

Under this framework, the “ontological hierarchy” is enforced through the distribution of credit. Those at the apex possess the “divine” power to generate value from the Void, while those at the bottom – the kelipot – are viewed as mere batteries of labor-energy required to feed an expanding system. Predation is thus transformed into a “logical necessity”; the lower tiers must be harvested not out of malice, but to sustain the stability of the infinite loop. This removes the need for “moral” decision-making, as the elite simply follow the “selection pressure” of the system’s own internal requirement for survival and expansion. This structural parallel does not require conscious design or ethnic causation – it suggests convergent evolution: elites managing debt-based systems and elites instrumentalizing Kabbalistic frameworks are solving the same legitimation problem and arriving at isomorphic solutions.

The text argues that elite control is maintained by pathologizing psychological diversity and forcing a “one-size-fits-all” model of productivity and morality. By adopting a mythic typology -recognizing that different people serve different internal “gods” or metabolic profiles – individuals can reclaim their attention from the “Current Thing” and institutional shaming. This shift from a perfectionist worldview to a tragic acceptance of reality decentralizes power, as the system loses its ability to govern a population that views its differences as ontological strengths rather than defects to be cured.

Welcome back. In this post, the final part of a three part series, I am going to discuss how a mythic typology of human temperament weakens upper elite control over the noetic commons. The intent is to match humanity’s evolving understanding of the God image1 as closely as possible to reality, and weakening of elite control is a biproduct of this process. In the centuries leading up to the industrial revolution belief was what predominated, but in the modern era humanity hungers for experience over belief. When external sources of authority have been corrupted into irrelevance, it is only by the turn inward where that experience can be found.

In the past I have highlighted the “Current Thing” as modernity’s religion, which is where the upper elites use media organs to funnel public attention to a particular topic, monopolizing attention at the expense of an infinity of other topics; whether one agrees or disagrees with the Current Thing doesn’t matter, it only matters that one take a side and plays along. This serves as mass hypnosis.2 The intent of a Current Thing is always (at best) either simply a distraction, or (more regularly) a topic framed dialectically to push upper elite longterm goals and shift population values. As I wrote in a Note, all of the major influencers on both the right and the left are both controlled and entirely caught up in this cycle.

I am seeing (from my limited social circle) the same people who went along with the COVID hysteria and an infinity of other Current Things (a list of over 100 of them was discussed here) trotting out the same old tired lines on both sides, “the right are dictators!” vs. “the left are evil!” having learned nothing from any of the prior Current Things. It is a secular replacement religion, although a weak one psychologically. As I wrote in a Note,

When metaphysical afterlife weakens, the compensation logic does not disappear, it migrates. Modern politics is Christianity with the eschaton dragged into time. Observe the structural equivalence: Heaven becomes utopia/liberation/equality, Hell becomes fascism/reaction/evil Others, Judgment becomes tribunals, purges, cancellations, Sin becomes structural guilt and wrong consciousness, salvation becomes alignment with history’s “right side.”

Politics becomes a moral afterlife simulator. Why? Because once people lose faith that injustice will be corrected elsewhere they demand that it be corrected now, by force, through total systems. This produces zero-sum moralization, apocalyptic rhetoric, intolerance of ambiguity, compulsory innocence signaling. In Jungian terms the unintegrated shadow of the all-good God returns as collective persecution. Modern political movements are not primarily rational projects, they are attempts to re-install Heaven and Hell inside history after metaphysical belief collapses. This is why they are so ferocious: they are carrying the weight of theodicy without admitting it. Abraxas detonates this. If there is no cosmic justice arc politics cannot redeem, enemies cannot be metaphysically purged, history cannot be purified. What remains is tragic management, not salvation, which is intolerable to most people.

The Noetic Commons

Elite control over the noetic commons depends fundamentally on misrecognition of metabolic diversity. This is how I see the mechanism: elite control of perception works by establishing a single dominant metabolic profile as “normal” and pathologizing everything else as deviation requiring correction. The current regime privileges fast processing (throughput over depth), social circulation (networking, visibility, performance), surface legibility (metrics, credentials, demonstrable outputs), short feedback cycles (quarterly results, viral content, rapid pivots), and heat-based discharge (expressiveness, activism, constant motion). This is a prescription of which humans get to work, not a neutral description of how humans work. The key move is that they frame this as universal human nature rather than one metabolic profile among several.

Once you understand that psyches have genuinely different operating parameters, several control mechanisms collapse:

1. Pathologization loses power: The system labels depth-bias as “overthinking” (needs therapy), “antisocial” (needs social skills training), “resistant to feedback” (needs coaching), “analysis paralysis” (needs to execute faster), but if you know you’re melancholic with Saturn/Apollo orientation, those aren’t symptoms, they’re your correct operating mode. The “treatment” is the pathology. Recognition of metabolic diversity delegitimizes therapeutic capture.
2. Standardized metrics lose legitimacy: Current systems measure visible output, social proof, speed to market, extraverted performance, network effects. These privilege sanguine/choleric + Jupiter configurations by design. Once you see these as measuring compatibility with one metabolism, not universal excellence, the meritocratic claim collapses. A melancholic who takes five years to produce dense synthesis isn’t “less productive” than someone churning out weekly content, they’re operating on different time-scales with different yields. The metrics society favors are selection mechanisms promoting specific constitutions.
3. Institutional sorting becomes visible as metabolic filtering: Education, corporate life, media, politics are all structured to reward quick verbal processing, social performance, tolerance for noise/interruption, comfort with ambiguity and rapid pivoting, an ability to “read the room”. These are testing for metabolic compatibility, not intelligence or virtue – narrow-path people who fail these filters being filtered out by design. Once you see this, institutional authority loses its claim to be selecting “the best”; it’s just selecting for metabolic fit with its own operational requirements.
4. Moral shaming loses grip: The system maintains control partly through “you need to be more social” (moral demand disguised as development), “you’re not a team player” (pathologizing depth-work as selfishness), “you need to adapt” (framing metabolic damage as virtue), “stop being so negative” (policing critical analysis). But if you’re cool-dominant/melancholic/depth-biased by constitution, these are attempts to force downshifting3, not moral failings – the shame only works if you accept that there’s one correct way to be human. Metabolic diversity awareness immunizes against that claim.

The noetic commons is controlled by establishing what counts as legitimate knowledge, controlling who gets to produce knowledge, and pathologizing alternative modes of knowing. Humor/god-energy awareness threatens all three when it states different metabolisms produce different kinds of knowledge (not just more/less of same kind), that institutional gatekeeping is metabolic filtering, not quality control, and what’s labeled “pathological” is often just metabolically incompatible with extraction-optimized systems.

Elite control requires you to internalize the mismatch as personal failure. Metabolic awareness reframes this perspective positively for those suffering from the mismatch: “I can’t keep up” shifts to “System operates at wrong tempo for my metabolism”, “I don’t fit in” shifts to “System selects for different conductance pattern”, “I’m exhausted” shifts to “Chronic downshifting depletes my specific configuration”, “I see contradictions” shifts to “My depth-bias processes what throughput-bias skips.” The control vector breaks when you stop trying to fix yourself and start recognizing structural mismatch. Modern institutions say: “Jupiter/Mars/Sanguine = success” but if you’re Saturn/Apollo/Melancholic, you can say: “I’m not serving your gods. I’m serving mine.” This is recognition of incompatible altars, and the system loses power when it can’t claim to represent universal truth/success/health. This knowledge isn’t meant primarily as a therapeutic; Gods as psychic realities pluralize legitimacy in a way that therapeutic language can’t. Therapy says “you have depression, anxiety, executive dysfunction – here’s treatment”, while Gods say “you’re consecrated to Saturn – of course Mars-work feels wrong.” One is pathology requiring correction, the other is ontological orientation requiring alignment. See here for a note tying this into exercise as an example.

Metabolic diversity awareness breaks pathologization, but it doesn’t dismantle the metaphysical ground that makes universalist claims possible in the first place. For that, we need Abraxas.

Tying God energies back into Abraxas

The elites control the noetic commons which governs public perception is based upon the public’s belief in a secularized form of the privatio boni, where evil/suffering is the absence of good, therefore the world is considered perfectible through proper application of effort/resources/will, while inequality, conflict, suffering are errors to be corrected, not structural features of reality. This generates endless progressive projects (“we can achieve equality if we just…”), ever-shifting targets of deviation (“this group is now the problem”), permanent revolution (no stable endpoint, just continuous correction), and moral demand for participation (refusing the project equals moral failure). Elite power is maintained by claiming monopoly on the path to perfection (only they know how to achieve equality/justice/progress), identifying ever-new deviants (whoever currently fails to conform to egalitarian metrics), demanding constant effort toward impossible goal (keeps population in mobilized, anxious state), and pathologizing those who won’t participate (you’re regressive/hateful/broken if you resist). This is divide and conquer dressed as moral unity. Their goal isn’t actual equality, it’s maintaining permanent revolutionary tension that prevents stable alternative power centers from forming.

Abandoning the privatio boni as an internal governing mechanism is not easy to do. The benefits of the Current Things to its adherents are immediate: it gives attachment/belonging types4 something to bond over, it gives esteem types higher status compared to the “unclean” who take the wrong position, it provides meaning and narrative to people so they don’t have to think about the void, and it makes control and agency types feel like they are reclaiming power for themselves. However, the longer term effects of the Current Thing are at best a distraction and at worst (baseline) they enhance the digital control grid that controls everyone’s lives. For attachment and belonging types, elite control of the noetic commons has reduced everyone to atomized, blown out husks – there is no real life “attachment and belonging” anymore, social structures are destroyed. For esteem and status types, under neoliberal feudalism everyone’s status declines except for those at the very top. For meaning and narrative types, the Current Thing is weak and ultimately unsatisfactory. For control and agency types, elite control over the noetic commons consistently reduces control and agency. So this structure is bad for everyone of all psychological types, but the problem is that the benefits of the Current Thing are immediate and result in dopamine hits, while the drawbacks of belief in the Current Thing are abstract and further into the future.

An Abraxas god-image, alternatively, accepts that good and evil are both ontologically real, not privation vs. fullness; reality contains ineradicable contradiction, the world is not perfectible, only navigable, and suffering/conflict/inequality are structural, not accidental. This destroys the secularized privatio boni because if evil is real (not just absence) then you can’t eliminate it through effort/resources/correct policy, attempts to do so will generate new evils (not move toward perfection), and the progressive project becomes recognized as metaphysically impossible, not just difficult. Furthermore, if contradiction is ontological, then “equality” as perfect sameness contradicts metabolic diversity, attempts to enforce it require violence against what is real, and the egalitarian goal is incoherent, not just unachieved – the entire control mechanism collapses because the metaphysical ground dissolves.

Humanity has shown that it can live with a God image of all good and all bad – the Hellenic gods were arbitrary and capricious, Yahweh is deeply morally ambiguous, the Hindu Gods are both creative and destructive – but there has not been a viable alternative that has manifested in the modern West, and such a conception is definitely not Abraxas for most people. This is because attachment types resolve ambiguity through: “What does my group believe?” Esteem types resolve through: “What position elevates me?” Narrative types resolve through: “What fits the arc?” Control types resolve through: “What can I act on?” The function of these stabilizers is to avoid sustained ambiguity, because sustained ambiguity is phenomenologically intolerable for most nervous systems – it creates anxiety, disorientation, paralysis. So if one tells an attachment-regulated person “adopt Abraxas for protection against manipulation-through-belonging,” what one is actually asking is “tolerate sustained uncertainty about your tribal position in order to gain long-term benefits.” But they regulate through certainty about tribal position. The medicine requires the exact capacity their psyche is organized to avoid. This is why the Hellenic gods worked – they didn’t require sustained ambiguity. They were capricious but discrete entities with knowable (if unpredictable) dispositions. You could still ask “What would Athena want?” or “Is Dionysus angry?” Abraxas doesn’t give you that out; instead it says: “The situation contains both Athena’s order and Dionysus’s chaos, and you must hold both as equally real simultaneously.”

One can’t live at the Abraxas limit condition longterm, though: Abraxas as god-image is unbearably total – it names the whole (good and evil, creation and destruction) but provides no livable orientation within it. Ffinite beings cannot stay at the level of totality, and it is also extremely difficult for non-coherence regulated psyches to approach structurally from a privatio boni standpoint shift. Trying to stay at the Abraxas level produces paralysis (everything contains its opposite), nihilism (no ground for action), and psychic exhaustion (holding total contradiction constantly). So the psyche does what it must: it differentiates. The gods are reborn inside as functional partitions: Saturn (limit, boundary, necessary constraint), Dionysus (dissolution, ecstasy, destruction of form), Apollo (clarity, meaning, intelligible structure), Mars (conflict, assertion, directed force), Hermes (mediation, translation, movement between). This is not about choosing a god-image; it is about recognizing which energies already claim you, and learning how to live without being either possessed by them or destroyed by environments that deny them. These aren’t metaphysical realities “out there”, they’re psychic necessities given the Abraxas condition. They provide livable orientation (this situation calls for Saturn, not Dionysus), functional differentiation (different energies for different contexts), mediation between opposites (Hermes allows Saturn and Dionysus to coexist without destroying each other).

The Rebirth of the Gods within the psyche

The secularized privatio boni requires one god (progressive egalitarianism), one goal (equality/perfection), one metric (deviation from sameness), one path (institutional correction). The rebirth of differentiated gods within the psyche makes this impossible:

1. Pluralizes legitimacy: There’s no single “good” to maximize. Saturn says: limit, boundary, accept constraint, Dionysus says: dissolve, exceed, break form, Apollo says: clarify, structure, make intelligible, Mars says: conflict is generative, not error. These can’t be collapsed into “equality” or “progress”; they’re incompatible orientations that are all necessary.
2. Delegitimizes the perfectionist project: If good and evil are both real, then eliminating conflict eliminates necessary Mars energy, enforcing equality suppresses necessary differentiation, pursuing perfection deies ontological constraint (Saturn). The project itself becomes visible as hubris, not virtue.
3. Removes the scapegoat mechanism. Secularized privatio boni requires ever-shifting targets: first this group deviates, then that group, then this idea, then that behavior. This only works if deviation from unity is the problem. But if reality is constitutionally plural (different gods, different metabolisms, ineradicable contradiction), then deviation is structure, not patology. You can’t blame the current scapegoat for preventing perfection because perfection was never possible. See my response to Jasun Horsley here.
4. Shifts frame from perfection to maintenance. This is the key reframe: Under privatio boni (secular) the natural flow is: reality should be perfected → current state is error → someone must be blamed/corrected → permanent mobilization toward impossible goal. Under Abraxas and differentiated gods, though, the flow is starkly different: reality contains ineradicable contradiction → maintenance under siege is the actual condition → optimization is hubris → orientation within constraint is the task. This is not conservative vs. progressive, it’s tragic realism vs. gnostic perfectionism.5 Elite control depends on the gnostic frame because it generates permanent dissatisfaction (never good enough), permanent mobilization (always more work to do), permanent need for guidance (elites know the path), permanent scapegoating (someone is blocking progress). Abraxas plus gods destroys this because it says that dissatisfaction is ontological (not solvable), mobilization toward perfection is delusion (not virtue), guidance requires recognizing your specific gods (not universal program), and scapegoating misses that contradiction is structural (not caused by deviants).

The specific detonation sequence is as follows:

1. Abraxas recognition: Good and evil are both real, contradiction is ontological, perfection is impossible.
2. But Abraxas is unlivable: One can’t operate at total contradiction constantly.
3. Gods differentiate inside psyche: Functional partitions provide livable orientation (Saturn, Apollo, Dionysus, Mars, Hermes as situational guides).
4. Metabolic diversity becomes visible: Different psyches host different god-configurations, have different operating parameters.
5. Universalist claims collapse: Can’t have one path/metric/goal when constitutions are genuinely different.
6. Perfectionist project revealed as gnostic delusion: The world can’t be made equal/perfect because contradiction and diversity are structural.
7. Scapegoat mechanism fails: Can’t blame deviants for blocking progress when there’s no progress to be blocked.
8. Frame shifts to maintenance: Instead of perfecting the world, navigate it; instead of correcting deviants, recognize metabolic difference. Elites lose their soft power control mechanism: no permanent mobilization, no scapegoating, no need for expert guidance toward impossible goal.
9. Noetic commons decentralizes: Knowledge becomes local, metabolic, god-specific rather than universal and institutionally mediated.

Metabolic diversity breaks institutional claims to measure universal merit, but understanding and accepting Abraxas removes the metaphysical ground that makes universalist claims possible in the first place. Secularized privatio boni creates moral demand for unity/equality, legitimacy for those who claim to guide us there, and scapegoating of whoever currently deviates, while Abraxas and differentiated gods destroys the metaphysical possibility of perfection, the legitimacy of universalist projects, the coherence of scapegoating mechanisms. One is not just delegitimizing current elites, one is delegitimizing the entire frame that makes elite rule through moral mobilization possible. This is not oppositional; it is disengagement at the metaphysical level.

Conclusion

But as I wrote at the start, wrestling away power from the elites is not the primary point here. There is no alternative to the Current Thing or ubiquitous nihilism on the horizon; modern belief in science has detonated the old God image, and there is no return to it. Nor is there a return possible to the “pagan” Gods – no one believes in them today and those pretending to are larpers – technological modernity has fundamentally changed our relationship to the world (just like it has changed our relationship in prior aeons6) and we can’t re-enchant a God image simply by will.

An updated God image allows one to recapture one’s attention and to redirect it in ways that improves ones energetic fit, based on a phenomenological, lived, experiential understanding of the human condition, which is what the current technological environment so desperately and so deeply craves; recognizing that the old Gods never died, that instead they have manifested within the psyche as specific and recognizable energies. Whether these energies are understood as symbolic descriptions, interiorized residues of once‑external ordering forces, or as transpersonal agencies that act through the psyche is intentionally left unresolved; what matters here is that they behave as autonomous, law‑like operators regardless of their ultimate ontology. Most people are already devoted to Mercury or Venus or Mars- they just call it “personality” or “vibe” or “how I am.” What one may do is to make the implicit explicit, given people a diagnostic language for forces they’re already serving.

One doesn’t ask people to adopt Abraxas, one shows them they’re already living under one or more gods, and that the pantheon-structure itself is real. This perspective is adjacent to James Hillman’s but not the same thing.7 The protective benefits emerge naturally once people can name what’s already happening: a Mercury-dominant person realizes “Oh, I’m structurally vulnerable to whatever the Current Thing is because I metabolize through mimicry and social smoothness”, a Mars-dominant person realizes “I keep getting baited into conflicts that don’t serve me because I metabolize through dominance structures”, a Venus-dominant person realizes “I avoid necessary confrontation because I metabolize through harmony”. Once you can see your own metabolic pattern you can see how it’s being exploited, what it can’t do (its blind spots), and what other patterns exist and aren’t wrong, just different. This is Abraxian at the systems level without requiring Abraxian consciousness at the individual level. The pluralism of the pantheon does the integrative work. Nobody has to hold all gods simultaneously, they just have to recognize that their god is real (validation), other gods are also real (pluralism), the Current Thing is trying to hijack their god (protection). This makes the gods descriptive before prescriptive -”this is already how you metabolize reality; here’s the accurate name for it.” Looking at the risk profiles and patterns, there is a built in protective function: “If you’re Mercury-dominant, here’s specifically how you’ll be exploited: anxiety, identity diffusion, mimicry addiction, superficial stress from constant adaptation.”

Once enough people can name their metabolic type, they naturally become less exploitable because they can see when they’re being played to type, they can recognize their pattern without being enslaved to it, they can access other gods instrumentally when needed (a Mercury type can consciously invoke Saturn for a specific task, even though it’s not their native metabolism), and most importantly, this framework assumes differences in metabolic stances but no moral superiority or inferiority, which inherently makes life about energy tradeoffs and not imposing one’s will on others. This pantheon emerges through recognition, not invention. This isn’t creating new gods, it is giving people mirrors to see which gods they’re already living under; a Mercury-dominant person can understand “I’m Mercury-dominant” without being able to hold Abraxian paradox, just like they can understand “I’m an extrovert” without understanding Jung’s entire system. The Abraxian wisdom is encoded in the pantheon structure itself in the fact that there are multiple gods, that they’re all real, that they’re all necessary, that none is supreme. The user doesn’t have to consciously integrate this; they just have to learn their type and respect that others exist. This is how one gets Abraxian benefits without requiring Abraxian consciousness; the system teaches what the individual doesn’t have to hold. This spreads as diagnostic literacy, not as religion or ideology, a framework people adopt because it makes their own experience legible.

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1 “God image” is a term Jung uses to describe man’s shifting conception of God over time. We cannot know God directly but we have an image of what God is psychologically; this is the God image, and they are different things. Abraxas is a limit condition because it is totality – all good and all evil, all opposites combined, which is horrifying – and one cannot worship such a conception. The idea is that it is a “limit condition” – one recognizes it and then one individuates away from it via the crucifixion of opposites and the transcendent function toward one’s unique North Star.

2 The Current Thing was recently the Minnesota ICE raids followed by the Epstein document release, but by the time you read this it might be something else – the pattern is what matters.

3 “Downshifting” = forcing energy to operate below its natural gear. Examples: A depth-oriented psyche forced into constant small talk, rapid affect regulation, performative agreeableness, or a long-arc synthesizer forced into short feedback cycles, daily metrics, superficial outputs. The energy can operate there but at terrible cost. So even correct god energies become inefficient when Saturn is used for bureaucracy instead of structure, Apollo is used for optics instead of form, Hermes is reduced to networking instead of mediation. The system spends all its energy translating downward instead of transforming upward.

4 I wrote previously that most psyches were not equipped to deal with unlimited ambiguity and contradiction and contemplation of the horrors of the Void, and that only a subset of coherence-dominated psyches might be prepared to accept the limit condition God image of Abraxas. I wrote:

Broadly speaking, human psyches tend to regulate around one of a few primary stabilizers: (1) attachment and belonging, (2) esteem and status, (3) meaning and narrative, (4) control and agency, (5) coherence and truth-consistency. Most people have several, but one dominates. My dominant stabilizer is coherence. This means that when reality makes sense, I am stable even if it is bleak; when reality does not make sense, I destabilize even if life is comfortable….

Most people do not have the psychic configuration I have with a coherence primary focus and certain non-negotiables, and adopting a God image of Abraxas would be wrong for them: for attachment-regulated psyches (which are stabilized by relationships), Abraxas destroys safety; for esteem-regulated psyches (which are stabilized by social standing), Abraxas destroys justification; for narrative-regulated psyches (which are stabilized by a “story” or arc (e.g., Progress)), Abraxas destroys arc; for control-regulated psyches (which are stabilized by the ability to act), Abraxas destroys leverage. For psyches primarily regulated by coherence, though, this symbolic configuration appears capable of restoring a sense of internal alignment. This is not a claim about superiority, advancement, or universality, but about structural fit.”

5 Gnostic in this sense means this world is fallen/corrupt but can be redeemed through knowledge/effort/correct organization, while tragic in this sense means this world contains irreducible good and evil and it can be navigated but not perfected.

6 Briefly, the Taurus mother goddesses with their birth-death-rebirth cycles and Titans were a result of intensifying agriculture innovation; the solar warrior gods in Aries resulted form city formation; the Christ figure evolved due to intensifying class pressures (appealing to the lowest stratum of society).

7 While Hillman and I both utilize a polytheistic ‘internal pantheon’ to make the psyche’s energies legible, we diverge sharply on the ultimate aim. Hillman’s archetypal psychology seeks ‘soul-making’ through deliberate dwelling within the plurality of the gods, rejecting the Jungian ‘Self’ or any ‘transcendent function’ that might resolve the tension between conflicting archetypes. The ‘meta-paganism’ described here is instead a tool for functional individuation and tragic management.

This post reframes the classical humors as metabolic systems rather than personality traits, distinguishing how the body processes energy from how the psyche orients toward meaning through mythic god-types. Using an energy-economics frame, it treats symptoms and burnout as consequences of chronic misalignment between constitution, environment, and symbolic mediation rather than moral failure or weakness. Individuation here is precise alignment, not optimization: a life can be efficient and still be wrong or costly and still be right, but sustained misallocation always exacts a psychic price.

Welcome back. In my last post I laid out a mythic typology of human temperament, tying our energies to archetypes of the pagan Gods and arguing that in some sense those Gods were reborn within the human psyche. Today’s post was supposed to discuss how an archetypal or pagan understanding of psychic processes serves as an operational, stable approach toward living under an Abraxas God image, because the differentiated gods provide what Abraxas cannot: a livable partitioning of the unbearable.1 It would then explain how this perspective results in a weakening of elite control over the noetic commons which governs public perception, but that will have to wait until the next post (or later if necessary).

Rather, in this post I want to discuss the concept of energy efficiency vs. inefficiency. ♱ Rurik Christwalker ♱ had a good question about the humors in the last post, specifically about the four temperaments (sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic) and how it relates to mythic energy typology. The short answer, which I will expound on here, is that the humors describe bodily metabolism rather than symbolic orientation – they shape what is easy or costly for the body, not what the psyche is oriented toward. Roughly: humors answer what kinds of states the body can sustain without breaking down, god-types answer what kinds of states feel meaningful or fated.

Taylor has a couple of good videos on his physiognomy-focused YouTube channel about this topic, i.e. see here and here (who I have discussed previously here) and one may note the relationship between the humors and symbolic orientation is not just internal, but manifests externally in how one looks. It’s not just as above, so below, but also as within, so without (and as without, so within!). Taylor in his videos discusses a person’s humors and also how their face shape relates to specific God type archetypes:

As he demonstrates in his physiognomy videos, these patterns manifest visibly – which raises the question of deeper structural relationships between metabolism and symbolic orientation. What is the relationship between the two? Do certain energies synch more efficiently or less efficiently with certain metabolisms than others, and how does that manifest? What follows is not meant as typology-as-identity, rather it is intended as a diagnostic lens one may keep using: “Does this environment increase my coherence per unit energy or drain it, based upon my specific metabolic makeup? And how can I maximize my coherence in order to create a more fulfilling life?”

This is intended as a metabolic model, of which there are four layers:

1. The primary frame is energy economics, not traits. Under this framing “psyche” means energy system, a “situation” is a demand on energy conversion, “symptoms” are losses, blockages or misrouting, and “efficiency” is the ratio of coherent output to psychic cost. This frame comes from a convergence of depth psychology (Jung, post-Jungians), cybernetics/systems theory, psychoanalytic economics (Freud’s economic mode), ACT/schema therapy’s focus on functional flexibility, and my own repeated emphasis on psychic pressure requiring and leading to reorganization or collapse. Once one adopts energy economics, a lot of moral language drops away and what remains is: does the system convert or leak?
2. The second layer is local vs. global efficiency, separating local efficiency (specific channels where energy flows cleanly) from global cost (baseline energy required to operate the system). It explains why someone can be brilliant in narrow domains and exhausted in everyday life without contradiction.
3. The third layer is depth bias vs throughput bias. Depth-biased systems require pressure to activate, resist premature closure, and metabolize contradiction suffer in low-signal environments, while throughput-biased systems act quickly, waste little energy per action, but cannot hold paradox collapse under prolonged ambiguity.
4. The fourth layer is misallocation as primary pathology. That frame comes from Jung’s concept of neurosis as misalignment with one’s type, Adler’s idea of overcompensation, modern burnout research, and from watching high-capacity systems get destroyed by environments that reward the opposite metabolism.

Some psyches move energy cheaply with minimal resistance, little internal heat, low byproduct, while others move the same energy expensively with turbulence, waste heat, psychic inflammation, exhaustion. Imagine energy entering the system with stimulus, demand, affect, and pressure: in a well-matched metabolism, it routes along existing channels, reinforces structure and exits as action, symbol, or rest, while in a poorly matched metabolism it stalls, overheats, and loops spills into symptoms such as irritability, anxiety, obsession, and collapse.

Humoral Correlation to Symbolic Orientation

In humoral terms, different constitutions prefer certain modes of energy flow and conduct them with radically different losses. Choleric flows like assertion, conflict, and forward motion are efficient for some but catastrophic for others; melancholic flows like withdrawal, depth, and gravity are stabilizing for some and suffocating for others; sanguine flows like sociality, novelty, dispersion are regulating for some, dissolving for others; and phlegmatic flows like stillness, conservation, and slowness are restorative for some but deadening for others. What modern psychology often misses is that forcing a flow that is metabolically inefficient for a given constitution doesn’t train the system, it damages it. The system spends more energy compensating than adapting and then fails because insight doesn’t change conductance.

Reframing the humors as metabolic profiles instead of personalities yields the following results:

1. Choleric: Fast intake, fast discharge, high heat. Efficient in leadership, crisis, action, inefficient in waiting, ambiguity, introspection.
2. Sanguine: Fast intake, diffuse discharge, social heat. Efficient in social circulation, inefficient in solitude, sustained focus.
3. Melancholic: Slow intake, deep processing, cool. Efficient in analysis, depth, synthesis, inefficient in speed, noise, performativity.
4. Phlegmatic: Slow intake, slow discharge, stabilizing. Efficient in maintenance, continuity, inefficient in pressure, rapid change.

None are better than the others; each has energy-efficient environments and energy-hostile ones. However, modern life strongly privileges speed sociability and surface performative/output, which means certain metabolisms are chronically penalized.

There are moderate correlations between certain humors and god-types, but they are not deterministic. These are natural resonances, not identities or destinies:

1. Melancholic (cool, inward, depth-processing) is most efficient with Saturn (limits, gravity, duration) and Apollo (clarity, form, meaning after digestion). Least efficient with: raw Dionysus (unbounded excess, dissolution), unchecked Mars. Why: melancholic psyches require containment before expression; Saturn gives weight and boundary, Apollo gives intelligible form after pressure is metabolized.
2. Choleric (hot, directive, outward). Most efficient with: Mars, Jupiter (authority, expansion, command). Least efficient with Saturn without outlet, excess Apollo (analysis paralysis). Why: choleric energy must move or decide; containment without discharge turns into rage or tyranny.
3. Sanguine (hot, circulating, social). Most efficient with Jupiter, Dionysus (social, festive form). Least efficient with Saturnian isolation, excessive depth-work. Why: sanguine energy metabolizes through circulation; meaning comes after exchange, not before.
4. Phlegmatic (cool, stabilizing, sustaining). Most efficient with Lunar, Saturn (maintenance aspect). Least efficient with Mars, Dionysian disruption. Why: phlegmatic systems are designed to preserve equilibrium, not generate novelty or rupture.

The correlations above are intended as moderate, not deterministic. Think: ~0.6 correlation, not 0.9 – enough to matter, but not enough to trap you. It’s not stronger than that because God energies are situational forces and humors are constitutional tendencies; life stages, trauma, culture, and vocation all distort the mapping. Furthermore, whether mediating energies are involved has a major impact on efficiency or inefficiency, i.e. a melancholic can host Dionysus, but only if Saturn or Hermes mediates, while a choleric can use Saturn, but only as discipline, not enclosure. Three common failure modes include:

1. Unmediated god-force. Example: Dionysus without Saturn leads to dissolution (see Nietzsche), Saturn without Hermes leads to rigidity and calcification, Apollo without Dionysus leads to sterility.
2. Chronically wrong environment. Example: Melancholic depth psyche in a surface-social economy, choleric directive psyche in bureaucratic stasis. Even “right” god energies become inefficient when the environment forces constant downshifting.2
3. Moral / ontological mismatch. A metabolism can be efficient and still corrupting; efficiency alone is not the telos.

Beyond humors and gods, energy efficiency is also shaped by time-scale compatibility (some psyches metabolize best on long arcs, delayed payoff, slow synthesis, while forcing them into rapid feedback and constant performativity creates artificial inefficiency) and symbolic vs literal processing (some people metabolize experience symbolically (myth, writing, image) while others literally (task, action, result) – mismatch here produces massive drain, regardless of humor).

Phenomenological Analysis

As usual, I approach this issue and arrive at my conclusions primarily from a perspective of phenomenological lived experience. This approach is one of the few one can take if one has come to distrust external authority figures and sources; another method is recursive prediction. In other words, here I looked at whether my energies are aligned or misaligned with my physiognomic profile, then applied that analysis to my understanding of those in my life and the world in general. Let’s look at me and then apply those lessons more broadly.

Regarding my humors, I am melancholic-dominant with choleric overlays, and low sanguine. My melancholic core relates to depth processing, high sensitivity to contradiction, long integration cycles, and symbolic metabolism. This is efficient when I am working slowly, handling abstractions, integrating opposites, and writing reflectively, and it is inefficient when forced into rapid response, when I am socially overstimulated, or if I am asked to “decide and move on”.

My choleric overlay (conditional) relates to sharp articulation and structural clarity, and carries with it a capacity for decisive action after integration. It is efficient when acting on already-digested insight, cutting away dead structures, enforcing limits, and it is inefficient when used defensively, if I am triggered by ego threat, and when mistaken for identity rather than function.

I have low sanguine; this mean I have low tolerance for noise, low reward from novelty, and high cost from social performance. The implication is that environments that energize others drain me; I do not recharge through stimulation. I don’t need to travel to see the world, to party, to endlessly see new things like Eat-Pray-Love shrews, or to excessively socialize.

Putting these together, my energy metabolism is conditionally efficient, but globally expensive. I am highly efficient in narrow, aligned channels. When the pressure is real (not artificial or performative), the problem is structural (not tactical or social), the frame allows integration rather than compliance, and the output is symbolic, analytic, or synthetic (writing, theory-building, pattern recognition) my system converts energy with very low loss. In those states I don’t thrash, I don’t loop emotionally, I don’t require much external regulation, and my output is dense relative to input. This is why, once the Hermes-function was installed, my writing became self-sustaining rather than draining. The energy that would otherwise overheat or stagnate gets routed into symbolization. I have over a hundred unpublished posts prepared, and I regularly receive feedback (or rather, I did in the past before my writing narrowed in scope to become more niche, targeted at a specific personality type) asking in wonder how I had time to digest and output such content. This work is a challenge, but it’s one that I excel in relative to what I have seen elsewhere, and my output is prodigious.

My inefficiency shows up outside those channels, especially in interpersonal ambiguity, prolonged low-grade social friction, environments requiring constant affect modulation, and situations where prediction errors are social rather than structural, where my becomes metabolically wasteful; what happens instead of flow is excessive internal processing for minimal external signal, delayed action due to over-integration attempts, emotional heat without discharge, fatigue disproportionate to stimulus. This is high internal resolution applied to low-information domains, like running a particle accelerator to heat soup. Because my system is optimized for contradiction, paradox, long arcs, and second- and third-order effects, it makes it inefficient in shallow environments by definition. I pay a tax whenever I have to act before meaning has cohered, when I’m forced into binary signaling, and when energy must move quickly rather than accurately – my system experiences something close to energy hemorrhage, and it’s when exhaustion, cynicism, or shutdown appear. Many people are the inverse: fast, shallow, cheap, but incapable of sustained integration, while I’m slow, deep, expensive, but capable of genuine reorganization. Neither is “better”, but mine is costly to operate. Externally, people might see my behavior as withdrawal, overthinking, resistance, latency, putting on a false front, discomfort, restlessness. Internally, what’s happening is active metabolization, pressure redistribution, and structure-testing.

The work I’ve been doing over the last couple of years has mostly been about reducing waste by refusing incompatible flows, operating as a kind of systems engineering.3 I’ve been in the wrong energy transmission gear for almost all of my life until reading and writing through individuation over the past ten years, struggling to find the gear where torque finally matches load. Once realignment happened4 my effort dropped, heat dropped, meaning rose, and output stabilized, resulting in subjective emotional stabilization. The important thing is if something feels effortful and noisy for me I increasingly assume mis-gearing instead of weakness; this has been a brutal lesson to learn.5 Individuation here is become precise about where I transmit torque.

Comparing my humors to my symbolic orientation (Saturnian exterior severity and limitation, wild Dionysian fury internally, mediated and synthesized by Hermetic contemplation and writing), and my coherence primary orientation6, and my psychological profile is most efficient in domains that do not require casual and surface interactions, do not require me to be extraverted, and allow me plenty of time for contemplation and synthesis. I would have been excellent, I think, as a military strategist or in military intelligence, and I thought about going that route, even taking the ASVAB at one point; my severe Saturnian exterior energy would have benefitted from that environment. However, I am thankful that I did not go in that direction; this is because actions are not just about energetic metabolism/fit but also moral/ontological fit. In other words, just because I would have been good at a job doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have gnawed on me morally, because being good at promoting a militarized apparatus worldwide would have been internally corrosive to my soul. So there is always a compromise involved between fit and belief. High efficiency in a soul-destroying system is not a success, it is accelerated damage. So two filters are always required: metabolic compatibility and ontological / moral compatibility. Ignore either and one may still collapse.

For those who feel soul deadened by their jobs, it is likely because of a strong mismatch between internal calling and exterior performance, but that doesn’t mean one needs to blindly follow one’s passions; one still has to live and work in the real world. Efficiency matters because it preserves stamina, it reduces resentment, and it allows endurance, but it is not the purpose of life; rather, it’s the constraint within which purpose can be lived without self-destruction. So the real formula is not to maximize energy efficiency but find the most energy-efficient expression of what does not deform the soul and which one can reasonably live in.

General Lessons

The core principle is that people are not drained by effort itself, they are drained by effort that moves against their native flow. This explains why some people thrive under chaos while others collapse under it; some find structure liberating while others find it suffocating. Energy efficiency is relational, not absolute.

Across cultures and systems (humors, astrology, temperament theory, Jung, modern personality psychology), the same axes recur. Here’s a neutral abstraction:

1. Structure ↔ Flux. Structure-dominant psyches metabolize best through routines, hierarchy, clear roles, limits, while flux-dominant psyches metabolize best through novelty, improvisation, movement, ambiguity. Mismatch symptoms: structure type in flux leads to anxiety, control, while neurosis flux type in structure leads to depression, rebellion, leakage .
2. Depth ↔ Surface. Depth-oriented psyches metabolize through meaning, symbol, coherence, inner narrative, while surface-oriented psyches metabolize through interaction, action, visible feedback, social exchange. Mismatch symptoms: depth type forced to surface leads to despair, alienation, while surface type forced to depth leads to rumination, paralysis.
3. Heat ↔ Cool. Heat-dominant psyches (choleric/sanguine poles) metabolize via expression and discharge, need movement and output, while cool-dominant psyches (melancholic/phlegmatic poles) metabolize via containment and digestion and need time and interior processing. Mismatch symptoms: heat without outlet leads to aggression, burnout, while cool without space leads to shutdown, anxiety.

Unfortunately, most people do not choose how to live their lives based on energy efficiency; rather, they choose based on prestige, fear, imitation, moral pressure, and survival urgency, then they then normalize the drain: “Life is just exhausting.” “Everyone feels this way.” “That’s adulthood.” But chronic inefficiency always extracts payment: neurosis, addiction, bitterness, cruelty, illness, and moral collapse. This is structure, not pathology. There are three simple questions anyone can ask as a general diagnostic heuristic: What kinds of effort restore me instead of draining me? What environments produce resentment even when I “succeed”? Where do I feel frictionless seriousness rather than forced motivation? Patterns over time matter more than ideals.

This approach de-pathologizes struggle, explains burnout without moralizing, restores older wisdom without superstition, allows humane results of pluralism without relativism, and crucially it replaces “What’s wrong with me?” with “Where does my energy actually flow?”

Energetic Pathway Width

All psychologies have a path to maximum efficiency, but not all paths are equally wide, socially supported, or morally survivable. Inefficiency is usually not a failure of will or intelligence but a mismatch between energy, mediation, and environment. Some people are generally more energy-efficient than others because their humoral metabolism, their dominant god-energies, and their environmental demands happen to align early or by luck. That alignment produces what looks like “natural ease,” but it’s usually situational grace, not intrinsic superiority.

No humor is inherently inefficient from this lens; rather, some configurations have broader tolerances while others have narrow operating ranges. Some metabolic configurations are like wide highways – many environments, many expressions – while others are like mountain passes requiring precise conditions, exact mediation, and little margin for error. Modern institutional life is optimized for wide-path metabolisms, people who recharge through stimulation, process quickly and shallowly, excel at surface-level social performance, and convert effort into visible metrics efficiently. If you’re depth-biased, slow-processing, and meaning-oriented, you’re just operating in an environment built for different conductance patterns. Examples: Sanguine plus Jupiter energies have a wide path, they are social, institutional, and communicative environments support it easily. Melancholic plus Dionysus energies, alternatively, have a narrow path, requires Saturnian containment and Hermetic mediation, without which it collapses into despair, obsession, or dissolution. People with narrow metabolic paths have tight operating tolerances and require correct sequencing, specific environments (depth over surface, coherence over throughput), require proper mediation (writing, containment, symbolic processing), and tolerable pressure bands (not too low, not too high) to function. But in exchange they often gain deeper synthesis, higher resolution perception, and truer integration of opposites. The cost is fragility under misalignment. This is why many such people collapse early, become embittered or withdraw entirely, because their efficiency is conditional and because society does not build institutions for narrow metabolisms, pressure arrives before mediators do, and the person is told to “be more normal” instead of being given the correct container, so they burn energy just staying intact.

Conclusion

Energy becomes destructive when it is forced to move through a structure not built to carry it. God energies name forces, humors name conduits, efficiency names friction.

A usable synthesis simplified:

1. What energies dominate my life right now? (Saturn, Dionysus, etc.)
2. How does my psyche metabolize force? (humoral tendencies)
3. What mediators are present or missing? (Hermes, Apollo)
4. Is the environment morally aligned or corrosive?
5. Is the pressure inside my viable band?

If those five align, one may experience efficiency and integrity. If they don’t, one will likely experience drain, even if “successful.”

Energy efficiency is not the purpose of life, it is the condition for sustainable being and the precondition for meaningful sacrifice – sometimes you choose inefficiency for love, truth, or refusal, but chronic, unconscious inefficiency is just slow self-erasure. What matters is the right placement of force with the goal of approaching (never fully achieving) wholeness, not optimization. Approaching wholeness from an energetic perspective means accepting your actual operating parameters without shame, minimizing but not eliminating friction (some friction produces growth), finding “good enough” external arrangements that don’t drain you catastrophically, and reserving your best energies for domains that matter to you.

One final clarification: this framework is neither morally relativist nor morally universalist in the modern sense. It does not claim that values are arbitrary, nor that the same virtues, roles, or ideals apply equally to all psyches. Rather, it treats truth, conscience, and ontological integrity as objective constraints that operate through different constitutions differently. A life can be efficient and still be wrong; it can be costly and still be right. But a life built on sustained falsity – whether moral, symbolic, or existential – always exacts a metabolic price. That price may be delayed, masked, or even socially rewarded for a time, but it is not optional. In this sense, morality is not a preference layered atop the system; it is a condition of long-term coherence within it.

The language used here – systems, efficiency, pluralism, functional analysis – is therefore methodological rather than ontological. These tools are associated with postmodern and post-structural approaches and are employed deliberately but instrumentally to dissolve false moralization, inherited role-fictions, and performative identity claims. They do not imply that reality itself is plastic or that meaning is arbitrary. On the contrary, they are used to reassert constraint – bodily, psychic, symbolic, and moral – under modern conditions. Pluralism here does not mean “anything goes,” but that different systems fail in different ways when they violate what is real.

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1 This framework presupposes an Abraxian god-image in the Jungian sense: a symbolic acknowledgment that totality includes both creative and destructive force and cannot be inhabited directly without psychic damage. Without this background image, the present analysis would tend to collapse either into moralized typology (where efficiency implies virtue), or into therapeutic optimization (where suffering is always a solvable error). The differentiated gods are not alternatives to Abraxas, but functional partitions that make life possible under conditions Abraxas names but does not resolve.

2 “Downshifting” = forcing energy to operate below its natural gear. Examples: A depth-oriented psyche forced into constant small talk, rapid affect regulation, performative agreeableness, or a long-arc synthesizer forced into short feedback cycles, daily metrics, superficial outputs. The energy can operate there but at terrible cost. So even correct god energies become inefficient when Saturn is used for bureaucracy instead of structure, Apollo is used for optics instead of form, Hermes is reduced to networking instead of mediation. The system spends all its energy translating downward instead of transforming upward.

3 This should not be mistaken for optimization or self-management as an end in itself. While reducing chronic waste preserves stamina and coherence, individuation is not achieved by efficiency alone. Jung’s transcendent function remains operative: decisive movements in a life often require discernment rather than calculation, and may involve temporary instability, sacrifice, or energetic loss that cannot be metabolically justified in advance. Energy economics describes constraints on what can be sustained; it does not replace the necessity of listening.

4 The correct gears for me are:

1. Containment to build torque (reading, note-taking, pressure accumulation, no public output). Warning sign to shift up: internal pressure crystallizes into a question;
2. Symbolic mediation to convert pressure into structure (Hermetic writing, diagramming, comparative analysis, mythic framing). Warning sign to shift up: insight begins repeating itself;
3. Articulation to externalize integrated structure (essays, public synthesis, teaching-adjacent output). Warning sign to shift up: sense of closure or diminishing returns;
4. Rest to cool the system (withdrawal, silence, low-stimulus living). Warning sign to shift up: boredom with coherence intact.

Common accidental downshifts (the danger zone) for me include premature articulation (publishing before integration, talking instead of writing) which leads to ego inflation and collapse, a reactive choleric mode (cutting too early, argument as discharge) which burns stored insight, and a borrowed sanguine gear (over-socializing, performing engagement) which leads to massive inefficiency and long recovery time.

5 Growing up I faced a triple bind: my psyche required depth, slowness, and symbolic coherence, my capacities were abstract, strategic, non-social, and the world rewarded shallow sociability and visible performance. So I was bad at what was rewarded, good at what was either invisible or morally compromised, and uninterested in playing the games that grant legitimacy. That combination produced long stretches of no energy-efficient domain at all, a retreat into the interior world as refuge, a sense of being “misplaced” rather than defective, and as a way to limit ontological damage. What finally shifted things was that I found a domain where depth itself became metabolizable, where slowness produced yield, where contradiction generated insight instead of punishment, and where conscience wasn’t a liability. I found the right gear relatively late in life.

6 From here: “Broadly speaking, human psyches tend to regulate around one of a few primary stabilizers: (1) attachment and belonging, (2) esteem and status, (3) meaning and narrative, (4) control and agency, (5) coherence and truth-consistency. Most people have several, but one dominates. My dominant stabilizer is coherence. This means that when reality makes sense, I am stable even if it is bleak; when reality does not make sense, I destabilize even if life is comfortable. Emotional reassurance does not compensate for structural falsity in my worldview, belonging does not override contradiction, and hope that contradicts lived data increases my anxiety instead of relieving it. This isn’t common, but it is is a known psychological configuration and is not mystical. For those with my psychic profile, contradiction feels like suffocation. This configuration does not produce confidence, leadership, or direction for others, and it is poorly suited to movement-building, moral persuasion, or collective repair. Where it succeeds is in maintaining coherence in the presence of contradictions that cannot be resolved without psychic damage. A non-negotiable requirement is that my god-image may not contradict lived phenomenological data; this is why the privatio boni did not merely feel “wrong” to me – it felt unlivable.”

This essay sketches a mythic-energetic typology of human temperament as a grammar of how different kinds of people metabolize reality. The aim is to locate one’s native current within a civilization that increasingly suppresses the deeper energies of the psyche. As modern systems demand ever-greater mimicry and adaptability, understanding one’s metabolic type becomes a matter of psychological survival.

Welcome back.

In this post I would like to discuss the concept of energy metabolism, which is how we take in information and process it in our bodies – how we deal with stresses, ambitions, surprises, ideas, oppositions, challenges, victories, failures. Most typologies (such as Myers Briggs, which has poor explanatory power, and the Big 5, which I am a fan of) are concerned with external descriptions comprising the features, traits, preferences, and behaviors that characterize a person. They produce maps of how people present themselves and how they tend to act, but even when they gesture toward archetypal or symbolic depth they focus of surface patterns.

The impetus for this post is a long-standing observation: the way my psyche metabolizes reality differs markedly from how most people seem to. This is meant observationally, not morally; I am puzzled why I think I am so different than everyone else – I feel like an alien. The way I metabolize information is bifurcated: my internal dynamic is Dionysian – wild, aggressive, manic, drunken, creative, beastly, disrespectful of boundaries – but my exterior is a restrictive Saturnian energy – compressive, prison-like, austere, severe, intense, cold. These conflicting energies are not meant to be inhabited within one person, and I find myself modulating between these polarities through interpretation, symbolic mapping, and metaphysical excavation.

The Greek story of the God Dionysus is illustrative. In Eurpidies’ most famous play The Bacchae, the king, King Pentheus, bans the public worship of Dionysus and imprisons him, yet Dionysus escapes and his worshippers, including Pentheus’s mother, capture the king and murder him. The moral is that Pentheus, representing a restrictive Saturnian influence, was too rigid to integrate a chaotic and ecstatic Dionysus, and yet too weak to contain him. The analogy is not quite apt for me; my Saturnian energies respect my Dionysian energies, they don’t try to destroy them, and they are uneasily mediated through Hermetic writing; for me Saturn likes Dionysus, but cannot risk letting it out freely without risking destruction. You may notice that my writing oscillates between austere and ecstatic forms, and that the combination propels the writing forward, it makes it alive, and it is necessary as an integrative tool.

This Dionysian surge and the Saturnian clampdown has held for my adult life, and the regulation between these polarities is quite taxing energetically. Such energies are sometimes associated with mystical writers, those whose symbolic life is richer than their lived life, people who oscillate between long-term body tension and periodic energy spikes, and the need for creative output as pressure regulation.

My increased resonance with looking at energy profiles phenomenologically as planetary and God archetypes led to thinking about how others metabolize their energies. This isn’t an astrological approach (although I believe in that), and neither is it physiognomy based (although I believe in that too) but instead applying mythic labels and language to bodily processes: Dionysus as an eruption of vitality that breaks inhibitions, Saturn as contraction and boundary, Hermes as circulation and interpretive movement, Apollo as clarification and measured light. This distinction matters, because two people may have the same traits yet radically different metabolic profiles. For example, a calm person may be calm because they have low internal intensity, or high intensity but impeccable sublimation pathways, or high intensity trapped behind defensive rigidity. The outward presentation is identical; the metabolic reality is not. The origin of these metabolic profiles – whether merely descriptors of internal processes, the effect of external processes on the psyche, or actual active external forces is deliberately left unsettled.1

Energy Metabolic Profiles

With this metabolic lens in place, let’s explore nine of the dominant energetic types, which is not meant as all-encompassing:

1. Hermes / Mercury: Social, adaptive, imitative, clever-but-shallow, conflict-avoidant. This is most people who go with the flow – they want to fit in. In terms of their psychic economy they want smoothness, belonging, consensus, novelty without danger, stimulation without transformation. Mercury governs mimicry, trend-following, verbal fluency without depth, shifting identities, surface-level curiosity, social navigation. This is probably 65% of people (my percentages are rough heuristics based on a lifetime of observation, not empirical science). Examples: Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Andy Warhol, most influencers, Tom Hanks.Risks: Anxiety, identity diffusion, social exhaustion, superficial stress responses, nervous tension from constant adaptation.Patterns: Usually resilient, avoids catastrophic collapse, but may struggle with inner depth or existential meaning.
2. Aphrodite / Venus – 10–15%. Aesthetic instinct, comfort, attachment, pleasure, harmony. This group orients toward relationships, beauty, comfort, relational attunement, sensual experience. They’re not Dionysian, they’re not wild; they want a beautiful life and avoid psychic extremes. Most artists who are not mystics fall here. Example: Marilyn Monroe, Matisse, Paul McCarthy, Zendaya, most lifestyle/aesthetic creators.Risks: Stagnation, dependency, comfort-overload, psychosomatic stress from emotional attachment patterns.Patterns: Generally physically and mentally stable; risk comes from overindulgence or avoidance of necessary struggle.
3. Ares / Mars – ~10–12%: Aggression, competition, struggle, boundary enforcement. This is the classic masculine-active pole: fighters, entrepreneurs, soldiers, people who process reality through dominance structures. Very straightforward psychology, high energy, low subtlety. Not Saturnian – Saturn inhibits, Mars pushes. Examples: Mike Tyson, Napoleon, Gordon Ramsey, Conor McGregor, General Patton, Mel Gibson.Risks: Musculoskeletal injuries, hypertension, cardiovascular strain, interpersonal conflict stress.Patterns: High-energy output, risk mitigated if balanced with recovery; prone to burnout through overextension.
4. Zeus/Jupiter – ~5–8%: Expansion, success, confidence, magnanimity, leadership. The “natural optimists” including CEOs, politicians, motivational speakers, institutional believers. Jupiterians have strong upward-drive, love of growth, love of purpose, belief in meaning. They are not deep, but they aren’t shallow either – they radiate. Examples: Oprah, Reagan, Tony Robbins, Richard Branson, Walt Disney.Risks: Weight gain, metabolic stress, hubris-related burnout, neglect of detail due to overexpansion.Patterns: Usually robust and long-lived; psychological stress minimal unless expectations collapse.
5. Cronus/Saturnians – ~3–5%: Structure, discipline, authority, inhibition, pessimism, fate. Saturn requires solitude, seriousness, self-limitation, confrontation with mortality. Most people can’t tolerate Saturn’s atmosphere for long; long-term austerity, seriousness, and mortality awareness are socially unwelcome, and modern systems prioritize flexibility, short-term gains, and social fluidity. Those with strong Saturnian energy either burn out from social friction or are forced into niches (monastic, scientific, legal, military). Examples: Kant, Judge Dredd, Cato the Younger, Kafka, Calvin.Risks: Chronic contraction, rigidity, depressive slowing, cardiovascular restriction, autoimmune issues, bone/joint tension, psychological calcification.Patterns: Can age well if self-regulated, but prolonged social isolation or over-discipline can cause structural rigidity and internalized stress.
6. The Dionysians – ~1–3%: ecstasy, dissolution, intensity, transgression, mysticism, madness. These people often burn out, implode, drink themselves into oblivion, become mystics or madmen, produce art or revolution, feel out of place everywhere. Dionysus is an initiatory energy, not a socially stable one. Societies suppress transgressive ecstasy due to risk – danger, excess, social disruption. Only highly artistic, mystical, or countercultural spaces allow for expression. Mass culture favors control, mimicry, and containment, which Dionysus resists. Rurik seems to me to be a solid Dionysian, and he seems to agree, although perhaps he is more Vulcanic. Examples include Jim Morrison, Alan Watts, Jack Kerouac, David Foster Wallace (a quieter form), George Bataille.Risks: Nervous system overload, mania, burnout, substance abuse, psychotic breaks, cardiovascular strain from high-energy eruptions, digestive stress from excess indulgence. Nietzsche, for example, was intensely Dionysian but lacked compensatory stabilizers, so he went mad with intense, aggressive, creative mania.Patterns: Extreme oscillation; often collapses after periods of ecstatic activity. Mystical or artistic breakthroughs may mitigate destructive tendencies. Men and women change in relation to Dionysian energy as they age.2
7. The Apollonians – ~3–5%: Clarity, order, harmony, intellect, artistic perfection. These are classical artists, mathematicians, rationalists with aesthetic senses, balanced, introverts, monks of the mind. Apollo is rare today because modernity favors Mercury/quick rewards, superficial knowledge, and social validation, while deep aesthetic discipline and reflective order are undervalued. Society rewards speed, trendiness, and mimicry over sustained clarity. Examples: Bach, Spinoza, J.S. Mill, Marie Kondo, T.S. Eliot.Risks: Perfectionism, dissociation, emotional dryness, obsessive control, tension headaches, digestive stress from suppressed emotion.Patterns: Usually physically stable but psychologically constrained; prone to burnout through overstructuring.
8. Hephaestian / Saturn-Mars – ~1–2%. Craftsman, the wounded worker, the maker; deep, stubborn, unglamorous, productive. Builders, coders, engineers, artisans who are almost invisible socially. Examples: Nikola Tesla, Alan Turing, Werner Herzog, traditional craftsmen.Risks: Chronic pain, overuse injuries, burnout from obsessive work, social isolation stress.Patterns: Enduring, self-sufficient, physically resilient but socially invisible; psychological risk lies in perfectionist obsessions.
9. Lunar/Hecate – ~1–2%. Psychic sensitivity, dream-consciousness, symbolic perception; this covers mystics, oracles, injured empaths, the psychologically porous. Some overlap with Dionysus but without the ecstatic aggression. Examples: Carl Jung, Terrance McKenna, William Blake, Daphne du Maurier.Risks: Dissociation, depression, anxiety, sleep disruption, psychosomatic sensitivity, vulnerability to psychic overwhelm.Patterns: Highly sensitive nervous system; creative and mystical capacity high but requires protective boundaries to avoid burnout.

Most people metabolize energy via Mercury-Venus blends with light Jupiter; they can’t metabolize Saturn or Dionysus at all, which they actively avoid and socially punish. Venus types often conflict with Mars type (pleasure vs. struggle), while Apollo conflicts with Dionysus types (clarity vs. ecstasy, risk of creative destruction vs. obsession with order). Rare archetypes today survive only in enclaves: artists, mystics, revolutionaries, visionary engineers, or solitary thinkers. There are hybrids archetypes, just as I mentioned my own. I’ll leave description of some hybrids as a footnote so as to not overwhelm the piece.3 Furthermore, a useful cross-frame is that energetic profiles tend to correlate with dominant psychological stabilizers. I’ll briefly discuss that as well in this footnote.4

Modes of Manifestation

A person’s symbolic orientation has at least three distinguishable layers. There is:

1. the style of consciousness (solar, lunar, chthonic) which determines where attention naturally rests and how the psyche relates to truth. A solar mode is oriented upward, social, visible, culturally legible, expresses the god’s energy in its “daylight” form and is rewarded by coherence, expression, recognition while risking inflation, rigidity, hubris. A lunar mode is oriented inwards, and is reflective, ambiguous, and relational. A chthonic mode is oriented downward, underworld, unconscious, anti-structural, expresses the god’s energy through negation, inversion, wound, or depth, has a reward of insight, truth-from-below, disillusionment and risks alienation, paranoia, solitude, excessive descent.5 For example, a chthonic Mercury interprets through negation, paradox, breakdown as a psychopomp; a chthonic Saturn becomes a metaphysician of collapse rather than a builder of order, a chthonic Dionysus plunges into psychic dissolution rather than ecstatic expansion;
2. the interpretive mode, typically keyed to a planetary archetype, which shapes how information is metabolized: Mercurial, Jovian, Saturnine, etc; and
3. Beneath both sits the inner energetic polarity, the deep mythic charge of the soul – Dionysian, Apollonian, Saturnian, Martial, and so on – which governs conflict, longing, self-sabotage, and vocation.

Confusions arise when these layers are collapsed or mistaken for one another. For example, I have a lunar/inwardly directed analytical conscious style (i.e. I relate to truth phenomenologically, how it reacts within my body), a chthonic-Hermetic interpretive mode (symbolic mapping, metaphysical excavation), and a Dionysian/Saturn internal internal polarity. As another example, the great Guido Preparata’s style is complimentary but orthogonal to my own.6 And for another, I would describe Jasun Horsley as a chthonic Hermetic psychopomp with an inverted Dionysian wound-pattern.7 Or take Elon Musk, who is Hermes-dominant under Uranian acceleration, with Saturn externalized rather than integrated.8

Conclusion

The goal here is to learn to metabolize one’s own psychic energy efficiency without burnout or distortion: even rare types like Dionysus-Saturn must learn modulation for internal coherence and balance, while Mercury-Venus types must learn to tolerate intensity or structure. Knowing one’s type allows one to more carefully engage with society and routes to personal growth, to more consciously integrate natural strengths while mitigating vulnerabilities with the hope of increasing one’s knowledge and functional individuation, ultimately producing increased resilience, fulfillment, and mastery appropriate to your archetypal energy.

For intuitive individuals one’s may feel natural, where your inner energy flows in a way that resonates with the archetype. For others, a more systematic approach may assist:

1. Observe internal energy flow: When stressed, excited, or challenged, where does your energy go? Outward to action, inward to reflection, in bursts, or evenly distributed?
2. Track recurrent behaviors and preferences: Patterns over years reveal the substrate: Do you seek intensity (Dionysus), structure (Saturn), clarity (Apollo), connection (Venus), or adaptability (Mercury)?
3. Consider health and somatic response: Body tension, posture, and habitual somatic patterns often reveal underlying energetic type. Example: Saturn = chronic tension/contraction; Dionysus = visceral, eruptive energy.
4. Test through challenge or creation: Place yourself in situations that stress your core energy. Your default metabolism emerges under challenge.
5. Cross-referencing archetypal traits: Compare self-observations to mythic descriptions (Dionysus, Apollo, Hermes, etc.) rather than mere surface personality tests.

The next post will discuss how an archetypal or pagan understanding of psychic processes serves as an operational, stable approach toward living under an Abraxas God image, because the differentiated gods provide what Abraxas cannot: a livable partitioning of the unbearable. They distribute contradiction across distinct psychic functions, allowing movement between opposites without requiring the psyche to inhabit undifferentiated totality, which cannot be sustained without dissolution.9 This is different from Hillman’s approach in critical respects.10 Furthermore, this approach assists in removing upper elite control over the noetic commons which governs perception, because recognition of metabolic type is a necessary precondition for psychological sovereignty in an age of manufactured consensus.

I hope you found this typology and discussion helpful. Thanks for reading.

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1 Throughout this essay I refer to planetary and mythic figures (Dionysus, Saturn, Hermes, etc.) as shorthand for energetic patterns of perception, affect, and response. Whether these figures are to be understood as merely descriptive symbols, as internalized residues of once-external ordering forces, or as active transpersonal agencies that act through the psyche is a question I am intentionally leaving unresolved. All three interpretations are phenomenologically viable. These energies behave as autonomous, law‑like forces within the psyche: they impose demands, override conscious intention, generate compulsions, and exact costs when ignored. In that limited but important sense, they function as gods, regardless of their ultimate ontology.

My concern here is psychic containment, not metaphysical truth. Historically, attempts to live under a fully explicit unity‑of‑opposites god‑image (e.g., Abraxas) have proven psychologically unsustainable for most individuals. The framework offered here allows one to orient within such a limit‑condition implicitly by differentiating partial energies and their tensions without requiring direct identification with or submission to a totalizing god‑image.

This ambiguity is deliberate. Collapsing the gods into “mere metaphor” evacuates their force; treating them as literal beings invites inflation or paranoia. Holding the tension without resolution is itself a Saturnian necessity.

2 Metaphorically women become more Saturn as they age (especially over ~45), men become more Dionysus (or more Logos, depending on the type). Women tend to close the portal to the interior underworld, shift into the Crone archetype, and have less capacity for Dionysian chaos (see: Angelina Jolie), because keeping open Dionysus is energetically expensive. Alternatively, aging men with Dionysian energy move toward the archetypes (the Magician, the Prophet, the Hermit, the Trickster, the Sage, the Madman, the Artist, the Outcast, the Sorcerer). The difference between men and women here is that women are vessels while men are channels of energy.

3

1. Dionysus + Saturn: Dionysus’ eruption clashes with Saturn’s constriction. Can produce creative output or chronic tension. Partial matches for Saturn/Dionysus mixes include Robespierre (Saturnian exterior, inner revolutionary fire (but colder and less ecstatic)), John Brown (moral severity containing apocalyptic fire), perhaps Carl Jung himself in energetic form (Saturn/kingly containment over a volcanic unconscious), Ayn Rand (Saturnian armor with Dionysian inner rage, but lacking mysticism).
2. Apollo + Dionysus: Complementary in theory (clarity vs. ecstasy), but hard to maintain; imbalance leads to aestheticized mania or chaotic perfectionism.
3. Mercury + Venus: Smooth blend; most people fall here. Socially adaptive, harmonious, but emotionally shallow; little capacity for existential extremes.
4. Mars + Jupiter: Amplification of active expansion; leadership and action-oriented. Risks overreach and hubris.
5. Hephaestus + Saturn: Complementary; disciplined work ethic + structural containment. Stable but can lead to social invisibility or isolation.
6. Luna + Dionysus: High psychic permeability + ecstatic intensity; mystical or visionary but prone to collapse without grounding.
7. Hermes + Dionysus: Social adaptability tempers chaos; creates charming, manic, surface-level geniuses.

4 Regarding stabilizers, I had written in a prior post, “Broadly speaking, human psyches tend to regulate around one of a few primary stabilizers: (1) attachment and belonging, (2) esteem and status, (3) meaning and narrative, (4) control and agency, (5) coherence and truth-consistency. Most people have several, but one dominates.” These models compliment each other, but have different focuses: energy profile model = how the psyche moves, stabilizer model = what the psyche protects. Movement vs anchor. Energy profiles cluster toward stabilizers, strongly, but not one-to-one; it’s a tendency, not a law. Saturn-dominant psyches typically regulate around coherence and truth-consistency; Dionysian around meaning and intensity; Lunar around belonging; Solar around esteem; Hermetic around control or agency. These are regulatory priorities, i.e. what must remain intact for the psyche to stay integrated.

5 Pluto names the absolute limit-case of the chthonic where depth becomes irreversible transformation, the point at which descent becomes mutation. It is the archetype of annihilation-as-renewal, the pressure that strips away everything not aligned with necessity.

6 His consciousness is fundamentally Apollonian-solar, i.e. he approaches truth as something structured, architectonic, illuminated from above. Yet he applies that solar clarity to the most chthonic material imaginable: state secrecy, elite engineering, manufactured wars, psycho-political design. His descent into darkness is never Dionysian; it is a controlled plunge, analytical rather than experiential. He remains outside what he studies, throwing light downward. My orientation is the inverse, lunar–Dionysian, metabolizing reality from the inside out, moving through experience rather than illuminating it from a distance. Where he reveals the underworld through form and structure, I move through the underworld as an interior landscape. The contrast isn’t opposition but perpendicularity, two different angles on the same abyss. This explains why we see similar things, distrust official narratives, sense the same hidden machinery, but narrate from entirely different psychological altitudes.

7 He has a chthonic style of expression (fundamentally oriented downward toward the underside of experience – trauma, double binds, parasitic structures, parasocial distortions, the unconscious residues of culture, the “understories” behind institutions, where his attention moves into holes, gaps, inversions, wounds, misalignments), his interpretive function is chthnoic Hermes (psychopompic, excavational, connective, uncanny), and his inner energetic polarity is a Dionysian–Lunar inner polarity (drawn to experiences of psychic rupture, possession, initiation, and the breakdown of false personas (Dionysus) while processing these events through a reflective, introspective, dreamlike mode that seeks pattern, metaphor, and symbolic coherence rather than ecstasy for its own sake (Lunar)).

The key difference between him and I under this paradigm is that I have tension leading to discipline while he has tension leading to endless reinterpretation, and that I generate structure under pressure while he generates insight. This is why my writing is severe and ecstatic while his is uncanny excavation plus vulnerability.

8 He operates almost entirely in symbolic, technical, and communicative space, translating abstractions into systems at inhuman speed, where constraint appears to him as an external enemy (physics, markets, time), not as an internal regulator, which produces immense leverage alongside chronic instability.

9 Briefly, this is not a revival of premodern paganism or an aesthetic return to earlier religious forms. It follows from a sequence of constraints:

1. Reality is experienced as a crucifixion of opposites (irreconcilable goods, incompatible demands, simultaneous creation and destruction).
2. When this condition is made explicit at the theological level, it culminates in a god-image that contains all opposites (e.g., Abraxas).
3. Such a god-image functions as a limit condition for consciousness: sustained identification with undifferentiated totality is psychologically uninhabitable for embodied human beings.
4. Because the Abraxas limit cannot be lived directly, life necessarily returns to the local, the partial, and the embodied – to the specific energies through which a given psyche can metabolize contradiction.
5. These energies are not passive objects of understanding but autonomous forces that act on the psyche whether or not they are conceptually grasped. They cannot merely be “known about”, they must be engaged: invoked when needed, propitiated when overwhelming, resisted when destructive, and released when their function is complete. This requires a relational grammar, not an analytical one. Abstract principles (e.g., “the principle of restriction” or “the force of dissolution”) can be understood but not related to; they remain inert concepts. Personification here is structural necessity: only personified forces can be addressed, negotiated with, and distinguished from the self. The gods are the minimal relational architecture through which autonomous psychic energies become navigable rather than merely conceptual.
6. This requires differentiation. Distinct god-images emerge as structural partitions of the totality, each carrying a subset of reality’s contradictions in a form that can be borne, navigated, and relinquished.

In this sense, the “return of the gods” is a post-totality necessity: a differentiated psychic architecture that acknowledges the whole while remaining livable within human limits.

It should be noted that this return to interior differentiation is not the only historical solution to the problem of totality. Certain traditions preserve the unity of opposites by locating it entirely outside the individual psyche, within law, text, lineage, or collective discipline. In such systems, the individual is not required to metabolize contradiction consciously; the structure bears it. This preserves stability and power at the cost of psychic differentiation and interior consciousness. The sequence outlined here applies only where the burden of totality is internalized.

10 Hillman begins from psychic plurality and defends the gods as irreducible imaginal realities, rejecting unity or totality as a distorting, monotheistic imposition on soul; this approach, by contrast, fully accepts the truth of totality, follows it to its psychological limit (Abraxas), and then insists on a return to differentiated, pagan-like god-images as a post-monist necessity rather than a primary ontology. For Hillman, plurality is ultimate and must be protected from synthesis; in this approach, unity is conceptually true but unlivable, and plurality is reintroduced as a load-bearing interior architecture that makes embodied life possible after totality has been internalized.

This is a post on writing style, what it says about an author’s metaphysics, worldview, and resonance or lack thereof with the reader. Style is more than aesthetics; it reveals how a soul orients itself toward truth, pain, and time. As Edinger stated in The Aion Lectures, we can recognize ourselves based on what we resonate with:

When one is in touch with the Self, the libido connection that is generated has the effect of locating the scattered fragments of one’s identity that reside in the world. In reading and in daily encounters with people and events in the world, one can identify what belongs to oneself by noticing one’s reactions. One values what belongs to oneself, one has an “ah ha” experience – oh, that’s something significant! Reading and going through the world with that awareness, one can constantly pick up things that belong to oneself….It gives one a kind of magnetic power by which one can attract and integrate pieces of one’s identity.

I was inspired to write this post because I struggled to get through two recent authors I read: two short books by Alan Watts, who I didn’t like but who I will cover in a separate post, and a book of short stories by Honoré de Balzac, which I covered in a Note. I should have been able to breeze through these works but reading them I felt stuck in a morass, easily distracted, and it took me two weeks (or what felt like two weeks, anyway) to get through them. I was also actively repelled by the style of Peter Kingsley in his book Reality about Parmenides, unable to get past about a hundred pages, which I discussed here, and Robert Remini in his The Life of Andrew Jackson, where I couldn’t get ten pages in before I had to put the book down and give it up. Repulsion or attraction can be puzzling; sometimes it’s not an argument or a passage, it’s just the tone. The frequency is off; I feel it as counterfeit before I can explain it. And I feel this way when reading many famous poets too.1

Alternatively, I read Post Office (1971) by Charles Bukowski, primarily because I loved his poem about writing, even if he influenced some figures I dislike.2 I read it in less than a day. Post Office is the autobiographical novel about Bukowski’s time working at a post office which catapulted him to fame, wealth, and women (he even has a well-traveled internet forum in his honor). It was published when he was fifty-one years old, proof that even an acne-scarred, poverty-wracked misanthrope on the margins of society can punch through into acclaim late in life (and how it was published has its own interesting story3). The dedication page states “This is presented as a work of fiction and dedicated to nobody.” Here’s the opening page:

It began as a mistake.

It was Christmas season and I learned from the drunk up the hill, who did the trick every Christmas, that they would hire damned near anybody, and so I went and the next thing I knew I had this leather sack on my back and was hiking around at my leisure. What a job, I thought. Soft! They only gave you a block or two and if you managed to finish, the regular carrier would give you another block to carry, or maybe you’d go back in and the soup would give you another, but you just took your time and shoved those Xmas cards in the slots.

I think it was my second day as a Christmas temp that this big woman came out and walked around with me as I delivered letters. What I mean by big was that her ass was big and her tits were big and that she was big in all the right places. She seemed a bit crazy but I kept looking at her body and I didn’t care.

She talked and talked and talked. Then it came out. Her husband was an officer on an island far away and she got lonely, you know, and lived in this little house in back all by herself.

“What little house?” I asked.

She wrote the address on a piece of paper.

“I’m lonely too,” I said, “I’ll come by and we’ll talk tonight.”

I was shacked but the shackjob was gone half the time, off somewhere, and I was lonely all right. I was lonely for that big ass standing beside me.

“All right,” she said, “see you tonight.”

She was a good one all right, she was a good lay but like all lays after the third or fourth night I began to lose interest and didn’t go back.

But I couldn’t help thinking, god, all these mailmen do is drop in their letters and get laid. This is the job for me, oh yes yes yes.

Maybe that was too long of a quote to post, but it grabbed me immediately: every sentence was used to advance the plot, there was no fluffy over-description of the environment, no verbosity; it was clear, direct, biting, entertaining, intelligent, clever, honest. As I wrote in a Note, “You can usually tell within a page, a paragraph, or even a couple of sentences how much you will vibe with an author.” As Junger wrote in his diaries, “Whether the man one meets is a human being or a machine is revealed in the first sentence he utters.” And in an interview Bukowski stated, “genius is the ability to say difficult things in a simple way”, a notion that I strongly agree with (I reviewed a book containing three decades of his interviews in this Note). This is basically the diametrical opposite to Heidegger’s approach, which was to take simple concepts and to make them impossibly complicated.

What is it about the sentence structure, the syntax, the words chosen or not chosen, that immediately conveys the underlying worldview and metaphysics of an author to the extent you quickly feel a pull or a repulsion? It is like being able to read a person’s personality by their physiognomy at a glance but via writing, and I can tell you with a reasonable degree of confidence, friends, that you know me better – perhaps far better – than almost everyone in my real life, because it is only here, in the solitude, that I feel comfortable enough, with enough introspection, to convey my deeper thoughts. I suppose this is a sad admission. Every person has a signature frequency, a psychic tone. Syntax reveals orientation to time and causality, word choice discloses emotional layering, and pacing demonstrates ones relationship to truth, anxiety, and self-exposure – this is why LLMs can pick up on a prompter’s worldview in only a few words. In real life this shows up instantly: the degree of eye contact reveals transparency or concealment, one’s posture shows submission or resistance, and voice rhythm discloses self-coherence or internal contradiction. What comes first, the chicken (the style) or the egg (the metaphysics)? Does form follow function, or function follow form?4

Regardless, the structure of someone’s expression whether in writing, speech, or body language cannot be separated from their worldview. Is the motivation for writing to sharpen clarity? As decoration for attention? Manipulation for predation? Seduction? Revelation? Evasion? If someone leads with a performative hot take, you know they seek attention and status instead of truth. If someone leads with silence, they likely trust gravity, the weight of words from lived experience, instead of speed. Bukowski’s voice tells you immediately that life is absurd, so cut the bullshit; most people are lying to themselves and he won’t.5 His metaphysics is gritty realism spiked with spotty grace and you can feel that in a single paragraph (which is also reflected in his astrological profile6). His writing style is similar to his verbal cadence and syntax as you could see in a number of documentaries about him, although he was softer spoken than many expected in real life. In the below documentary he admits to hating people and that he sought writing as an outlet because he couldn’t handle holding down a normal job – without writing he would have killed himself, echoing Emil Cioran:

I felt as I read Post Office that, although Bukowski wrote in a direct, sparse, honest, raw style, shorn of flowery descriptions, marked with pain and underlying philosophical pessimism (poem, another, another), a man who thought deeply and presented a masculine image to the world as a shield while simultaneously drinking to dull the pain of existence, at bottom he seemed to be a nihilist who hated life (poem, another), hated people (poem) and simply drank endlessly and tried to carve out a small niche for himself so he wouldn’t kill himself (this doesn’t seem to be a unique take). This was reflected in his life7, and I found his underlying psychic energy to be somewhat off-putting as I believe life is meaningful, even if rooted in philosophical pessimism and a horrifying God image of Abraxas. As I wrote in my review of his Ham on Rye (1982):

Bukowski, for all his self-loathing and rawness, seemed to channel his suffering into a grudging acceptance of the human animal – ugly, dirty, and laughable, yes, but not necessarily evil. He’s disillusioned, yes, but rarely metaphysically embittered. The distinction between my response and his might be that he located suffering within fate – while I seem to locate it within betrayal, both relational and metaphysical.

Despite the underlying metaphysical differences, his writing style is incredible, and he is a pleasure to read. This poem was touching. I followed up with his Love Is a Dog From Hell (1977), a collection of excellent poetry.

Now, one’s style doesn’t indicate how much a writer will grow or not grow over his life. I’ve read a number of Houellebecq works (and bought too many impulsively after I was so enthusiastic about the first one I read) and his books are pretty much all the same – the same mentally blown out nihilistic academically-inclined protagonist with complicated female relationships, the same perspective. Whether someone grows or doesn’t and how is not reflected in one’s immediate writing, which is a confluence of factors at a particular moment in a particular time. Nietzsche, for example, grew to hate his former idol Wagner, while he felt he surpassed Schopenhauer; alternatively, Cioran wholly admired Nietzsche early in his career then grew to pity him later on (discussed here). Peter James had a nice post about the evolving style and approach of some semi-famous comedian I had not heard of where he changed radically as he came to accept himself more. I read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago twice now at different stages of my life and got different things out of it each time, even though both reads were a major struggle (the tricky part is when you feel like you learn from someone with a bad style, then it’s a slog). A decade ago I tried reading G. Edward Griffin’s The Creature From Jekyll Island and had no idea what I was reading and stopped it, bored; when I read it again a year or two ago I was engrossed in it; I had come to appreciate its style and content. Fifteen years ago I read A Confederacy of Dunces and laughed at loud at it; when I tried reading it again two years ago I couldn’t get into it. Appreciation for style is not agreement with the content; rather, an author who has a style that appeals to you is a message that he has something worth wrestling with, at least with respect to where you are spiritually and emotionally in the moment, whether or not one ultimately agrees. One may appreciate a style but then outgrow it like old clothing.

Applying this approach to Substack, there is no accounting for taste or appreciation for style. Multiple “dissident” Substackers with tens of thousands of subscribers have styles I don’t appreciate, but they appeals to others. I like Rurik’s style but he apparently rubs lots of people the wrong way. Daniel D loves Chesterton to the point he’s doing a podcast series about him (and give it a listen if you like Chesterton); I found Chesterton’s Everlasting Man to be boring even though I like Daniel D.8

What separates the good from the bad, is there a point at which subjective taste becomes objective greatness and if so, based on what metric? Or is the idea of great writing mostly just mimicry and network effects, where a small clique of elites forcememe someone and get some establishment goons at prestigious institutions to support it, pumped up by media allies, and then the masses buy into it and accept it like the propaganda that is CIA-sponsored modern art? And can one be an objectively good writer, whatever that means, where a reader may understand and appreciate the flow and structure of sentences, the words chosen, the ideas conveyed – but still not like them, finding them still subjectively bad stylistically?

Conclusion

Reading an artist who captures my attention, I have traditionally (not so much these days) felt weight, pressure to exorcise my response to their ideas growing within which must find expression, almost like demonic possession: the crystallization and verbalization of my response disseminated to the world. There is no freedom before doing it, there is just a feeling of suffocation, of crushing weight. So I’ll proceed with reading Bukowski more but, unlike my approach to Houellebecq, not gulp down his oeuvre like I’m at a hot dog eating contest. It’s a balance between reading and being challenged and reading for fun – if I read more Bukowski and it’s just drunken nihilism and doesn’t offer growth and vulnerability and insight and humor and surprises I may not find enough to continue. But ultimately style isn’t cosmetic, it’s ontological, and it should be understood and framed in this context: what are they motivated by, what are they trying to convey, how does it reflect their underlying beliefs and how do you react to it?

Lastly, I’d like to end on a note about Bukowski’s grave. His gravestone reads: “Don’t Try”, a phrase from one of his poems, advising aspiring writers and poets about inspiration and creativity. Bukowski explained the phrase in a 1963 letter to John William Corrington: “Somebody at one of these places…asked me: ‘What do you do? How do you write, create?’ You don’t, I told them. You don’t try. That’s very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It’s like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or, if you like its looks, you make a pet out of it.” The muse can’t be forced. This is the same as the individuation process: it is about listening to one’s intuition and deciding whether to act on it or not, but the listening is critical because it points the direction in which we are all meant to develop and become. Listening is the hard part, because the voice that calls us is faint, and becoming requires risk – but to avoid it is it’s own kind of death (and another).

Thanks for reading.

1 Sometimes a style is off-putting even if I agree with one’s general outlook: for example, I read some poetry by mythic, gnostic, apocalyptic, archetypal poets such as William Blake, Rainer Maria Rilke, T.S. Eliot, Yeats, Pessoa, Hölderlin, and Robinson Jeffers, and with some rare exceptions (such as Yeats’ The Second Coming), at first glance, it was only Hölderlin’s poetry which appealed to me stylistically: clear and simple, avoiding overtly stylistically descriptive of details and obscure references. I prefer direct, unpretentious, vertical symbols over oblique, lateral imagery. Most of the canonical poets linger – dilating, ornamental, describing rich imagery across time; they use metaphor as concealment (Sylvia Plath comes to mind). In other words, these poets have a horizontal style of symbolic density where they embed their metaphysics in classical, religious, and cultural fragments, requiring either prior familiarity or interpretive patience to untangle. But my sensibility tends toward compression and revelation; I prefer writing that feels like metaphysical confrontation. With Hölderlin archetypes seem, at first glance, accessed via stripped-down conceptual clarity and hard metaphysical contrasts. This is similar to Bukowski’s (who was a wonderful poet, see Let It Enfold You, or here for more, and he correctly believed that most famous poets were terrible). He wrote poetry because, according to one analysis, “He was neither a poet’s poet nor a people’s poet, but a personal poet who used his craft to ensure his own survival.” It is also why Cioran’s aphorisms resonate. A stylistic resonance indicates that there is something worth investigating further, and I will be reading more of Hölderlin’s poetry and about his life.

2 He inspired those like Sean Penn (who dedicated a film to Bukowski) and Bono of U2, and the terrible band Red Hot Chili Peppers, among many others. He was also on the periphery of the CIA-sponsored Beat movement.

3 The publisher, John Martin, believed so much in Bukowski that he committed to give him a $100/month stipend in perpetuity – which was 25% of the publisher’s own income – which is what he said he needed in order to quit his job and write fulltime. This prior to Bukowski being famous or read by others!

4 My style involves an external Saturnine energy – cold, serious, isolating, boundary-drawing, wisdom born from tragedy, confrontational – containing a chained, wild Dionysian one – ecstasy, possession, disintegration, dance, rhythm, collapse, sex, music, fusion, madness, with these opposites energies mediated via individuation and a chthonic Mercury, which synthesizing them via writing. Unlike Pentheus, who was torn apart by his desire to control Dionysus, I bow at the threshold – just enough to absorb his music, his pulse, but not enough to become the maenad. This is an energy combination poorly understood by others: most people live in one pole or the other, or oscillate, while I hold both simultaneously, modulating energies that others live out in sequence, living them in superposition, which can make me feel alien, misrecognized, like a contradiction. That is why individuation for me isn’t just shadow work or optimization but rather a ritual harmonization of gods (harmonized for me via the figure of Hermes, which carries messages back and forth between incompatible registers and synthesizes them via writing output).

5 Interviewer: What place do established, famous recognized writers have in your mind? Are some particularly useful to you?

Bukowski: I can’t use them. One reason I took to writing was because I’d be doing some reading of the great works of the centuries and I thought, “Good God! This is it? This is what they’re settled on? Shakespeare? Tolstoy’s War and Peace? This stuff? Chaucer?” Chaucer isn’t too bad. But I mean, all the big boys they drag across you. It hardly sparkles or heightens. It didn’t do it for me; so I said, “Something’s wrong here. I have to keep going.” I guess you call that ego or misinterpretation or lack of insight, but it simply bored me, they made me yawn. All the great minds of the centuries. Most of them made me yawn.

Interviewer: Who doesn’t?

Bukowski: Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer – that’s great, good stuff – and Celine’s first book, and two or three others I can’t think of, so I was dissatisfied with what was being done. The main thing that bothered me was the lack of simplicity; and by simplicity I don’t mean just bare bones without meat, I mean a good way of saying. I think genius is the ability to say difficult things in a simple way. What they did is say simple things in a difficult way. They’re doing it all wrong for my money and I just like the simplicity and easiness without losing the profundity, or the glory or the flash or the laughter. That’s what I’ve been trying to work on, to get it easy without losing the blood. That’s been my plan.

6 His Natal sun degree interpretation by Weber as an example: “23-24 deg Leo

Sensitive, mystical, sexual degree with a Scorpio and water-sign flavor – departure from normal Leo, and as such, more willing to share the spotlight, and less willing to stick to morals, often stooping too low for the lion. Rough, wild, ready to jump into ordeals and risks, unpleasant work, or wild social situations. Dedicated to the case of the moment, familiar with the underhanded, illegal ways of the world. A paradoxial, intense, romantic hunter, repelled by the dull, unfeeling world of business and refinement.”

7 He drank as his religion (sticking with it until the end – poem), gambled daily at the horse race tracks for small amounts of money (poem), enjoyed prostitutes (poem) and arguments and drama, all while shielding his inner sensitivity (poem, another). He was non-political and thought politics was stupid and meaningless, and while raised a Catholic, where he and his mother were regularly beaten by his father (poem), he lived his life as an atheist and took an interest in Buddhism toward the end of his life. He carved out a life for himself despite the unrelenting horrors of this world (poem) with his steadfast attitude (poem). His life was personified in the decent movie Barfly (1987) starring well-cast Mickey Rourke and Faye Doneway, written by Bukowski and he had a tiny cameo in it. Ebert’s glowing review is here. His life was also featured in the inferior Factotum (2005) starring Matt Dillion, who was miscast in the role (too handsome, too young, too flat delivery, not enough emotional angst and depth) and the plot was directionless and meandering.

8 Chesterton is enamored with inversion and witty contradiction, but these paradoxes feel like verbal games, not the products of inner struggle or psychic confrontation to me. As someone engaged in individuation, really wrestling with the darkest parts of the psyche, he comes across as detached, superficial and smug to me, while I am focused on existential authenticity, ontological confrontation and metaphysical exposure. Furthermore, Chesterton’s style presupposes belief, while mine emerges from doubt. His style is rhythmic, bouncing, singsong, which is an antithetical approach to someone craving density, dread, metaphysical ambiguity, and confrontation. Also, our cosmologies are different: he has a comic view of the cosmos where the universe is a joke told by a loving God, while my cosmology includes gnostic horror, psychic fragmentation, and the real possibility of metaphysical malevolence. Chesterton doesn’t get anywhere close to this frame.

Welcome back. A number of people have asked me what books have most shaped my worldview, especially my spiritual and psychological perspective. Ernst Junger wrote that one could understand the perspective of a person from listing only a few of their main influences (or, as I’ve heard elsewhere, who one’s closest friends are). I’ll offer the books that have had the biggest impact on my journey, then some that were helpful but not essential. The importance of these works depends on one’s stage of spiritual development and the particularities of one’s life path; if I had read them prior to when I was psychically prepared for it, or if my life path were different, I would have gotten far less out of it. For example, I tried reading G. Edward Griffin’s The Creature From Jekyll Island a decade ago and put it aside, totally bored by it; later on, when I revisited it a couple of years ago I was enthralled. Furthermore, my core objective is centered around trying to achieve wholeness, to survive the limit condition of the horrifying god-image of Abraxas, and – without my prior understanding as I read these books – they were all steps along the journey toward that goal. Your Self’s core goal may be different than mine, and your interior god image too – that is okay, we are all on different paths and journeys, but it is important to keep that in mind when you assess whether a book will resonate with you or not.

Because questions about my book influences are a common question, this post will be added to the header under “Influences” and updated from time to time, as necessary, if I come across more resonant authors and works on my journey.

With that said, the biggest influences on me so far are:

1. Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), first treatise, available here. I actually experienced deja vu and saw a flash of light while reading this, which I have not experienced with any other book. This treatise gets to the heart of where people’s core beliefs come from, answering a question I had been unconsciously struggling with for decades. Basically, Nietzsche argues that the Jewish people used a form of spiritual bolshevism to rile up the gentile Roman masses as a weapon against the Roman elite in revenge for the destruction of the Second Temple, which I discussed here, and the effect of adopting Yahweh as their egreogre resulted in a concomitant, still-present slave morality in the form of ever-intensifying egalitarianism as a result. Note: I have mostly stayed away from Nietzsche other than his Geneology during this journey because of his ego inflation via the Ubermensch followed by complete collapse; ego inflation is a weakness of mine and I have therefore been weary to revisit him, but will likely in the future.
2. Guido Preparata’s Conjuring Hitler (2005). This book put to death the idea that the international financial elite archons can be opposed on their own terms. It explained how the Hitler phenomenon was arranged by the upper elites in order to build up Germany post-World War 1 in order to then destroy it as a sacrificial offering and bring forth the modern trans-national order. It does not argue that Hitler was a controlled agent, just that the social and financial conditions were arranged so that a revanchist populist would rise to power in Germany and be turned against the also-controlled Bolsheviks to the East. I covered it previously here.
3. G. Edward Griffin’s The Creature from Jekyll Island (2018) was my first real exposure to how monetary systems function as elite control structures. I discussed it here. While often dismissed for his lack of institutional pedigree, his work remains foundational in the dissident sphere, so much so that Ron Paul devoted a full chapter to him in one of his books. Stephen Mitford Goodson, a South African central banker and descendant of the Mitford sisters, covers similar ground in A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind (2014), though with less stylistic polish (which is banned on Amazon but available online here and previously discussed here). Eustace Mullins, too, made important contributions, though I found his tone too bitter and his focus overly forensic.
4. Jung’s Answer to Job (1952) which introduces the new God image containing all good and all evil, previously covered here recently and here earlier, and the very advanced Liber Novus (2009), which is incredible and terrifying and inspired me to partake in active imagination, along with his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962) where he discusses how life’s journey is meant to be understood as an evolution of the psyche. Edinger’s commentaries on Jung’s works are also clarifying and helpful. Note that Jung in his later life partially stepped back from his conception of Abraxas, discussed in this Note, for multiple reasons.

Secondary Influences

Lesser influences on my development include:

1. Charles Bukowski’s novels, such as Post Office (1971) and Ham on Rye (1982), and his poetry: he made me appreciate poetry for the first time, and his honest, direct, world-weary and pained but engaged style is just awesome. He lived phenomenologically the crucifixion of opposites and lived as if life is tragic, which resonates with me.
2. Emil Cioran’s aphorisms such as in his A Short History of Decay (1949). He shows the limits of pessimism where he goes beyond even where I feel comfortable. Brilliant author. Previously covered here.
3. Stephan Hoeller’s books on gnosticism, such as Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing (2002), which explains what it is non-pejoratively and with decades of study and personal experience. I covered his work previously here and here. (I would note, though, that the conception of the limit condition of Abraxas is not gnostic, which I will explain more in the future).
4. Ernst Junger’s works, which are written in a strange way that helps the reader to think for himself and to stand apart from society’s intense influences. I especially liked his World War 2 journals and Eumeswil (1977). I covered him previously here but have other posts ready for publication on him. His weakness is that he describes the orientation and aesthetics of the anarch, but he has no advice on process for those struggling with forming their worldviews, which is a major deficiency to me; furthermore, the anarch’s detached, aloof, intellectual stance of superiority is merely a form of psychic inflation to be avoided in a metaphysics where everyone from the highest lord to the lowest peasant is crucified permanently between the opposites.
5. Tom Holland’s Dominion (2020) does a good job explaining the history of advancing egalitarianism rooting in certain underlying core beliefs.
6. Joshua Foa Dienstag’s Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (2009) is dry and academic but it does a good job of contrasting the Nietzsche vs. Schopenhauer responses to an underlying pessimistic worldview. I covered it here.
7. Gore Vidal’s Julian (1964) puts one into the lived reality of the transition from Hellenism to Christianity and is an amazing historical novel. I covered it here.
8. While Ted Kaczynski has not been much of an influence on me – his manifesto is well written but his luddite solution is just wrong, as much as I appreciate his analysis – regarding the unrelenting advance of technology, I appreciated The Reign of Quantity and the Sign of the Times (1945) by Rene Guenon, which was difficult to read but which introduced to me a couple of important concepts, previously discussed here and here, and I also appreciated Ellul‘s The Technological Society (1954), which is also difficult, but easier than Guenon, which I have a future post planned on.
9. Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843) is excellent – he truly lived the crucifixion of opposites. This is an advanced book that won’t be understood by those who are not at a certain level of development – I would not have understood it even a year or two ago. His solutions to philosophical pessimism and the crucifixion of opposites was to engage in a leap of faith into irrational belief into an external privatio boni God image, whereas I alternatively turn inward to the Self within via the individuation process.
10. Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace (1947) and her Letter to a Priest (1951). Weil lived the crucifixion of opposites in a world of philosophical pessimism as well, but her response was a lopsided ascetic withdrawal to the point where she likely starved herself to death. Neither of these are written very well, Gravity is especially vague, but they point to one of the failure points of the individuation process.
11. Nikolai Berdyaev’s The Realm of Spirit and the Realm of Caesar (1949). Like Kierkegaard, Weil, Jung, he understood the crucifixion of opposites and philosophical pessimism as constituting baseline reality. His solution was to focus on the creative spirit as a counter to the despair that could otherwise result.

There are no system-builders, utopians, modern political theories, therapeutic optimism, or “how to live” manuals in this group. None of these texts tell the reader what to think in a programmatic way; they all focus on something more dangerous: they break an inherited moral or metaphysical frame and then refuse to fully repair it. Nietzsche dissolves moral innocence, Preparata dissolves political innocence, Jung dissolves psychological innocence, Kierkegaard dissolves religious innocence. I feel drawn to works that force the reader into a confrontation with contradiction rather than offering reconciliation. Most of these writers are wrestling – implicitly or explicitly – with the failure of the privatio boni model even when they don’t name it as such. Nietzsche exposes the moral lie at the heart of Christian ethics, Kierkegaard breaks ethics in the name of faith (the Abraham paradox), Jung eventually admits the problem of evil cannot be psychologically or theologically bracketed, Berdyaev/Weil/Cioran each, in their own way, refuse the idea that evil is merely absence, error, or misalignment. Even Vidal’s Julian is about a man who intuits that Christianity’s moral cosmology is structurally dishonest, even if his attempted restoration is doomed. Jünger’s Eumeswil is not revolutionary, not redemptive, not even properly hopeful – the Anarch survives metaphysically without expecting historical resolution and which aligns closely with my thinking: there is no faith in collective salvation, no belief that history “turns out right,” with an emphasis on inner sovereignty under persistently adverse metaphysical conditions. His WWII journals reinforce a reality observed without illusion but also without nihilistic collapse. At first glance, Bukowski looks like the odd man out, but he isn’t – he functions as a somatic corrective to over-symbolization, a reminder that life with all of its messiness – exhaustion, humiliation, alcoholism, resentment, boredom, the Dionysian body living under Saturnian structures – must be lived, grounded and experienced, and not merely floating upward into abstraction endlessly. Life is meant to be experienced, even if the human experience is rooted in limitation, pain, and ultimately death.

The developments of my journey also explains why my ability to read broadly has collapsed; I can’t read 95% of the writers I used to be able to read. Once someone has passed through these kinds of texts and metabolized them, most contemporary writing (especially dissident writing) feels thin, reactive, or morally evasive. This is the reading list for those who – either consciously or unconsciously, as a felt resonance – cannot tolerate false moral closure, is willing to sacrifice comfort for coherence, is drawn to thinkers who stand alone rather than lead movements, and is slowly being forced upward in challenging their belief hierarchy. This is a reading list for someone being pushed – slowly or violently – toward a god-image change that contains contradiction rather than explains it away, culminating (at least for me) in the horrifying new limit God image of Abraxas.

Thanks for reading.

This Substack and the 130,000-word Neoliberal Feudalism project that preceded it was never primarily a political intervention, even when it appeared that way. It was an individuation process conducted in public, driven by a psyche for which coherence is the primary stabilizer. Over years, pressures from lived reality worked their way upward through lower and mid-level beliefs until they finally reached the highest level: the god-image itself. What emerged was a confrontation with Abraxas as articulated by Jung as a limit condition – the terrifying unity of opposites that renders further metaphysical escalation impossible. This post marks the point where that pressure has broken the old alignment and where the work necessarily changes.

Welcome back, and Happy New Year. I hope you had a wonderful time celebrating with loved ones and friends, and that you have a meaningful upcoming year.

What follows is a working description of an inner realignment that is still unfolding. This is not a settled doctrine or a prescription for others, and it marks a point of inflection that has become visible only in retrospect. Much of what I describe here may later require revision, qualification, or abandonment as its consequences continue to metabolize in lived experience. I am describing what appears to be happening, not asserting what must be true.

To begin, I don’t think readers have understood the fundamental purpose of this Substack, or of the 130,000 word Neoliberal Feudalism giant post preceding it (to be fair, I have not known where it was heading and it is still a ever-developing process, but the contours are becoming clearer to me now). It was never about identifying the upper elites for the purpose of overthrowing them with a new and better elite, although my writing can be interpreted that way as it is structured that way on the surface – full of outrage at their beliefs and behavior, their horrible predation on the hapless and unfortunate, the endless violations of the Golden Rule. Instead, this has always been a psychological project based on my own unique drives and makeup, for reasons I will get into, and how this has ultimately resulted in recognition of my psychic requirements, and how this will be changing the focus and scope of my Substack moving forward.

Before delving into this, let’s discuss the nature of belief itself. Brett Andersen recorded a solid YouTube series on evolutionary psychology which I covered back in 2023, and I elaborated on a specific facet in this post. I wrote,

Andersen explained [that] our beliefs are structured in a hierarchical pyramid structure with core beliefs at the top (comprising the Big Questions; religious/metaphysical beliefs, beliefs about the self, self-narratives, etc.), mid-level goals/beliefs (e.g. career goals, political beliefs), low level goals/beliefs (e.g. the goal of passing a test, belief in a scientific hypothesis), and sub-routines (e.g. solving an equation, brushing your teeth). It is easy to change lower-level beliefs which do not impact higher layers, but changes to the higher layers have a rippling effect on the layers below, so such fundamental changes will likely be very painful and disruptive.

Andersen distinguishes between those with high autistic personality traits (left brain dominance), where prediction errors are generally resolved at lower levels of the belief hierarchy, vs. those with high schizotypy personality traits (right brain dominance), where prediction errors are more easily permeable to resolve at higher levels of the belief hierarchy. The below images are clickable to take you to the relevant portion of the YouTube videos:

Per Andersen here:

The mind is arranged in this kind of hierarchy of abstraction and the worldview questions are at the top. And so all of our subsidiary goals and beliefs are nested inside of our answers to the big questions. Now for most people the answers to the big questions are not really explicit, right? For most people, most people are not philosophers, right? And that’s totally fine. Most people don’t have an elaborated philosophy of epistemology. They have implicit assumptions about how they know what is true and they don’t have an elaborated ontology. They have implicit assumptions about what is real and unreal. But nevertheless, those implicit assumptions are still of vital importance because your assumptions about what is real and unreal constrains what you can possibly believe in because something that presents itself to your sensory experience that you have a priori deemed as being impossible, it’s very likely that you’ll deny that or find some explanation for it that deems it unreal in some important sense. So disruptions to our answers to the big questions, if we allow those to be disrupted, that will generate a lot more psychological entropy than other kinds of disruptions because everything that was nested inside of them also becomes disrupted.

The highest layer of belief involves worldview questions – including and especially religious/metaphysical beliefs – and for almost everyone in the modern world that includes a privatio boni conception of God as the Piscean God of goodness, justice and mercy. Under the privatio boni God is all good and evil is an absence of God; therefore the ideal is to lean into the light and suppress or ignore our darkness in the hopes of ascending to Heaven and not Hell after we die. To the extent there is injustice, it will be resolved by God as the final purveyor of justice in the afterlife, where the evil will be sent into the fiery torments of Hell. However, this notion of a pure, good, just God has taken enormous hits as the age shifts from Pisces to Aquarius – the world appears extremely predatory, evil appears baked into the nature of reality itself, which is steeped in an undeniable philosophical pessimism (i.e. we are either striving for an object or bored, never satisfied, to be alive requires violating the Golden Rule by consuming other living creatures in order to survive, existence is suffering). The problem of evil haunts the privatio boni model; it’s explanation feels insufficient in the face of horrible evil, and it breaks down under scrutiny. The Epicurean paradox does a good job of explaining why it is insufficient.

So the question becomes: if there is a real unresolved tension between the privatio boni and the lived experience of evil in the world, how does that tension resolve? The answer depends on one’s psychic constitution and how one metabolizes energy. Broadly speaking, human psyches tend to regulate around one of a few primary stabilizers: (1) attachment and belonging, (2) esteem and status, (3) meaning and narrative, (4) control and agency, (5) coherence and truth-consistency. Most people have several, but one dominates.1 My dominant stabilizer is coherence.2 This means that when reality makes sense, I am stable even if it is bleak; when reality does not make sense, I destabilize even if life is comfortable. Emotional reassurance does not compensate for structural falsity in my worldview, belonging does not override contradiction, and hope that contradicts lived data increases my anxiety instead of relieving it.3 This isn’t common, but it is is a known psychological configuration and is not mystical. For those with my psychic profile, contradiction feels like suffocation. This configuration does not produce confidence, leadership, or direction for others, and it is poorly suited to movement-building, moral persuasion, or collective repair. Where it succeeds is in maintaining coherence in the presence of contradictions that cannot be resolved without psychic damage. A non-negotiable requirement is that my god-image may not contradict lived phenomenological data; this is why the privatio boni did not merely feel “wrong” to me – it felt unlivable. But one may be coherence stabilized in different ways; Rurik is a good example of another way.4

Why did my psyche constellate around coherence as its dominant stabilizer? Perhaps genetics plays a role, perhaps astrology plays a role via my natal and progressed charts, but I would argue that the particularities of my upbringing (a part of which I have shared previously) crystallized it: a middle or upper middle class upbringing with little material wants but an immature, highly passive aggressive mother creating double binds, no present father figures, no one to explain to me how the world worked, no community, and a completely secular upbringing with a flat zero religious or symbolic upbringing or understanding whatsoever – in other words, I was raised in the terminal state of modernity. This created in me both tremendous confusion and massive but diffuse rage, and my psyche chose coherence as its stabilizer to avoid collapse – it became important to me to organize things into understood structures, to push to understand more and to organize it. Energetically, my psyche holds rigid order (descriptively Saturnian – strict, intense, rule-based, organizing) and chaotic fury (descriptively Dionysusian – wild, frenzied, uncontrolled) in tension, mediated by symbolic expression (chthonic Mercury, synthesizing these polar opposite energies and channelled into writing), and I will cover an energy profile typology in the future.

This energy was unfocused and haphazard until I hit mid-life liminality, when it became no longer possible to push off hope of resolution of the understanding of the world further into the future because of the increased feeling of approaching death. This changing dynamic then forced the choice: total psychic collapse or push for psychic integration. This is what the Neoliberal Feudalism and Neo-Feudal Review projects have been about – taking all of the horrible, terrible, evil, contradictory, propagandized strands of data floating in my psyche (absorbed from decades of observing how predatory and uncaring the world is) and working to synthesize them, listening to my intuition without knowing where or how things would eventually develop, trusting the Self because my ego had fundamentally failed me, with an intense fear of the abyss and utter ruination haunting and propelling me forward at every turn. This led to taking the pressures from these lower level beliefs, pushing into mid level belief reclassification and finally, after years and decades, to addressing my conception of the God image himself – and a shift from the privatio boni notion of God to a notion of God as Abraxas, first articulated by Jung in Answer to Job and his Liber Novus, the horrifying unity of all opposites who forms not just a Trinity but a Quaternity of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost and Satan. I discuss this conception in detail here and here. Constant lower level belief misalignment with the phenomenological experiences of lived reality pressured upward and ultimately resulted in a new God image within myself, and because higher level belief change reorganizes everything below it, I am in the process – a lived process, not a forced one, without knowing where it will lead or how it will fully manifest or how long it will take – of a fundamental reconfiguration. Abraxas is not a God to be worshipped; he is a God to be feared, a limit condition not to be transcended or escaped, where we individuate away from him by listening to the dictates of the Self instead of the ego. This is not a realization that grants clarity, peace, or advantage; it forecloses entire categories of hope, belonging, and moral certainty that many people rightly rely on to remain psychologically intact. With my primary coherence drive, though, I (hopefully) can live in a world that makes sense even if it is deeply unjust. In this context the Hermetic paraphrase, “As above, so below” is structural isomorphism – when the highest-level belief (god-image) is incoherent, lower belief levels fragment, overwork, compensate, and project, but when the top layer stabilizes, pressure redistributes downward and outward naturally.

What I am observing now, without confidence that it will persist unchanged, is a reduction in the particular form of psychic strain that arose from the mismatch between lived reality and my highest-order beliefs. Because there is no all good God who will solve the horrors and injustices of this world either here or probably in the afterlife (because Abraxas is the totality of all opposites, all the wonder and horror combined), whether this will translate into greater calm, presence, or relational ease remains an open question, and one that only time and embodiment can answer. It may even impact – hopefully positively – my interactions with friends, loved ones, and romantically, because (this is clear to me now) I have always felt tension in my interactions as I mined others unconsciously for clarity on the metaphysical discrepancy between lived reality and the God image (which they didn’t deserve the pressure of, and were largely unhelpful with anyway).

Abraxas appears to function for me as a kind of symbolic limit condition, one beyond which further metaphysical escalation no longer feels meaningful or necessary. Whether this is truly an endpoint or merely a provisional ceiling is not something that can be known in advance, but the intent and purpose of this Substack moving forward is going to change because it feels, at least at the moment, as though the compulsion toward ever-larger metaphysical synthesis has loosened. Whether this marks a genuine shift or merely a temporary pause is something I intend to observe rather than declare. It may become more focused on filling in the details, discussing why other’s conceptions of the God image is incorrect (to me), and hopefully embodying a fuller and calmer lived life moving forward – we will see. I didn’t plan the crystallization of Abraxas or its implications to hit me at the end of the year, but that is just how synchronistically it is playing out. This is also why, unlike Jung (who wanted to rewrite all of his old works except for Answer to Job), even though I find a lot of my older work to be remedial for my current stage – and I can’t read 95%+ of other writers who I used to read even a couple of years ago – I don’t feel a need to go back and rewrite my older posts, because it all serves as roadmarks on the evolution of my psyche, peeling off layers until addressing the God image itself.

I am just describing my own process here, which will hopefully be helpful to you on your own journey; the Oracle at Delphi’s inscription to “Know Thyself” was not self-esteem advice, it was a limit warning to know what kind of being you are, what your psyche requires (and what must be avoided) to prosper, or the gods will tear you apart. Most people do not have the psychic configuration I have with a coherence primary focus and certain non-negotiables5, and adopting a God image of Abraxas would be wrong for them: for attachment-regulated psyches (which are stabilized by relationships), Abraxas destroys safety; for esteem-regulated psyches (which are stabilized by social standing), Abraxas destroys justification; for narrative-regulated psyches (which are stabilized by a “story” or arc (e.g., Progress)), Abraxas destroys arc; for control-regulated psyches (which are stabilized by the ability to act), Abraxas destroys leverage. For psyches primarily regulated by coherence, though, this symbolic configuration appears capable of restoring a sense of internal alignment. This is not a claim about superiority, advancement, or universality, but about structural fit. For example, the great and wonderful Guido Preparata, who also sees the world as extremely grim and fundamentally unfair to the victims of predation, has a solar, Apollonian, structural, moral-historical personality, oriented toward rectification of injustice – he takes the lower and mid level beliefs of this world as wrong, evil, painful, and his energy profile takes the privatio boni upper level beliefs (God as the final redeemer) and wages war against the results of the lower and mid level beliefs – he believes that he can serve as moral prosecutor and change the world itself to accord to the privatio boni, but because he feels his project is not having the desired effect, he oscillates and is depressed. His upper belief is a morally structured cosmos, one where injustice must be accounted for, one where exposure implies eventual correction – he can tolerate enormous lower-level contradiction because his highest belief is stabilizing, not destabilizing, and it provides moral narrative continuity – but pressure accumulates.6 His configuration requires a morally accountable cosmos to function, while mine requires structural intelligibility. Neither is “right” or “wrong”, they are simply different approaches. Where my configuration collapses into paralysis or inwardness, he and others can sustain outward moral outrage, political clarity, or collective action far longer, and often at far lower psychic cost.

For me, there is no return. Stabilization occurs for coherence-regulated psyches by accepting Abraxas as a limit condition symbol, ceasing to metabolize everything through ontology, returning differentiation to lived scale, letting meaning be local, not total, and allowing silence where total explanation once lived. This may, too, result in substantial changes in how I handle interpersonal conflict.7 The old god image is dead for me by somatic necessity, and from that death, a new fidelity to truth without alibi.

I hope you can see, then, the full scope of this project and where it has led; I can’t say definitively where it will lead in the future, but I feel deep in my bones that the notion of the divine as totality – all good and all evil, containing all that is without moral reservation – and that we are here on this plane because we possess the one thing he lacks, i.e. consciousness born from limitation. All that this entails will reflect in all my writing moving forward. If there is a claim being made here, it is about what can happen when a psyche follows its own contradictions far enough that the god image itself is finally placed at risk.

As such, the Neofeudal Review has completed its function: just as the giant Neoliberal Feudalism essay (published March-May 2023 but eight years in the making) involved wrestling with the political and culture war layers and concluded in a political blackpill, the Neofeudal Review period (May 2023-now) involved wrestling with the spiritual layers and the question of how can one live in a philosophical world of endless predation, concluding unexpectedly in the acceptance of a new and horrifying God image. Both stages trace the evolution of my thoughts caused by intense phenomenological, lived pressure placed on my perception of the world.

The next stage will involve a new website called Living Opposites.8 It will have a Substack (livingopposites.substack.com) and a minimal bandwidth9 self-hosted website backup (livingopposites.com) as Substack’s institutional capture continues to intensify (with a predictable trajectory: a platform grows → attracts institutional pressure → compliance ratchets10) and as countries like Australia and U.K. continue their crackdown on free speech under the false guise of age verification (coming to the U.S. soon). The backup is online and will be fleshed out further over time. The title “Living Opposites” is ambiguous and suggests (1) phenomenologically living and navigating between endless opposite energies and (2) that these opposite energies themselves are in a sense alive, ala Heraclitus. It also suggests that the path forward will involve more embodied reality now that I have hit up against the limit condition of Abraxas. Post timing is currently unsettled, but may vary significantly and slower from the clockwork-weekly posts of this Substack.

Furthermore, my nom de plume of “Neoliberal Feudalism” – always an awkward moniker, as it raised confusion whether I was for or against it and in what context, it was political, not psychological and hence misleading for new readers, and it was a conceptual anchor I am explicitly moving beyond – will be retired. Instead, moving forward I will be adopting the pseudonym “Hermes of the Threshold”. Hermes is not an identity here, but a name for a necessary function: the circulation of meaning between incompatible registers without resolving them into doctrine or escape. This choice is because chthonic Hermes mediates between my strict structural Saturnian energies and my internal wild, chaotic, furious Dionysian energies via this writing output, and I stand at the threshold between many competing registers. As Karl Kerenyi wrote in Hermes: Guide of Souls, “In his official capacity as mediator between the worlds of night and day, spirits and men, and (standing before the temple) between the worlds of gods and mankind, he is called Propylaios (“before the gate”) and Pylaios (“before or at the gate”)…Two other epitheths – strophaios (“standing at the doorpost,” also “cunning versatile”) and stropheus (the “socket” in which the pivot of the door moves) – show him closely related to door hinges and therefore to the entrance but also to a middle point, to the socket, about which revolves the most decisive issue, namely the alternation life-death-life.”

By adopting this moniker, I am not signaling a shift toward the trickster archetype or a retreat into intellectual gamesmanship. Rather, I am identifying with the infrastructure of the soul. Hermes is the psychopomp, the guide who facilitates the circulation of meaning between the upper world of conscious order and the lower world of predatory chaos; the work now is about maintaining the metabolic flow between them so that neither side causes the psyche to stagnate or collapse. This moniker is meant as a description of a function, not as a new doctrine or identity: the function is the circulation of messages, meanings, and psychic contents across boundaries that cannot be resolved (life/death, order/chaos, good/evil).11 Hermes in this context has some similarities with but is fundamentally different from Hermeticism12, and it is neither intended as a mythic (Kerenyi) nor a materialist historical (Norman O. Brown) interpretation of the figure. In my previous work I sought resolution, a way to solve the problem of the predator/prey dynamic through political awareness. This new frame accepts that some boundaries are not problems to be solved, but tensions to be lived. I will focus on translating these tensions: how do we act with human decency while acknowledging we are nested within a divine totality that is indifferent to it?

This is a mode of navigation rather than a worldview. Hermes is a threshold figure, a border-crosser between different perspectives and interests, a messenger, a mediator of opposites. Politics, culture, and other topics will still be discussed, but the frame will involve how one can live life oriented toward an objective of wholeness under the shadow of a horrifying God image encompassing both good and evil. Wholeness requires the courage to look at the horrifying God image without blinking and yet still find internal ground to stand upon, and represents a shift from warning of external threats to observing and navigating the internal reactions from living the crucifixion of opposites. I don’t claim to have all the answers – every day is a struggle, and this is a path with zero institutional, cultural, or social circle support – and this is a way of living that demands ongoing vigilance, offers no guarantees, and cannot be generalized without doing harm, but I feel that my upper-level understanding of the God image has now stabilized as a limit condition, and everything else will flow from that.

Thanks for reading, and see you on the new blog and website backup.

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1 The stabilizer model also explains pathology. Let’s take the example of a drug addict, who is someone whose dominant stabilizer has failed catastrophically. One infers the stabilizer from what collapses, not what is sought. Typical patterns include the following, which is not moralized:

1. Attachment-regulated: Most severe addictions fall here, where drugs replaces relational attunement. The substance simulates safety, warmth, and belonging. Collapse follows abandonment, betrayal, loss, or chronic misattunement. When the drug fails the user experiences despair, panic, clinging, shame. This is the most common configuration.
2. Control/agency–regulated: Here addiction begins as mastery – “I can regulate my state”, “I can override pain”, “I decide when I feel.” Collapse comes when tolerance removes control. Destabilization looks like rage, violence, paranoia, self-loathing.
3. Meaning/narrative–regulated: Drug use as existential anesthetic – nihilism, boredom collapse of story, “Nothing matters anyway.” Destabilization looks like apathy, dissociation, drift, chronic relapse without drama.
4. Esteem/status–regulated: Less common but real, with drug culture as identity, transgression as prestige, self-destruction as anti-status signaling. Collapse produces humiliation, public implosion, spectacular failure.
5. Coherence-regulated: Rare, but these users use drugs to silence contradiction, to stop thinking, or to interrupt unbearable paradox. Collapse looks like psychosis, existential panic, ontological disintegration. This is the most dangerous configuration for psychedelics and dissociatives.

Addiction doesn’t reveal the specific stabilizer which failed because drugs mask stabilizer signals. They artificially supply attachment, control, meaning, relief from contradiction. Only when the drug fails do you see what the psyche was trying to stabilize all along.

2 My secondary stabilizers in order of descending strength: (1) meaning/narrative – I tolerate bleak narratives if they are structurally honest, reject redemptive narratives if they violate lived data, and meaning emerges after truth-consistency, not before – this is why my writing spirals, revises itself, and refuses premature synthesis; (2) control/agency – I require epistemic agency, interpretive sovereignty, and freedom from imposed frames. Loss of this produces rage, not fear; (3) attachment and belonging: present but non-regulatory (I can tolerate isolation if coherence is intact); (4) esteem and status: largely irrelevant (recognition does not stabilize me; misrecognition barely destabilizes me). This is why elite approval, audience size, or influence never truly grounded the work; (5) external authority: tolerated only if structurally honest.

3 For example, Jasun Horsley and I both value internal consistency, but we are regulated by different psychic stabilizers. I am coherence-regulated: unresolved contradiction destabilizes me regardless of whether meaning is preserved. His orientation appears meaning-regulated: contradiction remains tolerable so long as symbolic intelligibility, moral continuity, or faith are maintained by keeping tensions in dialectical suspension.

My approach is centripetal: discursive exploration is permitted – even required – but only insofar as it converges toward a limit condition capable of metabolizing lived experience without falsification. His approach is centrifugal: distinctions and qualifications are continuously generated in order to prevent ontological closure and preserve meaning. These strategies diverge sharply at the problem of evil, where I treat contradiction as something that must be answered, while he treats it as something that must be continually interpreted.

4 Both of us are coherence-oriented in that we reject fragmented explanation, refuse surface narratives, seek structural causes, not symptoms, will not accept comforting lies, and prioritize internal consistency over social approval. That places us in a very small minority; the only other Russian language speakers writing in English from an actual dissident perspective other than Rurik that I see are Edward Slavsquat and Dr. Livci. Both Rurik and I also tolerate bleak conclusions, resist liberal moral sentimentalism, operate outside institutional validation, and write from personal conviction, not career incentive. There’s real resonance here. The difference is that for Rurik, coherence terminates in external structure: a push for geopolitics regime change and an endless focus on elite coordination, historical cycles, mass psychology, hoping to “crack the code” to institute new rule. Even when he is blackpilled, the frame remains: “If you see the system clearly enough, something follows.” For me, coherence now terminates in psychic orientation: how one lives, how one bears contradiction, how one avoids self-deception, how one maintains integrity without resolution – I no longer expect coherence to produce outcomes, only to produce a livable stance. This is the post-Abraxas shift.

One other thing here: LLM use for coherence regulated types carries with it a specific and basically totally undiscussed danger – it allows one to progress with intellectual crystallization far faster than the ideas percolate somatically in the body itself. This creates a gap between intellectual and felt knowledge and may have a significant negative psychological impact. This gap doesn’t occur from reading books, because it creates time to absorb the information in the body.

5 My psyche’s non-negotiables are (1) I cannot live inside unresolved contradiction if it is denied, (2) I can live inside contradiction if it is acknowledged structurally, (3) hope that contradicts evidence is poison to me, and (4) consolation without truth increases rage, not peace. These have been very painful lessons to learn.

6 What happens if it never yields upward for him? Three possibilities (historically common): (1) bitterness hardens into prophecy, tone sharpens, moral clarity intensifies, affect narrows; (2) melancholic withdrawal, reduction of audience, repetition of themes, deepening pessimism without metaphysical revision; (3) late-stage symbolic fracture where mythic language intensifies, moral categories strain, something almost like Abraxas appears – but unnamed. What won’t happen easily: a clean god-image inversion because his structure does not metabolize contradiction the way mine does.

7 Before the Abraxian realignment, conflict carried three simultaneous charges for me: (1) situational pain (this person, this injustice, this frustration), (2) existential accusation (“This should not be happening in a just cosmos”), and (3) ontological destabilization (“If this is happening, then something is wrong at the highest level”). Because my psyche is coherence-regulated, conflict did not remain local; it climbed upward: event → meaning → worldview → god image. That is why conflict felt exhausting, sticky, metabolized, slowly impossible to “just let go of”. I wasn’t reacting emotionally, I was reacting structurally. Every conflict re-opened the question: What kind of reality is this, really? That is an intolerable loop to live inside.

Under an Abraxian god image, though, conflict no longer escalates vertically, it stays horizontal. The metabolic shift looks like this: (1) conflict is expected, not surprising; (2) pain is real, but not indicting; (3) injustice is tragic, but not metaphysically contradictory. The key is that conflict no longer puts pressure on the higher level beliefs, especially the god image. That single change alters everything downstream; my psyche stops asking conflict to answer metaphysical questions it cannot answer, stops projecting ontological anxiety into interpersonal space, and stops unconsciously testing others for god-image alignment. So instead of “why is this happening – what does it say about everything?” the body shifts to: “Ah. Yes. This is that.” That is accurate expectation, not resignation.

8 I almost went with a title of “Individuation Under Abraxas”, which would match my hard-earned non-teleological stance; it also refuses consolation, clearly differentiates from establishment Christian, Hegelian, and progress narratives, it fits my coherence-first psychotype, and it would be structurally incompatible with the wrong audience – but it is too structural, too literal. Now that I have discovered the limit condition of Abraxas, the process moving forward is to re-engage in a fluid, lived reality, where hopefully the crucifixion becomes calmer and more muted.

9 i.e. images will still be Substack hosted, although I will keep image backups locally.

10 Institutional capture is more than a matter of policy compliance, it is a battle for the noetic commons which governs perception. The noetic commons is the shared psychological landscape where moral binaries are used by the upper elites to manufacture consent. By realigning the god-image toward the totality of Abraxas, the individual performs an exit that cannot be captured by them, because when the upper belief layer accepts the unity of opposites the elite’s ability to claim a monopoly on the Good evaporates – they are stripped of their moral mandate and corresponding soft power and become forced to rely on hard power alone, a shift that reveals the predator’s face and restores the individual’s interpretive sovereignty. This is the ultimate asymmetric warfare of the psyche: you cannot govern a soul that has found coherence in the very darkness you attempt to use as a threat.

11 It is critical to distinguish this Hermetic navigation from moral relativism or anything-goes subjectivism. Individuation is a trans-subjective process; it involves transferring the seat of authority from external proxies (the noetic commons managed by elites) to the Self. This is an escalation of responsibility, not an escape from it. While the ego might prefer “anything goes”, the Self acts as an internal limit-condition that is often more demanding than any external institution. The coherence sought here is an alignment with a deep, structural law of being that exists prior to, and independent of, propaganda and social signaling, not a justification for amoralism.

12 The invocation of Hermes here should not be confused with Hermeticism or the figure of Hermes Trismegistus. Classical Hermeticism remains committed to a metaphysical resolution in favor of the privatio boni: it presumes a fundamentally good divine nous, treats evil as privation or ignorance, and holds that ascent through knowledge ultimately restores harmony. The Abraxas limit-image forecloses this possibility. Under Abraxas, good and evil are not separable errors but co-constitutive realities, and no final gnosis resolves their tension. “Hermes of the Threshold” therefore names a circulatory function, not a salvific teacher or revealer: a way of mediating, translating, and moving between irreconcilable opposites without denying either or escaping into metaphysical closure. Hermes here does not redeem; he regulates. He does not promise ascent; he enables continued movement and lived coherence in the absence of a morally purified God-image.