Gigayacht

Atu XII, The Hanged Man, Thoth Tarot

The Christian sees life as a vast ocean of darkness and despair. The Thelemite charters a zillionaire’s gigayacht.

Dear friends, beautiful and happy people, 

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. 

It is the 10th day of the Thelemic Holy Season, during which we traditionally meditate on the Qabalistic Mystery of the Path of Mem, that is, the XIIth Tarot card, attributed to the planet Neptune and called “The Hanged Man.” 

In divination, this card heralds Misfortune, in the least funky sense of the term, and, symbolically, sums up incarnate existence as a kind of endless and calamitous sea voyage, quite comparable to the one endured by the holy king of Ithaca, Odysseus of a thousand wiles (may his merits protect us). 

Ah! < the awful Sea >, as it is written in our Holy Books (Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente 3, 44).

You are not unaware that, in the Jungian “Totem Test,” the question by which the psychologist prompts the patient to reveal their vision of Life is: “What does the high sea evoke for you?” 

When Cathy, my uncompromising psychoanalyst friend— the very archetype of frigid beauty— once subjected me to this Test, I knew nothing of its significance. And to the question: “What does the high sea evoke for you?” I replied: “When a friend invited me to go cruising in Indonesia on his boat—we fished for sharks, we had a great laugh…” 

Then, seeing the dismayed look on my interlocutor’s face, I quickly added: “Alright, let’s say: me, in a deckchair, on the deck of a zillionaire’s gigayacht, right hand in the champagne cooler, left hand on Rihanna’s backside.”

Indeed, for someone who was sentenced to five years in prison for their philosophical and religious beliefs, I worry astonishingly little about the concept of Adversity… 

It’s true that, religiously, I am devoted to the gods of Thelema—that, philosophically, I am a disciple of the Gnostic Saints—and that, in practice, my unwavering code of conduct is, in all circumstances: There are two rules for living happily: the first is to give no importance to minor worries; the second is that all worries are minor. 

In short: Our gods are cooler than yours, and they are my playmates on this beautiful and interesting planet. 

Generally speaking, all my actions are for our august lady, the beauteous goddess Nuit—“Hail the Space Queen,” as our friend Corentin says—and my personal religion boils down to this: once I understood that life is a courtly love affair between me and a Cleopatra raised to the power of a thousand, everything became clear—I feel far more akin to a Beyoncé, Britney Spears, or Selena Gomez fan in their devotion to their “queen” than to 99.9999% of the global occult community. 

When Misfortune strikes me, it’s because Nuit is in Gal Gadot-as-the-Evil-Queen mode, the Hunter has upset her, and I’m the one taking the fall for it—When Happiness comes my way, it’s because she’s in Nefertiti mode, pleased with my service, and has ordered me to be showered with gold—In both cases, it’s super sexy! 

Did you know that, in ancient Israel, they used to give the condemned, just before putting them to death (following King Solomon’s recommendation: “Give strong liquors to the one who is perishing, and wine to those in bitter distress; let them drink and forget their poverty and remember their misery no more” (Proverbs 31:6-7)), a cup of very strong wine mixed with a strange herb like datura?—We can logically deduce that the condemned would depart like a barfly thinking they were a witch flying off on a broomstick. And that carrying out the execution after that was pure cruelty: the poor soul was already punished enough by having to drink Near Eastern wine! 

If I were to perish on the scaffold, a Château Latour 1st Grand Cru Classé 1945 would do, and replace the datura with some robust gaperon. 

Of course, that wouldn’t be enough to intoxicate a drunkard of my caliber to the point of forgetting that Macron rejected my plea for clemency—which isn’t very nice after all the good I’ve said about his wife—It’d probably take following Solomon’s injunction of strong liquors, and while an Adios Motherfucker cocktail seems fitting under the circumstances, I’d probably opt for a Looping-Papaye instead, thanks to its marvelous quality of intoxication that would—here we go again—make me feel like I’m heading to the guillotine on a yacht.

Meditating on this, go forth, dear friends, under the protection of that spiritual sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere, which we call GOD.

Warm kisses from the Bahamas.

Love is the law, love under will.

— ☉︎ in 8° ♈︎ : ☽︎ in 8° ♈︎ : ♄︎ : Ⅴⅹⅰ.