Love’s Ordeal: The Dark Night of the Soul

A Dark Night of the Soul always arrives uninvited, yet it could be the best thing to ever happen. It’s a sacred initiation into the underbelly of the soul that will make you feel cursed and blessed at the same time. Dark Nights of the Soul are all the rage these days. Our civilisation is self-destructing and we seem powerless to stop it. Some say we have brought ourselves to this dangerous precipice through our collective blindness, arrogance and selfishness, and that may be true. But we may also be on the brink of a breakthrough.

Alan Moore on the magic of fiction and the imagination

“I traffic in fiction. I do not traffic in lies.”

Alan Moore reminds me of an Old English Sheepdog with a wry twinkle in his eye. You just know he’s got a juicy bone hidden somewhere. He’s best known for his comics, like Watchmen and V for Vendetta, and for the fact that he hates the movie versions with a passion. Hollywood, he says, “spoon-feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination.” Moore is an artist driven by the art rather than the market. A writer, storyteller, magician, rebel, iconoclast, and psychonaut, who like William Blake, believes the reality of imagination is paramount. Moore’s new novel, Jerusalem, is out later this year.

The Flammarion Engraving: Escaping the Crystal Sphere

This is the well-known wood engraving by an unknown artist. It's often attributed to Camille Flammarion because it first appeared in his book The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology in 1888, but he probably just commissioned it. The engraving depicts a medieval pilgrim carrying a staff pushing his head through the border between worlds to look at the inner workings of the universe.