Angels and Demons
the week ahead š„ āļø
āEvery medium is the best and worst of things.ā ā Regis Debray
Mercury, the messenger, is officially in Geminiāwhere sheās at home. In three days, the sun will join her. In Gemini, Mercury finds its home resourcesāinvisible tools for transmitting information and energy. Words, air, the loquacious twins.
The sky is airy and mad mercurialāurging us to consider the mediums through which we communicate, and how we may serve as mediums ourselves, and that thing McLuhan told us, that the medium IS the message. In this spirit, Iāve been revisiting my lecture notes from a course I taught in 2022 called
MEDIUM AND MESSENGER: ANGELS, DEMONS, AND PHILOSOPHY. The recordings, slide shows, and readings are on sale for $77 while Mercury is in Gemini (now through June 1st). Possibly the strangest class Iāve taught, and possibly my favorite. Itās difficult, trippy, and rewarding to study mediums. Here, we thought about angels, demons, and Mercury as original technologies, as well as the act of transmissionā¦.
In his study of angels, Angels: A Modern Myth, Michel Serres writes that angels allow us to see āthe basic noise of the physical world.ā They create āconfusion in the rational.ā Angels disappear in relation to their message and demons stick around. Angels become demonic when they wrap their own messages, their own will, around the message theyāre meant to carry us from on high.
Then: chaos, noise. Art, maybe. We can think of Mercury/Hermes, as the first angel, but also the OG demon. Mercury messes with the message and delivers it dutifullyādepending on its state. Our job is to read the medium in the message, the winged creatures turning the cosmic machinery, the architectures behind AI. The sun joins Mercury in Gemini on Thursday. Tis the season, the season for studying mediums and messaging systems. Angels, demons, and our beloved trickster Mercury are excellent guides to tech-heavy times.
A look inside. Here are the many strange folders of the MEDIUM AND MESSENGER course:
The week opens with Mercury conjunct Uranusāthe mind electric, the medium overwhelmed with new intel from the faraway planet of disruption and technology. What was distant is now near. Some questions/things to consider:
In a world of artificial intelligences, noise, and invisible internetsāhow to sort?
How to stay in touch with our own capacity for mediumship, knowledge? To stay connectedānot plugged in, but in tune with our own desires and capacities?
Playfulness and rigor.
To sort through the noise is to peel away the filmy residue thatās stuck to us, filled with the desires, projections, and images of othersādebris from the constant scroll, and to find out what we truly think.
Curiosity over judgement.
To study Mercury, or any medium, is to study the relation between source and dissemination, word and act, magic and rationality, our own minds and bodies.
More on mediums, Mercury, angels/demons, and transmission in the coming weeks.
xx
E
This class was amazing! I still go back to it.