My other blog smells like candle smoke

There's a part of my head that doesn't show up much on this blog, mostly because it lives in another house, at pablo.space, and that house smells like candle smoke and old paper.

The place is called Chamber of Reflections, and it's where I write about the occult and the esoteric: Hermeticism, Kabbalah, grimoires, secret societies, old symbols and the crooked roads they took to reach us.

I've liked this stuff for as long as I can remember. I spent my childhood and early teens in the countryside, and whenever I found an older person willing to talk, I'd ask for a story about something nobody could explain. There was never a shortage of them.

If you've been reading here for a while, you know the other things that keep me busy: photography, cinema and, of course, code. The occult sits right next to them. Put the four together and you have pretty much everything I love talking about. They overlap more than people expect, too. The Holy Mountain, which I wrote about here, is basically an alchemical treatise with a camera.

What you'll find in the chamber #

Mostly history, told the way I like to hear it. The latest post follows Baphomet across three centuries: a garbled name in the confessions of the Templars arrested in 1307, the goat-headed figure Éliphas Lévi drew in 1856, and Léo Taxil, the hoaxer who stuck that goat onto Freemasonry and then admitted at a press conference in Paris, in 1897, that he had made the whole thing up.

There's a running series called Pills that circles around Lilith, from Genesis all the way to the Zohar. There are posts on Hermes Trismegistus, the Tetragrammaton, Christian Kabbalah and Abraham of Worms. There's a list of occult films that take the subject seriously, from Häxan to A Dark Song.

And there's "Do not knock three times", about black magic with both feet on the ground: the curse-removal business that never runs out of curses to remove, and candles that set curtains on fire in any alphabet. It ends with a line I still like: that's where I prefer my demons, on paper, safely unemployed.

The design follows the mood. Parchment background, a little planet symbol next to every date, and an opening line that sets the hour: "It is midnight, Worshipful Master; the work continues within."

Every post about the occult deserves at least one picture of a man being carried off by demons, so here's mine.

Look at the spiny fish at the top left. Someone cut that into a copper plate in the 1470s, on purpose, and people bought it.

Causos, someday #

In Brazil we have a word for a certain kind of story: causo. It's told as true, usually by someone older, usually at night, and it almost always happened to a friend of a cousin.

Folk belief gives them plenty to work with. Leave your slipper upside down and your mother will die. Cover the mirrors when a storm comes. The seventh son, born after six daughters, turns into a werewolf. The woman who falls in love with a priest becomes the headless mule and runs through the fields from Thursday night into Friday.

I want to start telling some of these. The stories people actually believed, and some of the ones I collected as a kid by asking the wrong questions to the right people.

The problem is volume #

Between the occult, the films, the photos and the code, there's so much I'd like to write about that if I wrote all of it, it would come out to about four posts a day.

If you've been following this blog lately, you know that's not much of an exaggeration.

So, for now, the candles stay over there and the terminals stay here, mostly. If you like old books, strange symbols and stories that don't end well, the door is at pablo.space. Knock once.