Playing the Tarot Game with Lucifer in Venice

 

In the end of my satirical ebook, The Godgame, I wrote that I made a pact with Lucifer that if I played the Tarot game with his guidelines, I would be rewarded with the ability of vagabonding the world. The game was about self-transformation.

The Cartographer Who Stole Lucifer´s Dreams

 

"Smoke from the Monastery of Light and Darkness". 

Photo by Morten Tolboll. Location: Cannaregio, Venice, Italy

 In his novel, "A Mapmakers Dream - The Meditations of Fra Mauro, Cartographer to the Court of Venice", James Cowan writes the story that in sixteenth-century Venice, in an island monastery, a cloistered monk experiences the adventure of a lifetime - all within the confines of his cell, the book tells the story of fra Mauro and his struggle to realise his life´s work: to make a perfect map - one that represents the full breadth of creation. News of his project attracts explorers, pilgrims, travellers, and merchants, all eager to contribute their accounts of faraway people and places; and as Mauro listens to their strange tales, his map begins to grow and take shape. In the process, the boundaries of his world are pushed to the extreme, raising questions about the relationship between representation, imagination and the nature of reality itself.

The Psychopath's Bible (a critical book review)

The Psychopath's Bible: For the Extreme Individual, is a book by Christopher Hyatt. Christopher Hyatt was an American psychologist and psychotherapist who wanted to be a philosopher instead of the philosophers. The description of this book goes:

In the most of the world, psychopaths have gotten a bad rap. That, of course, is quite understandable since almost all of the world's religious and social philosophies have little use for the individual except as a tool to be placed in service to their notion of something else: 'God,' or the 'collective,' or the 'higher good' or some other equally undefinable term. Only rarely, such as in Zen; in Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism; in some aspects of Tibetan Buddhism and Hinduism; and in some schools of Existentialism, is the individual considered primal. Here, finally, is a book which celebrates, encourages and educates the best part of ourselves --- The Psychopath.