September bookings are open for tarot readings, archetypal life path readings and transmutational counseling. I am also available for event bookings.
This morning I woke up a little less suicidal than usual. When my spirit re-enters my body, it’s always rushing to assess how much physical danger I’m in. Bracing for impact, my mind races to form a list of what I can do to avert these dangers. “What dismal, impossible tasks must I face today?” my body asks before my brain has barely had a chance to catch up. And I almost don’t know what to do when that question has no answer. And in spite of rent being due in two weeks, today, the question was shot out into my bedroom and instead of bouncing off my ceiling and stabbing me in the stomach, as it usually does, it dissolved into little pieces through some force (or lack thereof) that I cannot name. There is a panic when I cannot find a shape for my mind to inhabit, especially not one that is familiar. My suffering is cozy, and I almost don’t know what to do without it.
A freedom has haunted me the last few days. A thick syrup of creativity and okay-ness holding me in place, satisfied as I move easefully and peacefully through my many artistic and magical endeavors. I stole a lick of the sugary ether that surrounded me and it made me brave, fueled me to step forward into some practices of metal smithing, drawing and sculpting that I think I always held in a secret room of my psyche, covered with some old tapestry that I’ve been told since childhood not to go near. I simultaneously felt myself alive and like I was lying. Believe long enough that you are not the divergent creative of your own dreams and it becomes cellular-level lore, sinister bedtime stories recited to your bones nightly masquerading as *queue adult voice* “this is how it is, this is how it works.” It takes time to learn to hear this voice and then, once you do, you’re in a war with it for so long, that it becomes your whole identity. If you aren’t living for, you have to be living against, right? But the magician knows the truth. The middle path. The secret third thing.
I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries about artists lately, white men artists to be specific, but magical ones. Alejandro Jodorowsky, H.R. Giger, David Lynch. Men who explore the deep unconscious, the unseen, shadows of humanity. I was looking at photos of David Lynch in his home, seeing him smoking a cigarette or drinking coffee in the mystical Los Angeles light, and thinking of his daily videos where he shares his thoughts. I was thinking about space and slowness and what feels like the luxury of ability to explore imagined places. And how the root of this ability is nothing but the freedom of the mind. In this, I felt resentment and rage towards my caretakers in my childhood who implanted so many limiting beliefs that I would spend a decade being domesticated by and then another decade seeking to decimate through my own ferality. Generally, I hold the belief that everything that’s ever made me, everything I’ve been through results in who I am today and so I do not seek to torture myself with regret. (I’m tortured enough.) But I do claim the responsibility of presence with the parts of my own incarcerated mind, and the grief of how hearty the indoctrination of abuse can be. We want to believe we are God, that we are so all-powerful that simply believing we can have more removes our chains. But that is a fallacy. Because to know we are God is to understand that we are all things. To understand we are God is to know that we are also our chains. This is the only key to unlock our freedom.
The path of Death on the Hermetic tree of life is the path of the Imaginative Intelligence. On this path, we become formless. As the structures around us crumble, we rush to seek safety in what we once knew to be sturdy but find it to be rubble around our feet. Our minds, which contain pathways of narratives like well-worn dirt roads, crave knowing. They desire ideas and people and places they can cling onto like a life raft when everything rumbles and topples and falls away. We want to know our decimation is over, a clear finish line before we mark a new journey, but it is never so cut and dry. There is no welcome mat to a new life with a greeting crew that lays out exactly where you are, pointing you in the sure direction of Away from Death.
We long for a shiny new car with a big red bow on top, but what we’re given are dinged, rusted pieces of scrap metal and an invitation to realize that we have the skills, ability and mindset to resuscitate it. What it will Be relies solely on the freedom of our imaginations, unbarred in the wake of the war of self. Maybe the welcome to our new way of Be-ing, our declaration of freedom, simply relies on acknowledgement of this truth of mind. A comfort with being formless without fear. To drink coffee in the mystical Los Angeles light or smoke a cigarette and consider a song or a quote or something you read in a book next to a rosemary bush, to exist—even for a moment—in a world with all of your own rules and none of theirs, this is the seed of freedom offered in Being Nothing in the company of Everything. And if you need a personal invitation, here it is.
Jillian Adel is a multidisciplinary artist, Hermetic practitioner and archetypal reader with her esoteric practice, Vague Intellectual Pleasure. You can book 1:1 Tarot and Archetypal Life Path Readings as well as Transmutational Counseling here. You can view and buy art here.
Her work lives at the intersection of the mystical, the intimately personal, and the philosophical. She utilizes energetic and emotional landscapes, archetypes, and alchemical processes of death, rebirth, and ritual, in order to observe and discuss the far corners of the human condition. Through configurations of paint, pastel, and poetic phrasing, she makes the subconscious conscious and discusses the unseen forces that move us. She has been featured by Philadelphia Contemporary and was a 2024 artist-in-residence at Can Serrat, Barcelona.