Tao of the Tarot of Prometheus
1.
Horses thunder across the earth.
The earth roars like a bull.
Buffalo – the violence of their hooves tears the ground open.
Nomads follow the herds.
The intense, luminous beauty of Eve:
her buttocks are the sacred apples high in the divine tree.
Fire. Fire. Fire.
Fear and life of the nomadic tribes.
We sing the deep song of the journey –
the great bird descends from the clouds
and feeds the light in human hair.
2.
By the roadside the king is found.
A walled city grows from his head.
The sky above the city turns brown with busyness,
the dust becomes a sacred tree.
People hang from the tree like advertisements
for order and cleanliness.
All kinds of Romans rain from the sky
to tyrannize others.
Alexander the Great picks an empire from his nose,
so vast it defies comprehension –
drinking and raping women all the while.
It’s glorious.
The plague arrives, and the biker gang Satudarah crushes everything.
All’s well that ends well:
the shadow of eternal war once more falls
across the order of things,
and all inventions are forgotten again.
3.
Speak now, messenger,
for the monks' robes hang ready –
they wander like insects over the earth.
Beneath the great dead mammoth of Roman civilization
crawls an emaciated village dweller, brown and small.
The glorious sun stands like a young woman
above the paradisiacal land.
The cabinet collapses,
and the guild brothers begin to weave
the great tablecloth that will cover the world
when they are together.
The eternal printer –
his books suck themselves full of human flesh.
Rulers flail about,
while their slaves walk outdoors.
Freedom gets lost and hides in the printing press.
But reading? That’s not allowed.
Suddenly they want to know what’s inside a body –
explorers push through the rectum,
searching for the golden kidney stones.
Nothing is as dangerous as knowledge.
The soup of the Middle Ages still sits in the village square
and stinks as if all animals want to drown in it.
4.
The world suddenly collapses.
Gears roll across the earth and devour everything.
Great clippers roam to catch and enslave the Black man.
Missionaries are taken from their cages,
injected with holy water,
and fired from the coast with muzzles,
deep into the African jungle.
The great thinking head floats above the earth.
Kings and popes lie in their bathtubs
boiling with dark delight.
5.
The vision of Descartes:
"I walked in darkness, oh Lord.
Rid me of my animal nature
and offer my body to the blazing revolution."*
The council of saints in heaven –
God’s corpse falls upon the earth.
The child of man must be lifted
into the Virgin’s lap,
but the iron lobster of reason
already grips him.
Redemption through reason shows no mercy.
Scholars and inventors already play football with atoms.
The ancient mud-man becomes a machine belt.
And a train steams.
"I want to be a machine,
until the will of the screw is released
as a hailstorm of grenades
in a delightful, fertile gas war."
My angel has iron wings
and his eyes glow red with electricity.
7.
Then the illusion of the soul explodes
and turns into the graphic novel.
Photos devour things.
Indians quickly protect themselves
with a mouthful of ayahuasca.
Nowhere is there a more miserable singer
than the one melted into the radio.
Stories race ahead again
and film is born.
Now living in the jungle,
the downfall of civilization.
Film stars with glittering genitals
stagger through the cities.
Everything is important, everything must be captured.
Somewhere the very big bomb explodes
that will ensure eternal peace.
Cars climb Mount Everest
and many die on the way to the top.
Einstein lets his hair grow,
sticks out his tongue
at the subatomic subscriptions.
Children play with the Higgs boson
in an overturned playground.
Queen Wilhelmina parachutes
out of Prince Bernhard
and liberates the Netherlands single-handedly.
8.
The great net of voices
is the surprise in the land of paper.
Then the great horse at the end of time.
Bob Dylan sings during the great flood disaster
and raises money for Flipper.
Tied to an office chair
a mass of people boils to the breaking point.
Monkeys jump on tall buildings in Vietnam
and surprise the green-painted Africans
with new Albert Heijn shares.
Bound in loneliness
is the talking doll.
Mario Bros becomes president of America
and bans thinking.
9.
The world of the internet is more fun
than the real world.
Hands caress the distant soul.
Light devours everything.
There is only the music of films
set in Neverland.
All information is equally unimportant.
Stars fight underwater
for the highest prize.
10.
Life is conquered,
and the eternal light of truth
drowns out all doubters.
The eagle flies over the fields of the dead
and smiles comfortingly at the corpses.
"Everything is born from pride," he says.
Beneath the blue grapes sits God
and is still silent.
Death before death.
What is one, must remain one.
Nowhere is there deeper knowledge
than that of the light.
Prometheus 2.0: The Evolution of Human Knowledge
When the gods gifted fire to humanity, they ignited more than flames - they sparked the slow unraveling of our animal existence. The mastery of fire represented humanity's first great cognitive revolution, as we overcame our primal fear to harness nature's most transformative tool. This fundamental breakthrough made the subsequent invention of the wheel seem almost trivial by comparison, yet together they propelled our species forward.
The agricultural revolution marked our next quantum leap. By domesticating plants and animals, we tamed the land itself, exchanging nomadic wandering for permanent settlements. These grew into the first great cities along the Tigris and Euphrates, then expanded into vast empires. History witnessed an ironic twist when a small collection of islands, through its revolutionary political innovation - democracy - came to dominate these ancient civilizations. This Athenian experiment became the fertile ground where arts and sciences first truly flourished, later crystallizing in the millennium-spanning Roman Empire.
After Rome's fall, human progress entered a long intermission until Johannes Gutenberg's printing press shattered the silence. This invention democratized knowledge while mechanical clocks began segmenting time into measurable units - together restructuring human consciousness. The resulting explosion of ideas challenged religious dogma and birthed new philosophies as the world became increasingly mechanized and manageable.
The age of exploration shrank our planet, while the steam engine shrank time itself, birthing trains, industrialization, and fundamentally new social structures. Progress accelerated exponentially - humanity's ancient dream of flight became reality within mere decades of the Industrial Revolution's onset.
Visual representation underwent its own revolution: photography and film captured objective reality independent of subjective interpretation, making external image a core component of identity. Telecommunications - from telegraph to telephone to television - dissolved spatial barriers, creating unprecedented connectivity that internet technology would later amplify to near-ubiquity.
Today, as we stand at the threshold of the AI revolution, we face a profound paradox: we've built systems that can model and manipulate reality with unprecedented precision, yet find ourselves inhabitants of a world we control but scarcely comprehend. Our tools have become so advanced they're creating their own ecosystems - digital biotopes where human understanding lags behind our own creations.
This trajectory suggests our next evolutionary leap may not be technological, but cognitive and ethical. Having mastered so much of our external world, we now confront the more daunting challenge of understanding the inner worlds we've created - both psychological and digital. The fire Prometheus stole now burns in server farms and algorithms, presenting us with urgent questions about what it means to be human in an age of our own artificial creations.