Cosmic Midnight
It feels a little silly to be putting something as trivial as this out on the internet right now, living in the US during an acute recognition of long-standing racial injustice (and also, still, a global pandemic). Please don't misinterpret the brevity of this note: the tragedy of continued violence against people of color is worth more of your attention than this virtual gizmo. But this moment of increased awareness and activity doesn't change the fact that I'm ill-suited to write in depth on the topic. I need to do a lot more learning and work. That's the important thing, and I'm doing my best to stay engaged, listen, and contribute. If you're in a similar boat, some of the resources that have been helpful to me include 8 to Abolition, Campaign Zero, and Layla F. Saad's Me And White Supremacy.
Continuing to work through my list of unfinished projects, this week I returned to…the Gnostic Circle.
Now, as it turns out, there’s apparently a lot of context behind this diagram. But that’s not part of my history with it. No, somehow I stumbled across it — probably because there’s an Enneagram in it, which I do read about in some quantity — and then this baroque thing sat on my fridge for a while:
Some time later, I happened across this Tumblr which is, as the kids say, a big mood. And lo and behold, amongst the other white-on-black esoterica, my old friend the Gnostic Circle. Something about the idea of overlaying as many circular systems as possible just clicked with me, even though half the text was unreadable and I had no idea what it was meant to mean.
And so, in the same way that I’ve enjoyed redrawing posters and movie titles over the years (like this striking book cover!) I struck out to redraw the Gnostic Circle.
And then I stopped. This was still a few years back, and I’d started out with a Python drawing library, and…it just wasn’t going anywhere. Trying to render uncommon glyphs like the zodiac symbols had sent me down a deep rabbit hole (Pango and Cairo, anyone?) and the project just wasn’t proving to be fun or satisfying.
It sat dormant for a while more, until I picked it up again this week. I’ve been trying to use these unfinished projects as chances to learn new programming languages, new crafting techniques, and so on, and I already have another project in the works that draws things with Python, so this seemed like a great opportunity to try something different. I scouted around the different JS drawing frameworks, since that’s the language I’m most fluent in these days, and eventually found Pts. I’ve definitely not wrapped my head around everything it can do, but author William Ngan definitely captured my interest with his desire for a different way of thinking about drawing with computers. And sure, why not, let’s do it in Typescript while we’re at it? (As bandwagons go, this seems like a pretty useful one to jump on.)
So I typed a bunch, as you do, and came up with… T H I S.
I’m pretty happy with this! (Code lives here.) It fulfills my yen for something that Looks Mysterious, and I can just imagine it projected through haze onto a wall or floor at a party. Some high and/or low points of the process so far:
- going through an incredible amount of rigmarole to load the one font in Google’s collection that actually contains the zodiac symbols (rather than falling back to bright purple emoji) and then getting the webfont → Sass → CSS → webpack chain to behave. (Protip: you can specify specific text or character subsets to load via the Google webfont API, and their demo pages do not load the default subset — they load more.)
- learning that there are at least two symbols for Pluto, although I could only find the more boring one in webfonts
- trying to decipher text that’s been multiply photocopied, scanned, digitized, and so on. For a brief moment, one of the words in the outer ring was almost “SODOM”…or “MOOSE”.
- getting to type, and say, “SESQUIQUADRATE”
In the end I’ve been very impressed with Pts — I think it’s something I’ll return to in future projects. I was also surprised how much of the original diagram I didn’t transfer to this digital experiment! I have ideas for a few more things to add…like drawing in squares and sextiles and cosmic axes, and having the planets traverse the Enneagram…but I think I’ll digest this version for a little while first.
The rotations? They mean nothing!