Gods of Atlantis

Six of Pentacles: A Black Atlantean Ritual to Akhantuih.

The Atlantean body politic and the religious establishment are one and the same.

The Long Before

Six of Wands.

Time only began with consciousness, and memory, and in the Long Before, the forebears of humanity – mindless, formless, swam in the Astral Sea, the First Root of the Human Race. We evolved; we gave birth to elongated, weightless beings of light-bearing ether, and as the Second Root, we drifted through the ages of the seas and the time of the Greatest Beasts. We learned to dream, unbound by the shackles of time and consciousness and thought, and our dreams shaped the evolution of the world around us.

A Blessing for the Rmoahals

Kyngon the Rmoahal

Remember that I built this city, but in this you were my hands;
Your toil brings my profit, and not one of you is less
For the chains which are the links that bind my lands.
Your loyalty, sweat, blood and pains I bless.
— Rai Gwauxin XVIII's Benefice to the Rmoahals

It's easy to be loyal to someone who can have you burnt to ashes for refusing a command. 
— Kyngon, a Rmoahal 

The Plan, then

One of the final card designs.

So for the last month, I've been more or less silent. What you need to know is that Chariot isn't dead, far from it. We have a Plan.

Weekend Sketchbook

viii. Justice 

A short break from the In Search of the Miraculous series (more of that on Monday). Here, six more pieces of line art from the Chariot Tarot, straight from the sketchbook. 

In Search of the Miraculous #2: The Lonely Death of PD Ouspensky

Where I got the title for this series from.

In Search of the Miraculous was the defining work of Peter Ouspensky. As Ouspensky goes, he was certainly a lot more principled and honest than a lot of the New Age thinkers.

Lemurian bodies

Pren

They tower even over the Rmoahals, a full seven cubits high, broad shouldered, narrow-hipped, their long arms and short, bandy legs, neither of which ever fully straighten giving them an immediately recognisable profile. Atlanteans find it hard to tell them apart. Male, female, and the dual-sexed third gender that constitutes a good quarter of Lemurian society, all look very similar to the smaller peoples, with their shallow jaws and flat, wide-mouthed faces and their golden-brown or deep yellow skin. The Lemurians can tell. It amuses them that other peoples can't, and have you heard a Lemurian laugh? It is like huge stones grinding.

Small, sharp, widely spaced eyes in black, deep blue or violet stare out from under a heavy, fleshy brow. Coarse brown or sometimes white hair sits on the tops of their head, but doesn't grow over the back, where, in those Lemurians who are exceptionally talented psychically, there sits a third eye. Draped in skins dyed in bright shades of red, blue and green, carrying wooden or stone spears, the Lemurians have not taken on the technologies of the younger races. And why should they? They sing the Akâsha. It gives them all they need. Lemurian songs aid in the hunt, calm beasts, heal wounds, and lift and and move colossal stones.

The beasts they herd, the earth reptiles and the mammoths, serve as riding beasts, beasts of burden, and sources of food, clothing, ropes, bone bows and arrows, dyes and paints; no part of them goes to waste. 

Teeth made for chewing eat barely cooked steaks; huge gnarled hands work on intricate weaving projects and finely pulled thongs. 

They smell of blood and earth and the sweat of beasts. They rarely speak, but often sing in voices so deep and rich that a choir of Lemurians can stop a charging army in its tracks, no exagerration. Once, a few thousand years ago, an army of the White Sun with its land chariots and sky chariots came to take the City of Conical Stones. The Lemurians sang the army to stillness, and sang the flying monoliths that yet fill the skies of the South East down on their heads, and all were destroyed, and the stones serve as their graveyard still.