I suppose you're wondering about our final card. He is the Devil, and what a handsome Devil he is.
Baphomet (avertus), the Goat of Mendes, Idol of the Templars.
He sports the head and hind parts of a goat, with a human arms and torso bearing, I might say, a rather magnificent pair of breasts, with no less impressive a set of male genitals lolling between his shaggy thighs.
Huge bat wings spread from his shoulders to stir the Air.
In his left hand he holds a flaming torch, pointed down to the ground to symbolise the diabolical Fire.
His right hand is raised in mocking benediction, in reflection of our sixth card, the Pope, but his palm is branded with a circle quartered by a cross, the astrological symbol of Earth.
Thus, he controls three of the four elements; only the forgiving Water is absent.
And upon his brow is inscribed the pentagram, symbol of the secret fifth element, inverted.
He squats upon a broken granite altar, his talonned feet crumbling the stone lip.
Before him stand a man and woman, naked save for the tell-tale fig leaves that cover their modesty and mark their transgression: the eating of the forbidden apple. They are chained by the neck, through an iron ring set into the altar, to the Devil's foot. They are Adam and Eve, who are also the Tarot deck's Lovers, bound to the Adversary by the chain of Original Sin.
But look closer: the iron circle is crowned with horns, and at its base a cross: thus formed the sigil of Mercury, the horns, the ancient symbols of wisdom; the cross, the base matter of the world and hence Mercury, signifies mind over matter, the triumph of intelligence.
Above the Devil's head, between his twisted, onyx horns, appears the Black Sun, as though in parody of Hathor's crown which we saw earlier.
In alchemy, the hermetic tradition teaches of two suns: the hidden sun, the true sun, the light of the æther, forged of the Philosopher's Stone; and another, the apparent sun made of profane gold, whose consuming fire leads us to call it the Dark or Black Sun.
The Black Sun, you see, is our sun, for we live in the fallen world.
But also, in Egyptian myth, when in the night Ra would pilot the boat of the Sun down the Nile to be born again next morning, the serpent Apophis would lay in wait for him and attack, swallowing the Sun. With Day and Night inverted, it fell to Set, the Egyptian Devil, to rip open the serpent's belly, recover the Sun and save the World.
Appropriately enough, our Devil's four supporters are the Princes of Hell.
Here at the top left, Abbadon (avertus) girt for war, in his black armour, armed with lance and flail.
To the top right, the shrunken miser Mammon (avertus), his gold stacked about him.
To the bottom right, Beelzebub (avertus), Lord of the Flies, devouring all before him, children fed into his flaming maw.
And at bottom left, the Old Serpent Leviathan (avertus amen), his head snapping at Eve's heel, his great body wrapping up around and back surrounding the entire card.
This card is edged in red.
And what a curious reading our cards would be, if we used them for a divination; what strange fortune they have told. For we started with violence, our noble king threatened with treachery, but through strength and moderation we travelled to reach the place of contemplation and thence knowledge of heaven and hell. But in the end have we not gone to the devil? The truth will set you free, they say, but the devil tempts you with the knowledge of good and evil and you end up in chains.
This is a story about the holographic universe, about information being the same as entropy and entropy being the same as time and time being the same as freedom.
I had a dream of Exatrens.
I stood on the inner surface of an impossible world, an endless, horizonless landscape that rose to infinity beyond sight in all directions; and a sky that fell into forever. A Dyson's Nightmare: a Worldsphere wrapped around a Black Hole. The homeworld of the dragons, the demons, the d'Toyz.
"One should expect," wrote Freeman Dyson in 1959, "that, within a few thousand years of its entering the stage of industrial development, any intelligent species should be found occupying an artificial biosphere which completely surrounds its parent star."
Of course, Dyson would later insist that any such object should rightly be called a Stapledon Sphere, citing Olaf Stapledon's Starmaker as inspiration for his theory.
And he would dismiss the idea of a solid sphere surrounding a star as completely impossible.
For even if it were not enough that any material it could be made of would instantly be crushed to powder by its own weight, and at the same time smashed to flinders by the interstellar winds no longer deflected by the protective heliosphere, the sheer mathematics of the object mean that the gravity of the sphere completely nets off to zero at every point inside the sphere… so you would fall straight off the inner surface into a black star that wanders unrestrained about the interior.
Whatever would Newton have made of that? Releasing his apple and seeing it fly away up into the sky, lost into the maw of the ever-eating collapsar.
So the entire sphere spins, generating artificial gravity in the broad Ouroboros valley that runs up and over the hole and back again; and diabolical engines drawing endless trains run perpetually on looping tracks so that their centripetal weight might counteract the crushing pressures of the sphere's own mass, engineered wormholes allowing their orbits to intersect without interruption; while field pressors, super-string anchors and deep physics equations shackle the black star to the real matrices. In short, it works by magic.
The transhumanist Robert Bradbury, one of the great thinkers on Fermi's Paradox, theorised a structure of nested Dyson spheres composed of nanoscale computers, each layer absorbing energy from the stellar object within, using it for their computing processes and then passing it on to the next shell out: a matrioshka brain, named for the Russian matryoshka dolls. The dream of the Omega Point cults and Singularity worshippers: a singular computing megastructure, with the raw processing power to reorder time and space or synthesise entire alternative universes, running simulations of living human minds in whatever virtual reality they can imagine. Cities the size of galaxies. A sepulchre for all the dead of eternity. A Heaven. Or Hell.
So the shifting sands of Exatrens, the dust and rock, the weathered boulders, the ridges and cols, saddles and passes, hills and mountains, so many mountains rising higher and higher into the faraway, are all sheathes and layers of just the innermost shell of the grand computer matrix; all micro-colonies of millions of minds, a billion souls beneath my feet as I stand on the surface and look out across the empires of the endtime.
We all live on surfaces.
The skin of Newton's apple, proportionately, is thicker than the skin of the world on which we stand, protected from fire below and void above by a wisp of air and veneer of dust.
M-Theory suggests that all matter, every point-like proton, electron and photon, is itself a surface, only seeming point-like because of our point of view, the only intersection of our reality with its: two surfaces sliding through each other.
The same theory propounds the very origin of the universe as a result of collision between two hyper-dimensional surfaces.
Imagine the time before time. Nothing of our universe exists, only the static powers: vast, endless, formless, drifting serene. And then. The collision. The beginning of all beginnings. Two forces touch. And explode. Time, newborn, cries out. Ripples spread, waves overlap, cancel out, reinforce: an interference pattern.
All that we perceive is extrapolated from the patterns made by ripples in the higher dimensions; like the hologram extrapolating the three-dimensional image from its flat surface. This "holographic universe" is a hollow shell, a black surface etched with the pattern that we only interpret as our four-dimensional world.
In 1975, the future Lucasian Professor of mathematics, inheritor of Newton, Stephen Hawking, demonstrated that energy is radiated from a black hole by means of quantum mechanics. But this created a paradox, since information in the form of particles of matter-energy could fall into the hole and then be radiated away as random energy, leaving their information somehow trapped inside.
As a consequence, a black hole must have the highest possible information density of any object in the universe.
Hawking's contemporary and rival, Jacob Bekenstein of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, expanded on these theories to show that not only is there a limit to the information that can be contained in any finite region of space but also that that limit is set by the smallest sphere that contains it. In other words, all the information inside a black hole can be known from its event horizon.
You have to see the symmetry: if a black hole contained the universe, then it would be the holographic universe: the black surface of the event horizon would be the hollow shell and all that there is to know would be written upon it.
Look up into the abyssal sky of Exatrens and wonder.
We live on the knifepoint of time, the eternal surface of now, between the dead past and the fluid future: the moment of choice.
"Determinism" is the belief that given any one arrangement of physical space, the laws of physics determine that there is one and only one possible thing that can happen next; that each shell, each surface of "now" is completely determined by the one within and before.
If that's true, then even the atoms that make up our brains, the patterns of electrons that describe our thoughts among the neurons and axons, are just one "arrangement" and physics determines what will happen next: what we think, what we do is determined by simple physical laws and any experience of choice is an illusion generated by the chemistry, our "will" no more than along for the ride.
If we truly have no choices then what of morality? How can it be fair to judge anyone by their actions? Yes, yes we would have no more choice about whether to punish or not and the punishment itself would be inevitable – but suppose you believe in a god outside of the laws of space and time: how could it be moral for such a god to set up a deterministic universe and then judge people to heaven or hell based on actions they cannot control?
But that can't be right, can it?
Sir Arthur Eddington, the British physicist sometimes called Einstein's representative on Earth, coined the phrase "The Arrow of Time" in 1927, observing that time only went one way.
That this was not in any way a trivial observation was far from obvious, and yet all the known laws of the universe, from Newton and his apple to Einstein's relativity to Schrodinger's wave equation which governs Quantum Mechanics, all are symmetrical in time. The universe should, by all accounts, run backwards as easily as forwards and yet, to even the most casual observer, clearly it does not.
Drop a glass of water and it smashes into pieces; the pieces never leap back to your hand to reform a glass.
Or more generally, things go from more ordered states to more disordered states.
This is entropy, the scientific measure of disorder, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics: "In a closed system, entropy increases". Or as it has been satirised: "Things Can Only Get Worse".
In a real sense, then, time is entropy, and the Arrow of Time is the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
And you can see why entropy must increase. There are few ordered states and many disordered ones: any change at all from an ordered state is far, far more likely to go to a disordered state than to an ordered one; but a disordered state is still more likely to go to another disordered state than back to the ordered one.
But Claude Shannon, the American mathematician, engineer and cryptographer known as "the father of information theory", defined information to be the same thing as unpredictability. The more predictable a thing is, the less information you require to describe it. If something is ordered, a glass, say, it is easy to describe with little information; if it is disordered, a thousand shattered shards in a spray across the floor, then you require much, much more information.
Clearly, by this definition, information and entropy are the same thing.
Therefore "entropy increases" means later times must have more information than earlier times, and this would be true. From the state of the Universe as it is, we can infer the state of how it was before. Each moment of time contains the memory of its history, nested within each other like the concentric shells of Bradbury's matrioshka brain.
And therefore it is impossible for determinism to be true.
For if there were only one possible outcome from any configuration of the universe, then the later times could have no more information than the earlier. And yet entropy increases. Information increases.
Entropy, then, is our freedom.
And the price of freedom is death.
There are no stars in Exatrens.
Professor Richard Dawkins, in his book "The Ancestor's Tale", says:
"It's hardly surprising that we see stars when we look up into the sky at night, because stars are a necessary prerequisite for organisms that see."
He means that the elements necessary for life – carbon, nitrogen, oxygen – are only created through nuclear fusion, and thus only in stars.
So the evidence of our own existence requires that there must be stars, even if we do not see them, for we are made of stardust.
Look up into the sky over Exatrens, the sky above and within, and there is nothing, nothing but the lurching drop into the abyss of the hole.
But even in a world without stars, still Richard Dawkins would know they were there, not as a blind believer knows his watchmaker gods are there, but as a rationalist who has inferred the stars' existence from the very fact that we are here at all.
We live in the Stelliferous Era: the Age of Stars.
But in a hundred trillion years the Stelliferous Era will come to an end as the last stars go out. Every sky will be as Exatrens' sky.
In 2011, in his "Wonders of the Universe", Professor Brian Cox, the physicist, musician and science-prophet, went there too. He presented the Heat Death of the Universe as an inevitable consequence of Entropy.
That's bleak, very bleak, and not a little controversial – it is by no means a certain thing that the Universe will end that way.
In a nice simple universe, the Big Bang scatters matter in all directions and gravity tries to pull it all back together. If there is enough mass in the universe, then eventually gravity stops all the bits from flying apart and pulls them back into a Big Crunch, a reverse Big Bang that ends the Universe as it began in a fiery cremation of all matter, energy and time; if there isn't enough mass then things just expand into the cold and black forever.
Astonishingly, the amount of matter in the Universe – the stuff we can see and the so-called dark matter that we have to guess must be there from the way the rest of space moves – is right on the borderline between being just enough to stop the acceleration and not quite enough to stop it going forever.
But, whatever happens, that expansion should gradually slow down and slow down under the pull of gravity.
Except that's not what we observe. The expansion of the Universe actually appears to be accelerating.
So we don't live in a simple universe; and until we have any idea what the "Dark Energy" powering the acceleration is, all bets are off.
The law of entropy, that Second Law of Thermodynamics, means – says Professor Cox – that nothing is forever.
But that's not right, is it.
Not even nothing is forever.
This universe exists as the intersection of matrices: space and time; matter and energy; observation and awareness.
In Quantum Mechanics, in the Copenhagen interpretation, all possible outcomes of a quantum event occur simultaneously. They call these "superposition states": multiple realities, all stacked up – super-positioned – on top of each other, and time is a process where our observation collapses this into a single state that we see, without necessarily disturbing the others.
If our awareness, our continuous observation of our own existence, our long reiteration of "I think therefore I think I am", if that means anything then it means we can and do choose the quantum superposition states that we observe.
We can, with our actions and choices, change the Universe, even it is only the universe that we ourselves are aware of, passing like ghosts along one path through the myriad observable superposition states.
Quantum Mechanics tells us that particles can just happen, appearing out of nowhere in matter/anti-matter pairs. In our busy universe of stars and matter they almost always collide and vanish again. Almost always. But who knows what the rules are for a cold, empty universe, trillions upon trillions of years after the last stars. Our universe began in a single point of time and energy bursting into existence: everything from nothing. Perhaps that is how the next universe will begin.
Not even nothing is forever; there is always, always something new.
A Worldsphere wrapped around a Black Hole, a singularity about a singularity. All of time and space written on the surface of the event horizon; all of human life resurrected in the sands of the sphere; the beginning and the end of history implicit in its existence.
I had a dream of Exatrens; and I never woke up.
