“What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?”
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: 125 - The Madman
To have something inscribed on your skin is daunting to me. But after several years of contemplation, I chose to get a tattoo that I designed. Here it is:
Thanks to Krunikan Leima and Andrea (Instagram @parallelismart) for the professional service and great experience. The craftsmanship is great and I'm very happy with the result.
Many of my friends were kind enough to ask - and listen - what the tattoo is about. This blog post is the long version about it, but I’ll save you the trouble and give you the short version first.
White is good, black is evil, grey is the decisions between these two.
The small round part with black and white is the human element.
The large star-shaped part is a higher spiritual element.
The thin line is the connection between the human and the spiritual element.
The connection can be - hopefully - maintained by doing the right decisions in life, the ethically ambiguous gray area.
So, the tattoo reminds me that it is up to me to maintain a connection to a higher good.
However, a host of meanings and ideas are living in this symbol, drawing from philosophy, poems, psychology, history and even lifting weights and submission wrestling.
Please bear with me through this text, as I’m trying to paint a picture with multiple layers, and the linear format of text allows you to only see one thing at a time.
The Undertone
I’ve noticed myself seeking for spiritual experiences and knowledge. This mostly happens through art and music, as I’m more of an individualist, rather than a person seeking a spiritual community or a creed to profess.
I’m about to publish my second collection of Finnish poems this spring. It starts with a poem like this:
-My life-
To be
Free and strong
That is what I desire
As said, the tattoo reminds of my freedom to choose. To be free and to be strong means to have the pre-requisites to choose the right thing. Without them, the battle is lost. But, more than freedom or strength is needed.
The Elements
The song Elementa by the band CMX is one of the keys to understanding my tattoo. The following lines are my translation from the original Finnish lyrics.
The song begins:
And what is freedom?
Where is the line drawn
A brute from a gentleman
A silent member of the mob?
Now down from the mountain
Steps down the alchemist
A prince from the banks of Nile
With him the tablets of the law
So I’ve claimed that I seek freedom. But what does that mean? Freedom to do anything I wish? Freedom the become a slave who doesn’t take responsibility for myself? No. I don’t believe I’m looking for that kind of freedom. However, when seeking something so profound the trip is going to be a… trip. I’m not going to get away by shying away from uncomfortable topics, be it emotional, ethical, practical or anything else.
The verse continues:
Archangels, five of them
See these from the heavens and
In man their creator
And so they speak
Uriel wants beauty
Michael wants truth
Raphael wants love
Gabriel wants humility
Here four out of five archangels are named. The divine values - or virtues - of beauty, truth, love, and humility are named. I’m tempted to say, love would be the highest good, but even love is not the good itself.
Thus the four archangels are represented in the four beams of the star in my tattoo. This reminds me that nothing but good is good, and even the highest ideals can fall short if you follow them blindly. Only the middle of the star represents the good itself, with its reflection seen in one of the halves of the smaller part of the tattoo.
Then the chorus kicks in:
And of these the morning star alone wanted freedom
A place where to say “Maybe I don’t want to”
The planet and the earthly realm where all are tried
To their measure
And of these the morning star alone took freedom
A place where you don’t say “I serve”
Lesser than good under the vault of heaven
To their measure
The fifth archangel is shown here. The Morning Star, Lucifer, Satan, the Eternal Adversary, the one who chose to oppose God. This is an ancient story of mankind and I believe this is a truth we have to embody in our lives.
Be it in the Bible or John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the conundrum stands: we are here in this world, and we have the capacity to influence what happens. More importantly, we can make things better or worse. It is extremely difficult to organize yourself in such a way that this freedom is used properly.
In the tattoo, the thin line from the star to the two-colored round part - the Planet - is the fifth element, the Luciferian freedom. Without the freedom to choose, we’d be slaves to our master. Choosing slavery is a path that eats you up, diminishes you and ultimately devours you, thus sacrificing the good you could have manifested. …but nowhere it is said that freedom brings a lesser burden than being a slave.
When used wrong, the power of freedom turns evil. This is the painful matter I haven’t yet fully realized. The black part of the tattoo reminds me of this possibility to turn evil, and that it might be smart to consider it to be also half of your potential, not less. Underestimating here, I feel, would we a mistake of epic proportions.
The song continues:
Take this away from me
This vessel of human flesh
Take away this vessel
Heavy chalk, burning
In deep waters do not succumb
Ignite into flame
Plant your feet against the ground
Vanish into air
The horrible realization that the divine - and adversarial - elements reside inside us is more than enough to want to do away with everything. Getting rid of one’s life is an option many have chosen. I can’t say I’m the most resilient person in this regard, but I’ve been to some decently dark spaces. Luckily, I’ve emerged from them. As the song suggests, I can say with some confidence, that I’ve not succumbed to the deep waters.
The concept of fire is introduced here, and that is strongly present in my tattoo. The largest symbol is the star, and for my purposes, I’d say stars are made out of fire. For the past 3-5 years, I’ve become more conscious of my freedom and strength to influence things and I’ve tried my best to not make things worse.
Long hours of self-reflection, conversations, and arguments with my conscience and a tiring vigilance against personal lies have been needed, but I feel like I’ve succeeded to a decent degree. This success has manifested with an increasing sense of flow states, meaning and purposefulness in my life. I have a gut feeling that these intimations might be akin to the old idea of “becoming flame” that spiritual masters seek. Who knows, but I know it feels right, deep in my gut and heart.
Here the chorus would kick in again, before the final verse of the song that goes like this:
The stage is here, it won’t shy from us
The stage is here, it won’t fear our will
The stage is here, it won’t shy from us
The stage is here, of our tears it won’t break
To me, my tattoo is this "stage of life" in a symbolic form. I’ve gone through times of alienating gloominess and I’m tired of that. I don’t want that anymore. Now I’m on a path that energizes me, I’ve found meaning and purpose and I’m not going to shy away from the ethical challenges that going out into the world will inevitably put in front of me.
The lyrics of CMX open many paths to depth psychology and esoteric thought and I’m sure that in time my tattoo will grow rife with these kinds of meanings. But to wrap up this section I want to draw attention to a common structure of great stories. In great stories, the hero often faces an insurmountable challenge that he can’t overcome. He needs to travel the world to discover his own strength and then face the challenge once more to emerge victorious.
An archetypal way of laying out this story is traveling the four corners of the world, the four cardinal directions, with each of them representing different qualities. The four corners of the world are also the four beams in the tattoo, with the fifth being the lifeline of the hero, who travels the world to find himself.
In my case, it looks like my journey is mostly an introverted one, but since all is one and one is all, I don’t think it really matters if you discover yourself in the outer world or the inner world. In any case, our conscious experience is firmly squished between these two, both being mysterious, enticing and horrifying.
Our Crisis
The “we” in the above sub-headline is the modern man, a child of industrial, scientific and spiritual revolutions of the past 300 years. I find myself always returning to the passage 125, The Madman in Friedrich Nietzsche’s book The Gay Science when I’m trying to make sense of the world we live in. In the passage, he prophesied in a semi-poetical way the oncoming horror, confusion, and hope that would follow from the cultural developments in the Western world of the 19th century.
For two thousand years, Christianity grew and exerted its powerful ethical world view. In the heart of this world view was the search for truth, yet to be realized consciously. The fruit of this growth process was what we now see as modern science, which saw its first real steps 500 years ago, as renaissance and Enlightenment were about to sweep over Europe.
What Nietzsche realized and tried to convey in the passage was that as scientific thought would grow out of Christianity, it would turn against its mother. The result would be the demolition of the old way of thinking, the Death of God so to speak.
Possibly the most powerful line in that passage is the quote:
“What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?”
I have no issues believing that Nietzsche had the nose for what was about to come. The cosmic proportions of his language are well-matched by the immense progress and degradation of the human condition in the 20th century, be it magnificent inventions or World Wars.
Furthermore, it is most noteworthy that the line is posed as a question. It is not a statement, it is an open-ended question, that remains to be answered. Or, it has been answered by our close ancestors. What has been left for us to build on is a library of unspeakable horrors and an existential vacuum that is so easy to fill with hasty and badly thought out ad hoc ways of living.
Right now, as I’ve been trying to make sense of what is going on, what is filling this vacuum, I’m sensing an interesting development. First, there are two older factions. Of these the first one is the people who put their faith in the objective power of science, disregarding the human element. In the history of science, these might be called positivists, realists or objectivists, but overall the message is the same: there is a world out there regardless of us humans and figuring that out is the thing we should do.
The second faction is the subjectivists, the relativists and the idealists. To these guys, the first and foremost thing to focus on is the human experience, up to the point of professing that you can be whatever you decide to be, and the outside world is unreal.
I believe that Nietzsche’s thinking, that actually preceded the first group by 30-80 years and the latter group by 50-100 years was an attempt to get past both of these. Interestingly I feel that this change has started to happen recently. If you look at different areas of human endeavors, be it science, sports or even food and nutrition, it looks like the objective and the subjective are starting to converge.
For example, as insignificant as it may sound, in the strength training world, the concept of monitoring your own experience through specific techniques has started to gain popularity. Another, more tangible idea is that in the scientific world the concept of pain has developed a lot, going from a machine-like, objectivist understanding into a deeper acceptance of psychological and social factors.
So, what I’m sensing is a development where warring ideas are starting to mingle and create something new and worthwhile. This makes me hopeful about the future and the human spirit. In this way this makes me feel that the heavy burden of responsibility and freedom put on me by the tattoo is not only in my head, but something happening in the real world also, simultaneously.
The Solar Chain And Religion
I got first introduced to the passage about the madman when I was a teenager. In my early twenties, I had a short-lived video game project with two friends. I had a story in my head that went like this:
There’s a planet connected to a star by a mystical chain-like energy. The planet has many kinds of kingdoms and natural realms. There are three main characters. One is a man, whose mother chose to be sacrificed to a cult that oversees that the chain-like energy is maintained and order preserved. The second is a great warrior who lost his wife in a great tragedy. The third one is a woman who lost her baby son, likewise in a great tragedy.
The story starts as a mysterious angel falls from the sky, losing its wings. In the beginning, the angel sacrifices a village full of people and regains one of its wings.
Three main characters start hunting the angel, traveling around the world, following the angel's bloody steps wherever they go.
Finally, they confront the angel in the same cathedral where the main hero’s mother was sacrificed. As the battle rages on, the angel reveals its true power. The party of three is smitten down, the sacred chain broken. The planet itself collapses as the chain disappears in space. The angel's second sacrifice is complete, he regains his second wing and returns to his home.
As you can see, Nietzsche’s idea of a planet chained to a sun, humans chained to a specific ethic, took a symbolic form in my mind. This connection to a higher ideal and the apparent break from it has gripped me for years. The theme of connection is the key here, and that is related to the concept of religion. The word “religion" comes from Latin. “Re-“ means to do again or repeat, “ligare” means to bind. So it could be said the “religion” means to bind again to something.
This idea of re-connection has intrigued me for a long time. I’m very glad I found Jordan Peterson, through whom I got into Carl Jung and similar psychological thinkers who draw from symbolic and mythological materials. It could be said that Jung, who studied Nietzsche extensively, was very concerned about this monumental break in the Western culture. But unlike Nietzsche, who was betting that mankind could create its own values after the fall of the old way of living, Jung and others started to look deeper into the past.
Through studying these writers and experimenting in my own life, I’ve started to believe that the right way of going about life for me is to try to regain this connection to the higher power. Instead of creating my own values, I need to discover them. This happens through “traveling the world”, by putting myself in challenging situations in my life, be it in my body, mind or spirit, be it alone or with others.
How To Build A Connection With The Highest Good
Imagine a pyramid. It's split horizontally into layers of the same thickness. On the top, you have the highest form of consciousness, intellectuality, science and similar. Below that philosophy. Then literature, followed by religion, mythology and symbolic thinking. Further below are play, imitation and in the bottom, there’s simply action.
This pyramid is the path animals and consciousness has developed evolutionarily speaking. For example, some animals are capable of play and maybe even some forms of religious thinking, but higher than that, we are talking about human business.
However, the pyramid is also a harmonious way of being in the world. Now, in the Western world intellect and science are often seen as the highest and most valuable faculty of the mind. While this is often a comfortable way to think it has an unsavory side too. The idea that the intellect or the purely objective world view would be the key to everything turns things into hell. If you look around and pay attention to the most powerful stories in our popular culture, you will often find a man with vast intellectual capacities aiming for the destruction of all.
This is the power of the intellect when it is - falsely - crowned as the king. Intellect dubbed as “seeing things clearly” or “shining a light on something”. Not that far from the idea that the one who rebelled against God and was cast into the abyss was Lucifer, the light-bringer.
So, I shouldn’t be duped by the fact that intellect is at the top. Instead, the true way of living is maintaining harmony between the levels, so the pyramid stands tall and can last for ages.
Here is a translation of a poem I wrote to illustrate the idea:
-The Secret of Life-
1 scientific thought requires
10 philosophic thoughts require
100 stories require
1 000 myths require
10 000 intuitive hunches require
100 000 imitations require
1 000 000 singular acts
Deeds in real life
So it’s useless to wait around
For action not to be
Always needed, and ultimately
The eternal mystery of our lives
So, action to me is the base of the pyramid out of which everything flows. Living a life filled with challenges, art, physical training, poems, writing, wrestling (with friends and with God. …or is there a difference?), eating, sleeping; being okay with some things being intuitive, some inexplicable and very few intellectual or rational; that seems - for now - to be the way to go.
The Tattoo On My Body
The last thing to cover is the placement and position of the tattoo on my body.
It’s on my left arm because I write with my left arm. The black part, the evil part is also the ink of my pen, as most of my poems and personal writing is about trying to work through things, seeking clarity and calm.
The star is closer to my heart. This quote by Jordan Peterson puts it well:
"Whether the gods are inside or outside makes very little difference to whether there are gods.”
As I’ve been exploring the world within and without, I’ve started to split to the outside and inside a little meaningless. Therefore I’m not terribly interested in talking about “where” these powers are. In my case, I spend a lot of time self-reflecting and that’s where I’ve gotten my greatest rewards.
The sharp tip close to the wrist is like the tip of a pen - and a talon, fang or a blade. I’m by nature a careful, but also a very disagreeable. This reminds me that I can be very sharp, be it in writing or otherwise, and what comes out first - unless I have my act together - is black.
So, that’s what I can tell you about my tattoo now.
And as a final note to myself, the heaviest and simplest message of my tattoo to me is that there is no single way of life, thought or action that allows me to forego my own responsibility in choosing what is right.
Thanks for reading!
P.S. Check out Instagram @parallelismart if you are interested in the artist’s (Andrea) work!
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