The Left Angle Cross of Wishes (Version 2)

Full breakdown

The first variation of Wishes projected laws and rules — 'wouldn't the world be better if...' You could call it the Cross of Utopia: the search for a better world, one built less on different rules and more on different values.

This is the most culturally threatening cross of all, ready to step past traditional values in search of something larger, transcendent — after all, it's transpersonal. We live in a time of the deepest stagnation of religious thought, and the deepest fundamentalism as a reaction to it — Christian fundamentalism, Jewish fundamentalism, Arab fundamentalism, Hindu fundamentalism, sectarian and denominational fundamentalism, all expanding. We're watching traditional religions and their old ways of operating come apart at a sharp turning point — hence this backward pull, this desperate attempt to hold onto old tribal cultures and old tribal values.

In Wishes, the tribal judge rebels against their own tribe: 'listen, this isn't so bad, we should do it too — and by the way, if we do, maybe we get UN funding out of it.' At the sixth line: 'well, that looks fine.' The wish to find a utopian value system starts with openness to other value systems — 'oh, that's interesting, we could take that on.' That's how religions get built.

As it happens, December 25th is also the birthday of Sol Invictus, the god of the Roman Imperial soldiers — born of a virgin, walked on water. Giving Christ the same birthday made it easy to tell the soldiers, 'we're not taking away your god, just putting a new coat on him — still Sol Invictus, don't worry.' So while Christ says love your neighbor, the worshippers of Sol Invictus go off to conquer their enemies — same god, different clothes.

In the first variation, caution was needed: the projected system of values could bring real discomfort into your own. Some people dream so hard of a better life that they end up living the worst possible one — one of the great paradoxes of being human.

If you're a tribal person for whom Allah, or Shiva, or whoever is central to your life, having someone with this cross nearby can feel like a nightmare — and yet these are the very people who wake us up: 'you know, this god and that god are really doing the same job, just under different names.' Karmically restless people — this cross, especially its second variation, keeps landing in the geometry where their openness to other values creates real risk in their own process. This is the Heretic, gate 5, so often burned for exactly this.