Among the seventy-eight cards of the Sola-Busca tarocchi, engraved in Ferrara around 1491 for a Venetian patrician, one trump depicts an armored man holding an infant over a small fire. The card is named Nerone. The historical Nero burned a city; the designer, who elsewhere shows an exact command of Plutarch and Livy, attached the emperor’s name to a scene that belongs to a far older cult. Peter Mark Adams, who spent years with the deck, reads its whole program as Saturnian, a private theology for an elite that had recovered the pagan past and preferred its darkest room; and Nerone, in his reading, is the memory of an operation.
An operation is something done, repeatedly, by someone, to some end. The oldest image of Saturn, god of time and of the harvest, is a mouth. Hesiod has Kronos swallow each of his children as it is born, so that no successor can arise. The sickle he carries is the one he used on his own father, and it is the same sickle that cuts the grain. Time, sacrifice and harvest were one figure before they were three words, and the figure was never benign.
The Tophet
The deck’s designer had a specific memory to draw on. In 310 BCE, with Agathocles of Syracuse at the walls, the Carthaginians concluded that their god had abandoned them because the rich had been substituting bought children for their own. Diodorus records the remedy: two hundred children of the noblest families were selected and burned, and three hundred more were volunteered by parents anxious to be seen. The bronze image of the god, he says, had hands that sloped downward, so that a child placed on them rolled into the pit of fire. Plutarch adds that the mothers were required to stand by without weeping, and that a paid flute-player drowned the sound.
For two thousand years this could be read as Greek slander against a commercial rival. Then in 1921 the precinct was found. At Salammbô, on the edge of the old harbour, excavators opened a field of urns packed in layers, each holding the burned bones of an infant, sometimes two, sometimes a lamb in place of a child, and above them stelae carved with the sign of the goddess and the name of the god to whom the offering was made: Baal Hammon, whom the Greeks called Kronos and the Romans called Saturn. The argument over whether every urn was a sacrifice or whether some were natural deaths given a ritual burial has run for a century and will continue. The precinct itself settles the larger point. Carthage built a walled enclosure for the burning of children to Saturn, maintained it for six hundred years, and enlarged it as the city grew rich. The Hebrew scriptures knew the same institution under another name: the Tophet in the valley of Hinnom, where the kings of Judah made their sons pass through the fire to Moloch, and which Josiah defiled so that no one could use it again. The valley’s name, Gehenna, became the word for hell.
The modern reflex at this point reaches for the word metaphor: a system that consumes its people resembles an altar. The Carthaginians held no such view of what they were doing, and neither did the kings of Judah, nor the Ferrarese scholar who put a burning child on a playing card and named it for an emperor initiated into the mysteries. They understood sacrifice as a transaction with a real counterparty, and they understood the counterparty to be hungry. That understanding is taken here at its word.
The economic account, and where it stops
The economic account of extraction is correct as far as it reaches. A warehouse schedules its workers to the edge of collapse and no further. A lender profits from the gap between a wage and a life. A platform has measured, to the minute, when a tired woman on a bus can no longer put down her phone, and sells that minute to whoever bids highest. Shoshana Zuboff calls the raw material behavioral surplus, the data a person sheds beyond what the service needs, refined into predictions and sold to those who wish to intervene. None of these parties need meet. None need know the myth. Each follows a local appetite, and the appetites fit together into an arrangement that leaves the source with less each night than she needs to refuse it the next morning.
The account explains a great deal and stops at the excess.
It leaves unexplained why the arrangements that harvest most efficiently are so often decorated with cruelty that serves no balance sheet: the humiliation rituals of the workplace, the deliberate uncertainty of the schedule, the interfaces engineered to produce dread as well as engagement. Greed is satisfiable; a glutton stops when full. The systems in question continue past satiety, and their operators show no wish to stop them. The account leaves unexplained the secrecy that surrounds the harvest’s deepest tier, and the fact that wherever a court record or a leaked archive has opened that tier, it has involved children. It leaves unexplained why the men who run such arrangements bind one another with the possession of each other’s crimes, where other men would use contracts, so that the entry fee to the inner circle is an act that can never be confessed. And it leaves unexplained the fascination, the sense reported by survivors and investigators alike that something in the room wanted it, that the appetite being served exceeded the appetite of the men present.
The economic account ends at the wall of the precinct. What happens inside requires a different vocabulary.
What remains
Adams’s method with his deck applies here: describe the ordinary explanations exactly, and see what they leave standing.
Theft is a single act; the thief takes and is gone. The harvest is a standing arrangement whose whole design is that the source survives to produce again.
Predation kills, eats, and is for a time satisfied. The harvest keeps its source alive, and calm, and grateful where possible; it prefers a herd to a corpse.
Greed wants the yield. What the record shows at the deepest tier wants the act: the burning, the terror, the specific and irreplaceable quality of a young life’s attention as it is taken. No accountant asked for that. Someone else did.
What stands after these three are described is a standing arrangement in which living beings are kept alive so that what they produce can be offered up, continuously, to an appetite that belongs to none of the operators. That is the definition of sacrifice, and the traditions that have looked at it longest agree about the shape of the counterparty. Gurdjieff, through Ouspensky, says that mechanical humanity is food for the moon, that involuntary emotion is a crop grown for a cosmic tenant. Robert Monroe, returning from his journeys, reports an economy in which human suffering is harvested as loosh, and love is the finest grade. The Hermetica, older than both, says that from the moment of birth the human being is taken possession of by daimones arrayed under the stars, who lie in ambush in the marrow and govern the earthly government through the body; Hermes called that government heimarmene, fate. The Carthaginian priest would have recognized every one of these. He was feeding the god’s hunger, in his own understanding, and buying with the purchase his city’s survival, his family’s standing, and his own place in the order that endures.
The control structure is sacrificial. Its profit is the tithe. Its operators are a priesthood, whether or not any of them could name the god, and the initiation that binds them is the one that bound the Ferrarese elite Adams describes: identification, through a taboo act, with the most ancient god who bears the sickle. No operator stands outside the circuit he runs. The man who feeds the mouth is fitted, turn by turn, to a world with a mouth at the end of it, and the seal that binds him is the first installment.
The economy of the altar
Seen as an altar, the structure’s parts arrange themselves.
The enclosure, the narrowing of what a population can perceive and remember, is husbandry. A herd that knows it is a herd is difficult to keep; a herd that believes the fence is the edge of the world tends itself. The Lock keeps the source calm.
The wars, the terrors, the engineered catastrophes that no rational interest fully explains are the burnt offering. A population in fear produces the crop in its highest concentration; a population in mourning produces it for years. The crop is emotion held back from its consequence. Fear that becomes preparation and grief that becomes mourning are spent by the one who felt them; the altar feeds on the charge that is handed a new object before it can act, and a feed exists to supply the next object. When an event is followed by no visible profit and a decade of managed grief, the questions are what was harvested, by whom, and whether the men who arranged it were paid in money or in something older.
The child is the purest yield. Every tophet, from Carthage to the precinct in Hinnom to the deepest tier of every modern network a court has opened, arrives at the same place for the same reason. An untrained attention is undivided; a life not yet spent is the whole of a life; a terror never felt before has no callus. The systems that harvest at scale take adults in bulk and children at the altar. And the child is the future at its point of highest concentration, the successor in potential; whoever takes custody of him reaches backward into the parents and forward into everything the lineage would have become. Kronos ate his children to keep his throne, and a ruler who feeds on the generation that should replace him buys the present another interval. The god of time is paid in the one coin that extends a reign.
The taboo act is the seal. Adams shows how the Sola-Busca invited its owner into a self-fashioning that inverted every courtly norm, and how that inversion functioned as loyalty, a bond stronger than any political allegiance because it rested on shared participation in what could never be admitted. Blackmail is the modern form of the same seal. The archive of compromising material is the initiation register of the priesthood.
The harvest also reaches past the body. The Shattered Vessel follows what happens when a person is broken at the threshold and made to yield something beyond attention, which is access: an opening held open for an intelligence that could otherwise find no passage. Sexual and reproductive capture belong at the center of the subject, because the erotic threshold is the widest port a human being has, and the traditions that practiced sacred sexuality knew what could come through it in either direction.
What is left
Return to the card. Nerone holds the child over a small fire, and the fire is small because it need not be large. The operation is what leaves the child and goes elsewhere.
The deck’s designer engraved a question, and it concerns the remainder. A field harvested by a farmer grows again; the farmer’s whole art is to leave the field able to bear. A field harvested by Saturn is left able to feed, and it learns, over generations, to feed him without being asked: to schedule its own exhaustion, to defend the fence, to bring its children to the precinct and stand by without weeping while the flute plays.
The tired woman on the bus is the last, mildest, most diluted grade of the same crop. The same mouth waits at the end of the same circuit, and it is not full.
One thing the altar cannot take, because it is never produced and so can never be offered, is what a person has made of themselves and keeps: judgment, coherence, the capacity to refuse. The priesthood knows this, which is why the enclosure exists to prevent its formation. How such a capacity is formed at all, inside the precinct and under the sickle, is the question The Work takes up.
Further reading
See The Extraction Regime, The Parasitic Ecology, The Shattered Vessel, and Loosh and the Emotional Harvest for the fuller treatments. The synthesis sheets Extraction and the Broken Return, Trauma Opening and Initiatic Return, and False Light and the Capture of Appearance take the argument into particular cases. The evidence is gathered at The Parasitic Ecology, The Sacred Union, and The Pharmakon. Reading paths through the archive: Why does every operation return?, How does capture work?, and How does money become a permission system?.
References
Adams, Peter Mark. The Game of Saturn: Decoding the Sola-Busca Tarocchi. Scarlet Imprint, 2018. On VIII Nerone, pp. 107–108 and fig. 59; on the deck’s theology, ch. 8–9 and Conclusions.
Diodorus Siculus. Library of History 20.14.
Plutarch. On Superstition 171C–D.
Kleitarchos, in the scholia to Plato’s Republic 337A.
Leviticus 18:21; 2 Kings 23:10; Jeremiah 7:31–32.
Xella, Paolo, et al. “Phoenician bones of contention.” Antiquity 87 (2013): 1199–1207; and the reply by Schwartz et al. in the same volume.
Hesiod. Theogony 453–506.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs, 2019.
Ouspensky, P. D. In Search of the Miraculous. 1949.
Monroe, Robert. Far Journeys. Doubleday, 1985.
Corpus Hermeticum XVI, 15–16, after Copenhaver.