THE MAP Quotes

“And yet, and yet; it is a strange dance that the Fool must learn as he encounters the Devil on his path. Like the serpent who offered Eve the fruit of knowledge, or Samuel who seduced Lilith away from paradise, all knowledge comes from darkness, and so we are drawn towards it. But darkness and evil are not the same thing. We go to the darkness willingly, so we can, as Cormac McCarthy wrote, “learn how to carry the fire”, but sojourn too long and we open the door to forces we may not be able to pry ourselves from. Indifference, doubt and scepticism form, as Kelly Braffet describes, the “logic that the Devil likes most”, to trap us into the conviction not just of the absence of evil, but more cynically, the non-existence of virtue. Thomas Aquinas rather beautifully defined sloth as "sorrow about spiritual good", for perhaps it is not that “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled is to convince the world that he doesn’t exist” (Baudelaire), but rather the far superior and more hellish of hoaxes, that God doesn’t either.”
― Dr Aisling O'Donnell, THE MAP: Archetypes of the Major Arcana

“Being pious is not the same as being true.”
― Dr Aisling O'Donnell, THE MAP: Archetypes of the Major Arcana

“Light is the in-utterable name of God; the YHWH form. It is the emotional life of a bee and the distance to Icarus, the farthest visible star. It is the finding of compassion amidst tyranny, the networked communication between trees, and the whale song. Light is woven through the gauze of grief and is “the limitless undying love which shines around me like a million suns” (John Lennon). It is what Catholic theologians called “the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable, the thing we cannot conceive” (John Chrysostom) . “Tell me, if you have understanding. What is the way to the place where the light is distributed?” (Job 38:4) And unable to answer, in dumb obliviousness, instead, we point at the Sun”
― Dr Aisling O'Donnell, THE MAP: Archetypes of the Major Arcana