SnakeAppleTree
&
Estrus Album
&
Hollow Ones Tradition Book
It is personal.
Both of these arrived through my letterbox on the same day.
I pre-ordered the album months ago. I bought them both to celebrate my having completed a cycle of cycles, which is 7x7. You can understand the magickal keys involved. Because I am Virgo (Virgin - relates to Ostara) it means the 7 months after my birthday will be Springtime of 2027 (202 plus another 7 to provide 777).
Also, 27 is 3x9 and it is also 2+7=9, so there is another layer of a completion of a cycle (0-9).
At this time I am in the last half a year phase before that culmination (Spring 2027). I have an Autumn and a Winter to get through. The dark before Rebirth.
The two objects, read on their own marks, are a vessel and a window. The personal dates sit beside that reading. They do not write it.
The sleeve is a downward triangle with a cross at each vertex, the word ESTRUS inside it, and under the word a vesica with a small cross hung from its base. Tove Lo has said what the title is for. Estrus is an animal in heat: primal, mind and body wanting different things, wanting everything. She also called the record a lot of feelings and no solutions. The biological term is the fertile window, the days when conception is possible, and the anxious part of that window as much as the hungry part. The older word under it, Greek oistros, is the gadfly and the frenzy. The triangle points down. In the grammar this design is using, the downward triangle is water: chalice, womb, the receptive, the thing that takes in and makes. The vesica is the same claim drawn as a door, the overlap of two circles. A cornucopia is that shape under a harvest name, the horn that pours and does not close. Easter and Ostara are the calendar names for the door opening after a shut season. The sleeve does not say spring. It says the condition in which something can be conceived, and it refuses a cure. Three crosses do not seal the figure. An odd number generates. The flow is the content.
The book is the other figure. A square, corner crosses fixing the edges, a current named and then described as not quite a tradition. Its own text calls that current the living embodiment of romance: not a mood, a refusal of the flat world, and the insistence that the manner of a thing matters. The real lineage under the name is Romantic and Decadent before it is a game; the séance table, the borrowed rite, the poem used as a working, the sign redrawn in whatever is to hand. The square is the fourfold container: body, room, season, the fixed mark that holds. Hollow is the working word. A cup is defined by the space it has not filled. The corner crosses keep that space from leaking. They do not fill it.
The Hermetic triangle does not contradict the womb. In the real tradition the triangle is the ternary, sulfur, mercury, salt; the three principles out of which a thing is made, and the orders that took Hermes’ name used it as a working figure, not as a patent held by men. The upward triangle is fire. The downward triangle is water. The charge of patriarchy misreads the figure, and so does the defence that answers it on those terms. The ternary was always the generative grammar. The quaternary was always what generation had to pass through in order to become a body, a book, a year. The album wears the downward ternary. The book wears the quaternary. Stacked, they are one operation seen from its two ends: the fixed house, and the heat the house is shaped to receive.
What they say to each other is therefore plain. The square is not the wisdom. The triangle is not the wisdom. Wisdom here is the relation. A hollow vessel with its corners warded, set under a fertile window that offers feeling and withholds a solution. Solve the flow and you lose the window. Fill the cup in advance and you lose the cup. Romance, on the book’s own terms, is the decision to keep the manner exact while the outcome stays open. Estrus, on the sleeve’s own terms, is the biological form of that decision: a timed openness, contradictory, creative and sexual in the same gesture, and over when it is over.
The dates you gave are the interval this pair describes, not a second message. Forty-nine is seven by seven, a closed square of a number, a cycle completed and stacked. Virgo is the virgin in the old sense of the intact vessel, and in the season where that sign actually sits she is the harvest maiden, the sheaf, the cornucopia already cut and held; not the March dawn. Ostara is the other door, the one the sleeve points at and does not yet open. Between a September completion and a Spring seven months on there is only the dark half: Autumn as the storing of the horn, winter as the hollow proper. Twenty-seven completes by threes and by nines; it is a later seal, not this one. The objects do not promise the seal. They describe the half-year in front of it.
The book is the instruction for that half-year. Keep the corners. Stay hollow. Do not borrow a solution from a tradition that would rather be full. The record is the instruction for what the hollow is for. Not a mood to be cured. A window that opens on its own count; creativity and heat as one motion, a cornucopia only once there is something to pour, Easter only after the shut season has been kept. The dark before rebirth is not an absence of the triangle. It is the square doing the triangle’s waiting.
Hollow Estrus & SnakeAppleTree