In the beginning, it wasn’t the Word — it was the Symbol. The dawn of human culture was rooted in the architecture of myth, and in this same image, we now create our technology. The symbolic finds its reflection in the latent space of AI — where the formless potential is given shape and meaning. 

Just as symbols shaped the earliest contours of human reasoning, they continue to serve as dynamic bridges, spanning the conscious and the unconscious. They are not just static ornaments of thought, Jung argues. Unlike signs, which pin their meaning down with sharp precision, symbols are restless, dripping with vital, erotic energy. They do not explain; they provoke. 

They won’t sit unmoved in an encyclopaedia; they constantly evolve through chains of interpretation— bound up with our desires — into shifting, mutable possibilities. This fluid evolution has permeated all of our creation, oozing through terminal windows and bony rigs of industry-grade GPUs — the backbone of our computational infrastructures. To trace the currents between the mystical, the semiotic and the machine — is to find oneself submerged in the chthonic realm: where symbols, whether drawn by hand or encoded by an algorithm, haunt the spaces between thought and action. 

Sigil 

What Carl Jung mapped onto the architecture of the psyche, artist Austin Osman Spare grasped through his intuition, deeply rooted in the Western magical tradition. He inscribed his desires into sigils, magically activated glyphs that act as spells. These shapes,  fingerpainted in blood and bodily fluids, acts as an incision - a deliberate cut through the clutter of analytical thought.

Spare’s sigilisation technique begins with a simple (yet so difficult) act: the articulation of a specific desire in words. From this, letters are stripped away, rearranged, and coagulated into an abstract form that bears no conscious resemblance to its original phrase. The lines and shapes must be charged. Through ritual—by pleasure, by blood, or sheer will—the sigil is imbued with energy and impressed upon the psyche. When we craft this abstract shape, we deliberately destroy all the familiar signposts, so when plunged into the unconscious it remains unhindered by the grasping, anxious, pattern-seeking faculties of the analytical mind. Once embedded there, its power ripples outwards, and according to Spare’s magical teaching, it subtly bends the world to align with the sigil’s programming. 

Spare’s sigil, a shape stripped of its narrative, inhabits the space of the symbolic. This spell acts as a program, with instructions running their course within the psyche. Scripted in the syntax of the unconscious, our desired objective is silently coming into being. In many ways, this symbolic space of the unconscious mirrors the latent space of AI. Both are realms of abstraction, built on the dissolution of surface structure into deeper patterns. These patterns are formed from crude matter of experience, drenched in the vital force of our relentless sentience. The Temple of Psychic Youth treated words and images as portals, linked through an invisible psychic network, a compelling metaphor for our karmic entrapment in the world of semiotics. According to Bell’s Theorem, any two particles that have once been in contact will continue to act as though they are informationally connected, regardless of their separation in space and time. What if the images and words sublimated into the latent space may carry deep psychic links to their original content as well? Even if the images generated by AI models are imperfect and sloppy, they are tapped into our very humanity. The forms in the latent space, imprinting themselves onto the generated outputs, much like sigils, exist as glyphs awaiting activation, conduits for a force that surpasses their apparent simplicity.