Use Your Illusions

A Vigilante is just a Man Lost in

The Scramble for His Own Gratification.

He can be destroyed or locked up.

But if you make yourself More

Than Just a Man...

...if you devote yourself to an ideal...

...and if they can't stop you...

...then you become

Something Else entirely.

Which is?

Legend, Mr. Wayne.

The alchemists had two components to their philosophy. These were the principles of “solve” and “coagula”. Solve was basically the equivalent of ‘analysis’. It was taking things apart to see how they worked. Coagula was basically ‘synthesis’. It was trying to put the disassembled pieces back together so that they worked more efficiently.

These are two very important principles which can be applied to almost anything in culture. Recently in literature, for example, there has been a wave of post-modernism, deconstructionism. This is Solve. 

Perhaps it’s time, in the arts, for a little more Coagula. 

Having deconstructed everything, perhaps we really should be starting to think about putting everything back together.

Spiritualism was the natural state of human thinking up until the Renaissance and the subsequent 'Age of Reason' that grew out of it.

Our original way of seeing The World, was as a place entirely inhabited by spirits, where everything had its indwelling essence, where everything was, in some sense, sacred, including ourselves. 

The 'Age of Reason' changed all that. 

While it’s inarguable that Reason brought many great benefits, and was a necessary stage of our development, unfortunately this lead to Materialism, where The Physical Material World was seen as the be-all and end-all of existence, where inevitably, we are seen as creatures that have no spiritual dimensions, that have no souls, in a soulless Universe of dead matter…”

- Alan Moore