Writing Characters Of Gold

The highest possible spiritual level is the element of gold. This represents perfection. Gold is the most precious of the metals known to the ancients. As such, its presence had the greatest influence on their behaviour. Gold is very much the fulcrum around which the world turns, and for this it has long been worshipped.

In the ancient world, gold represented the Sun, the life-giving force. The Sun was also worshipped by all of the ancients at some point or other, most notably in the Roman cult of Sol Invictus. This was due to the realisation that if the Sun did not return to the world after the Winter Solstice then all life on Earth would perish.

In an alchemical sense, gold represents God. The uppermost pole of the alchemical spectrum belongs to God, and the raising up of any of the lesser elements is to imbue them with God’s energy. Characters of gold, then, are divine. Characters of mercury might be messengers of God’s will, but characters of gold are direct expressions of it.

Viewed metaphysically, a character of gold is every bit as important to the world as the light of the Sun. Without the moral rectitude afforded by the character of gold, the human race would regress into a pre-civilised state. We would go back to being animals, God’s light being entirely absent. The characters of gold, and their messengers in the characters of mercury, are the force that imposes moral order upon the world.

The real power of the element of gold is its subtlety. Being perfect, it need not use any force or coercion. It is already in accordance with the Will of God, and consequently it acts without resistance. Its power is exemplified in the fable of Aesop, in which the Sun and the wind compete to induce a man to take off his coat. The Sun wins, because its gentle power does not inspire resistance.

The essential characteristic of characters of gold is radiance. Whereas the characters of silver are learned and the characters of mercury brilliant, the characters of gold radiate a divinity that comes from a consciousness that is perfectly attuned to the Will of God. They are wise – a quality that is not appreciated by all, although all benefit from it.

This radiance will set all of the other characters in their presence at ease. Being around a character of gold will incline the anxious to calmness, the angry to peace and the lustful to temperance. The ambitious characters of mercury will switch to enjoying their lives rather than exulting themselves. This is the power of the character of gold – to create peace.

In contrast to the characters of iron, who dominate with physical force, and to the characters of silver, who dominate with psychological force, the characters of gold dominate with spiritual force. They have no need to twist other characters’ arms or trick them with contracts; they influence the world by living in accordance with the Tao. This causes other characters to look up to them.

A character of gold will be one that other characters tend to speak about very fondly. This is a reflection of the generous personal warmth that the characters of gold exude. The character of gold will recognise the gold in others. As such, it will feel good to be around them.

The greatest motivation of the character of gold is to alleviate the suffering of all sentient beings. This is true to a lesser extent of the characters of mercury, silver and copper, but only the character of gold represents the perfect expression of this. The character of gold wants for nothing more than an end to the suffering in the world, and they are happy to put themselves second to this goal.

Gold is the most malleable of all metals. This softness is one of its prime characteristics. A character of gold will seldom be prickly, bad-tempered, abusive or impatient. If directly insulted, they will be extremely slow to take offence or to show anger. This may not work out to their advantage when other characters, interpreting the situation through their own base lens, come to think them weak.

This malleability is such that, in the physical word, one gram of pure gold can be beaten into a sheet one square metre in size. That the tiniest piece of gold can create something that shines so brightly captures the essence of metaphysical gold. The smallest amount of it is potentially enough to completely upend the order of the world.

Concomitant with this softness is a reluctance to cause divisions or separations. However, gold is still a metal, and still has enough of an edge to cut if necessary.

The ability to expand itself beyond the capabilities of the other elements is reflective of the ability of characters of gold to see the bigger picture. A character of gold will never be motivated by short-term instincts. They have perfected themselves to the degree that impulses not in accordance with their true will no longer arise.

Characters of gold, despite their glorious radiance, are entirely capable of being destroyed by the envy of baser characters. Characters of iron can run a sword through them; characters of silver can destroy their social standing. In no sense are characters of gold superheroes with special powers. They are simply people of a higher spiritual frequency to all the others.

A character of gold can be of any age. Young or old doesn’t matter because alchemical gold is an expression of the spirit. As long as they are good, they are gold. In practice, a character is more likely to be of the gold if they are either very young or very old, because the former will not have been corrupted yet and the latter will have entire lives to mine for wisdom.

In practice, it will be almost impossible to portray a character of gold with true accuracy if the author themselves are not of the gold. This doesn’t matter, as long as the reader can be induced to believe that the character of gold is perfect.

Perhaps the closest example fiction has seen to a character of gold is that of Michael Valentine in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land. A modern real life example might be Jiddu Krishnamurti, an ancient one Socrates.

A character of gold in your story might be a legend that informs your story world, rather than an actual character that appears and speaks lines. They might be the legendary founder of the state in which your protagonist resides, someone whose perfection has created a space for an entire nation to thrive.

A character of gold might otherwise be someone who only makes a fleeting appearance, and that to change the direction that a character or the story is going in. Like Gandalf in Lord of The Rings, they appear to move the other characters in the direction of absolution.

Characters of gold have warm feelings towards characters of all of the baser elements, but they have a special fondness for the characters of mercury, who are their messengers. Characters of gold are often in opposition to characters of silver or below, on account of that the latter are frequently acting under the influence of baser instincts.

This article is from Viktor Hellman’s The Alchemy of Character Development, the sixth book in VJM Publishing’s Writing With Psychology series. This book will show you how to use alchemy to create deep, realistic and engaging characters for your creative fiction.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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Clown World Chronicles: Who Is The Great NPC?

His eyes are black dots peering lifelessly out from a pallid grey face. His nose is nothing more than a triangle; his mouth is nothing more than a straight line. Hairless on crown, hairless on face, he casts a ghoulish and nightmarish figure. He is the Great NPC, one of the Younger Gods of the Clown World pantheon.

NPC stands for Non-Player Character. It’s originally a Dungeons and Dragons term, and it refers to characters who are played by the Dungeon Master and not by one of of the other players (who play PCs, or Player Characters). With the rise of video gaming, NPC came to refer to a game character that was controlled by the computer.

In either case, NPC came to be understood as a metaphor for an apparently human being that had no mind of its own. The main characteristic of NPC behaviour is that it is extremely predictable. Having no mind of their own, NPCs don’t have motivations, intentions or aspirations above that which their controllers imbue them with. They are every bit the programmable machine.

An NPC has been so completely programmed – whether by the television, by their schooling, by their religious indoctrination or by peer pressure – that they have no original ideas of their own. Everything they say, and everything they think, is simply repetition of something they had been programmed to believe.

The NPC can never question the mainstream narrative. They are incapable of making their own truth judgments. Any time they are asked a question, they respond with what the herd thinks. If the herd wants to zig, then the NPC will say that it’s time to zig. If the herd wants to zag, then they will say that it’s time to zag.

Being so dumb, the NPC is prone to paralysing bouts of cognitive dissonance, something which is heavily mocked by Clown World denizens in meme form. At maximum intensity, this cognitive dissonance can cause the NPC to suffer an NPC Error, which is when the NPC’s central processing unit is overwhelmed by the demands placed on it and crashes.

Encountering an NPC can be a terrifying experience if one isn’t used to it, akin to encountering a zombie or something else that isn’t human. Like a Terminator, one can never be sure that they’re not about to turn on you, pitilessly tearing you apart for a reason only their controller understands. Not being in possession of a soul, the NPC cannot be in possession of empathy.

Fortunately, NPCs are harmless in most cases, at least when it comes to direct violence. The real danger is that their mindless repetition of programming can lead to the normalisation of inaccurate ideas, which can lead to harmful consequences. If the television can program enough NPCs to believe something, the dead mass of their bleating will penetrate into every corner of society, causing everyone else to believe that thing too. If that belief is wrong, people will suffer.

It isn’t easy to tell if any given person one encounters is an NPC (as has been discussed at length here, determining an NPC from a conscious person is far from straightforward). So it’s usually necessary to rely on one’s intuitive sense of whether there’s anyone home. An NPC can say any number of things that hint at deep thought and intelligence. But all of it is mere programming.

The number of NPCs in the world appears to be growing larger. One of the characteristic phenomena of Clown World is that the divine spark within us all has begun to weaken. If this spark weakens enough, a person no longer has the will to do good things in the world. At this point, they will simply drift through life on the waves of social fashions. If uninspired by the divine, Wojak falls down the Fundamental Axis, and declines into an NPC.

All NPCs are avatars of the Great NPC himself, the Younger God of the Negative Pole of the Fundamental Axis. He is a reminder of what can happen to Wojak if he falls under the influence of the Merchant. The Great NPC hates all freethinking and all questioning of dogma. If the Merchant is the owner of the Clown World plantation, the Great NPC is its overseer.

The Great NPC is the god that represents the power of the mindless masses. His ultimate goal is to turn the entire world into NPCs. The reason why NPCs get angry when conscious people disagree with them is because the NPCs are trying to intimidate those people into silence. The Great NPC wants the entire world marching to a single drummer, too afraid to break step.

In this sense, the Great NPC is fundamentally opposed to Pepe, the Younger God of the Positive Pole of the Fundamental Axis. Pepe’s role in Clown World is to break down the cancer with spontaneous humour and good cheer. His meme magic is the antidote to NPC thinking, because NPC’s can’t understand it. Much of the cultural warfare in Clown World boils down to shitposters loyal to Pepe taking on normieposters loyal to the Great NPC.

This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.

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Writing Characters of Iron

With slightly more spiritual energy in them, characters become characters of iron. This occurs when someone starts to value things other than simple pleasure. A character of iron has developed a sense of honour, which means that they have identified cowardice as an impurity and have sought to rid themselves of it.

A character of iron is tough. Iron is used here as a metaphor for that which endures. The nature of iron is to resist the wear and tear of the outside world. A man or woman of iron is one who takes a beating but keeps on moving forwards. An iron horse is another name for a steam train; an iron fist is what a boxer is said to possess if he regularly knocks out his opponents (or an iron jaw if he is hard to knock out himself).

Iron is yang energy applied to the raw physical.

Physical discipline marks out the character of iron. They are fit, strong, well-trained. Physical pain and deprivation do not trouble them. If anything, they raise the spirits of the man of iron, who knows that his capacity to endure it raises him above the other softcocks.

The spirit of iron was represented in antiquity by Mars, from where we derive the term ‘martial’. Mars was the Roman God of War, the physical expression of the masculine. Usually, Mars was only invoked in the presence of men. This means that if your character of iron is female, you will have to do more thinking to make her believable.

More esoterically, characters of iron are about order in the physical realm. Not only have they imposed order upon their own bodies, but they are also willing and able to impose order upon the physical world. The essence of iron is the kind of physical dominance possessed by an alpha chimpanzee or gorilla – the sort that makes weaker characters avert their gaze.

Iron became popular on account of that it was capable of keeping a hard, sharp edge. This hardness is characteristic. Whereas the softness of the characters of lead and tin sees them give way in stressful situations, the characters of iron hold fast. Being sharp, they are more dynamic than other characters. As such, a character of iron is particularly useful for getting a story started.

In the same way that iron is useful on account of that it can be made into tools, characters of iron are useful in the sense that they can achieve things. Characters of lead are too lazy and characters of tin too hedonistic. This means that characters of lead and tin tend to get order imposed on them by characters of iron (at least physically).

The archetypal profession of the character of iron is soldiering. The art of soldiering is all about making oneself hard like iron, and bearing tools made of iron to destroy one’s enemies. In practice, there are many types of men in the armies of history, but the men of iron constitute the most successful among them. The others are either too precious or too dull to truly excel in combat.

In your story world, a character of iron could also be a bouncer, a police officer or a professional sportsman. Anything where the prime objective is the imposition of physical order upon chaotic elements is the realm of the character of iron.

In principle, there’s no reason why a character of iron in your story can’t be female. In fact, the rarity of it might make for an especially interesting character, one that was less cliched than a male warrior. Red Sonja of the Robert E. Howard tales might be the best example of this.

Commensurate with their higher level of spiritual refinement, characters of iron have immense physical courage. A true character of iron will not back down from any threat or physical challenge. Like the Gurkhas of Nepal, this physical courage comes from a heightened sense that physical death is not the worst possible thing. The merely brutal men are more likely to come from the passionate realm of tin than the disciplined realm of iron.

There is a flipside, however. Iron is brittle, and it will break instead of bending. Whereas the character of silver is just as happy moving backwards as forwards, the character of iron tends to be stubborn and bull-headed. This is a good quality when they’re receiving a cavalry charge, but it’s a bad quality in peacetime, when it tends to lead to unnecessary fights and arguments.

In a sense, iron represents the archetypal primal masculine – the warrior and the hunter. It reached its apogee in the ancient world with the invention of iron weaponry, which easily defeated weapons and armour made of softer metals (let alone wooden spears and bone clubs). Iron is that which penetrates and pulverises. It dominates physically, but in turn it gets dominated mentally and spiritually.

Other characters might look down on the character of iron out of the belief that that they are vicious. The characters of iron don’t have the sense of chivalry possessed by the characters of copper, much less the sophisticated moral sentiments of the three highest elements. Consequently, their readiness for physical conflict makes them appear threatening to the others.

It’s true that characters of iron can have a pronounced dark side. Their physical superiority gives them the opportunity to get away with a variety of acts of cruelty, brutality and savagery. Although they are at their best in the fire of war, when the guns fall silent the head tends to become noisy. The effect of trauma on a character of iron can come to mean that they devolve into a character of tin or lead, and come to express dark energies.

The most sinister side of the characters of iron is perhaps expressed sexually. The man of iron is the typical rapist, rape being very much the order of things in a state of nature. The man of iron despoils women as much as he despoils the countryside. He might not be as impulsive as characters of tin and lead, but neither is he motivated by a desire to end the suffering of all sentient beings.

The character of iron is capable of great cruelty on account of what is known to Elementalists as the Conceit of Iron. This the name given to the fact that the character of iron tends to be physically dominant, and that it’s easily possible for them to confuse this physical dominance for the Will of God (i.e. to mistake their ability to force something on others with their right to do so). If a character in your story suffers from this conceit they are capable of anything.

On the other hand, characters of iron are capable of their own great virtues. Few are as loyal as the character of iron, for better or ill. A true man of iron, feeling no physical fear, can sit happily in a foxhole under artillery fire, knowing that such an environment would destroy all of the softer characters. Other characters might be able to outsmart them, but they can’t simply scare them off with a direct assault.

The real value of the character of iron is that the space they win through their courage creates an opportunity for others to grow, and perhaps then to achieve some of the higher positions on the spiritual spectrum. Following this, it may be that your character of iron is an elderly warrior, or a chivalrous one with a bit of copper in them.

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Why Stuff Is Worth Less Than VJM Publishing

Many New Zealanders were surprised last week by reports that the Stuff news portal at www.stuff.co.nz was worth less than one dollar. How could it be possible that our foremost media portal, which employs hundreds of people, has a lower net value than a ramshackle outfit like VJM Publishing? This essay explains.

Stuff has a world Alexa rank in the top 4,000, and was ranked 7th in New Zealand at time of writing. They get hundreds of times more traffic than VJM Publishing does. They have been legitimised in most people’s minds as the “mainstream media” and, despite being shit, are considered to be “proper” journalism.

So how can they make less money? The simple answer comes down to who owns Stuff and what they have bought ownership for.

The VJM Publishing strategy is not to churn out vast numbers of shitty articles, with clickbait headlines, about vapid celebrities, in the hope of tricking some pleb into clicking on some more clickbait in the form of an advertisement.

No wonder advertising revenue is plummeting, if that is the business model.

VJM Publishing doesn’t make money from spamming Google ads through every page or by having banks of them at the bottom of every article like Stuff does. In fact, we don’t make any money from advertising revenue – we make it from selling books. Every page on this website has a set of links to our book sale pages on Amazon and TradeMe.

Making a living selling books is tough, but it’s possible. The trick is to produce material of a high enough quality that it promotes and advertises itself. This is the secret to ranking well in the Google algorithm, because that algorithm can estimate a page’s quality by measuring the responses of its readers. If the readers tend to click away quickly, it’s probably a low-quality page, and vice-versa.

This is a different business plan to that of Stuff, but we are in fact a publishing company, not an advertising seller (or reseller). As such, we compete on quality and not on volume.

This company operates under the logic that if we can provide quality articles about esoteric subjects and alternative psychology, as well as intelligent political commentary from an alt-centrist perspective, that this will give us an edge. As long as this edge leads people to become aware of our books, some people will buy them, and we make profits.

All of this sounds so obvious, that the question has to be asked: why doesn’t Stuff do similar?

The first thing is to look at who owns the New Zealand media: essentially it’s owned by international banking and finance interests. This was demonstrated by us here at VJM Publishing, in an example of the kind of journalism that the mainstream media will never give you.

These international banking and finance interests don’t care if they lose money from Stuff. They gain something of far, far greater value: control of the narrative. Thanks to having control of the narrative, they can normalise all kinds of things that are in their benefit. In principle, every article on Stuff has been calculated to suit the agenda of its owners.

By directing Stuff to constantly cry and scream about racism, those owners achieve several objectives.

The international banking and finance interests make enormous profits from mass immigration. Not only does every new immigrant push the price of housing up and generate one new mortgage account, but their cheaper labour also pushes the cost of running a business down. On top of all that, their presence destroys the solidarity of the host nation, making it easier to rule over. Win-win-win.

The major opponents to the mass importation of cheap labour are the native working class. They lose the most heavily as they don’t tend to own houses, and they tend to sell rather than hire labour. As such, the mainstream media makes a great effort to paint these people as ignorant bigots who oppose mass immigration out of nothing but pure hatred.

It has to be understood that the mainstream media stokes up hysteria about racism for money. Not only does it generate clicks and traffic, but it also normalises the idea that mass immigration is normal and that anyone objecting to it is evil. Multiculturalism destroys the ability of the host nation to resist the predations of the international banking and finance classes – and the latter know this intuitively.

By directing Stuff to fill space with crap about Meghan Markle, they also achieve several objectives.

Foremost of these are wasting people’s time and conscious awareness on shit. If the mainstream media informed people about issues that directly impacted their well-being, it would agitate them. This might lead to chaos, which is bad for business. Much better to have a passive population who can be milked for profits without protest.

The best thing for business is for the populace to be induced into maximum docility. Perfection would be a herd of consumers that only get excited when the next product is released. So the mainstream media is directed to fill their pages with fluff pieces about irrelevant people. Meghan Markle, who has no connection to New Zealand at all, is the ideal subject.

All of these objectives serve one greater meta-objective: to gain control over our minds. Whoever controls the mainstream media – otherwise known as the apparatus of propaganda – controls the minds of the people. They control what the people hear, what the people think, what the people consider normal. Effectively they control how the people react to every stimulus that is put before them.

It’s an enormous power, perhaps the archetypal modern expression of what Elementalists call silver magic.

In summary: the international banking and finance interests who own the mainstream media are happy to lose money from it as long as they gain control of the narrative, because this confers a great deal of power. The elites run Stuff as a loss-leader to capture the attention of the masses in the same way that supermarkets run chocolate specials as loss-leaders. The losses from it are written off against greater profits elsewhere.

VJM Publishing, by contrast, is run as an actual business, whose mission is to provide quality information, forecasting and analysis in exchange for money. As such, we have to maintain a net worth above zero.

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