“They are here. They have always been here.”Les Fermiers, book I
What every tradition knows, and none dares to say together
What if we were not at the top of the chain, but one of its links? An apiary, watched by those who harvest its honey. Les Fermiers (The Farmers) is a trilogy of essays in speculative cosmology, currently published in French: a map that gathers what separate traditions have each described in their own language.
The Atanor, the 24-card tarot, is its object. Not a weapon. Not a promise. A mirror.
A farm needs no jailer when the livestock hold the bars themselves.
Just above our layer of reality live beings who feed on what our emotions produce. They do not come from elsewhere: “They are here. They have always been here.”
They are neither cruel nor kind. They look at humanity the way one looks at an apiary. The traditions have given them a hundred names: Archons, Qliphoth, parasitic entities. The book simply calls them the Farmers.
IAn Initiative
IIAn Isolation
IIIA Pride
IIIIA Mystery
VAn Insight
VIA Danger
VIIAn Affection
VIIIA Labor
VIIIIA Judgment
XA Chance
XIA Strength
XIIA Question
XIIII Block
XIIIIA Renewal
XVA Success
XVIA Suffering
XVIIA Hope
XVIIIA Tranquility
XVIIIIA Blindness
XXAn Alliance
cardSilence
Look closely at their costumes: these are the figures of the 21 cards.
Every figure in the Atanor is a Farmer: the one who harvests the state its card is named after. That is why a card says “It is said of you”: it shows what is being taken, and by whom. It gives you no power over him. Only sight. Each portrait opens that Farmer’s page (in French).
Meet the 21 Farmers See the 24 cards“Cruelty is not what drives them. Need is.”Les Fermiers, book I
They do not create our emotions. They steer them, sustain them, intensify them at the optimal moment. Not demons: workers.
A goal, cheering, glasses raised. Hab-Honey: golden, light, rare. It evaporates quickly; it must be caught at once.
It is no luxury granted out of kindness. It keeps the soil alive: livestock without joy would stop producing.
The Farmer of the cardA Blindness
Neither disaster nor happiness. A chronic tension, kept up day after day, with regular peaks and just enough hope to start again.
This is a farm’s optimal balance: the most stable resource, and the easiest to harvest.
The Farmer of the cardA Blindness
No one plotted anything. A platform optimizes a number, engagement, and discovers through sheer selection that anger pays, that fear holds, that outrage spreads.
“The same screen that harvests you is the first place where you can see the harvest.”Les Fermiers, book I
The Farmer of the cardAn Initiative
Every intense emotion secretes a Honey. Two are harvested. The third never is.
It is born of fear, shame, sadness, rage, despair. It is abundant, stable, persistent. “Suffering produces more. Faster. More easily.”
It is born of joy, gratitude, love, wonder. Rare and volatile, it frugally feeds those above, and serves as fertilizer for the emotional soil.
To feel fully, from a stable inner space, without being swept away. This is lucid non-reaction. “It happens now, or not at all.”
Reality is layered, like the supers of a beehive stacked one on top of another.
Our physical layer is the densest. Density amplifies suffering here, and that is what makes it precious. Higher up, beings no longer have bodies of flesh.
Those who went up to see did not find what they had hoped for: “It wasn’t paradise. It was a market.”
Dying there is only a change of level, like water passing from liquid to vapor.
The athanor is the alchemist’s furnace: the place where whatever you lay down is transformed. The farm is also a forge.
The 24 cards of the Atanor bear the names of the states that secrete the Honey: A Suffering, An Isolation, An Affection, A Hope, the Silence… Each card says two things.
Laid out, the corner cards draw a torus: a wheel that reads from the Black, our dross, toward the White, “Light-present”.
The golden rule: the cards give sight, never power. The book speaks of a rigged table where the house always wins, and of the player who, having understood, “simply stops betting”. The Atanor is the only table where no one bets: you look.
A trilogy of essays by Vincent Trapinaud, currently published in French, and a manga in the works.
Lays out the map: the Farm, the Honey, the hierarchy of the Harvesters, death reread as a change of level.
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Shows the door: the body, the armor, and the presence that cannot be harvested.
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Shows what lies behind the door.
A beekeeper watches his hives die. An accident, and he understands he is not the only one raising livestock.
“I don’t want believers. I want verifiers.” The books offer a map, which everyone is free to test against their own experience.
The Atanor is a reflective game inspired by this universe. It predicts nothing and contacts no one: it helps you look at what you produce.
