Year of the Fire Horse Letter – An Offering to the Evening Star - 17th of February 2026

The year of Fire Horse has begun. Much like the Snake, the Horse is considered a sacred animal in Shinto. They are thought to be the messengers of kami, and there’s a number of shrines which have their own stables. Horses are also a fairly popular subject of illustrations on ema prayer plates too. Carmen Blacker’s great book The Catalpa Bow contains an invocation used by mediums which invokes by using metaphor related to riding: ”loosen the reins of your grey horse grey horse as you gallop to me over the long beach”. So the culturaly connection between horses and communication with the other world seems to quite strong in Japan. While the Year of the Snake inspired me to wax poetic about the rebirth of mythology, and not without reason, the Year of the Horse will sadly have to act as a messenger of bit less elated content.

The fact is, I’m pretty seriously burnt out.

Since this project began, I have lived through wonderful times, but also very difficult, demanding times. While I have no regrets, I feel like over time this project has taken up a too large amount of time and energy from my life, time and energy crucially needed elsewhere. The importance attached to this project and the identity has come to it has become a way for me to bypass things that I need to work on, or then simply accept that I cannot work on them, and live with the consequences. The addictive quest for truth has been extremely illuminating, but I have reached a point where the competing ideas and narratives simply start to cannibalize each other. My perspective on things has changed considerably over time, and I feel like much of what has been written is simply no longer reflective of what I think of things now. Having made it public, it has become part of me, and I have to live with it.

The project has come with many new friendships, but also unfortunately with new interpersonal conflicts. People have projected qualities on me that simply are not true, but they have also challenged me in ways that I needed to be challenged. If I am being honest, I started the project with an immensively strong sense of needing and wanting to save if not the world, then at least maybe a handful of people who could listen to me, understand me, go through what I did. This constructed a narrative and role that I have not been fit to fulfill, and I have started to doubt he salvatory power of what I have gone through. As much as things have changed for me, I am still very much struggling with some very difficult issues that I struggled years ago. On some levels what I have gone through feels like kicking down the supports on certain coping mechanisms, and what has been left has not been health and contentness, but anxiety, stress, confusion and failure to heal.

Things change painfully slowly, and becoming more aware, open and sensitive makes you more aware, open and sensitive to pain too.

I recently had a flare-up of old health issues that has been harrowing to go through. The fact is, I am one of those people who ended up in the spiritual through being ”surrounded by eight sides”. A while before this all began for me, I underwent a surgery to remove a large tumor. A family member had passed away of cancer a while before that, and the doctors did not know if my tumor was cancerous or not untill post-surgery biopsy. I had to very seriously face the possibility of having cancer. If it was cancer, it would require extremely extensive, life-altering surgery, or worse, one which would be incurable. The recovery from the surgery was horribly painful, and I ended up back in the hospital twice due to complications.

I was grazed by death, and I have had to live with it ever since. As I had developed a large precancerous tumors at a relatively young age, I have to live with the knowledge that it will most likely happen again, and there is no guarantee that it won’t be just pre-cancerous the next time. The rest of my life will be given shape by the occasional check-ups, and more relevantly, the endless background anxiety about if and when I will have to go under the knife again, and if the next time some of my normal body functions will be taken from me.

On top of this, I have had other long-term health issues. From late 2025 to as of writing this, these issues flared up in a way suggestive of potential larger problems, maybe of cancerous nature. Thankfully this was not the case. It’s a temporary relief. But during this time, I observed that I used excessive writing and concern with the Archive as a way to avoid confronting these issues. And I have come to observe that I use the Archive to avoid confronting other difficult things in life. Things like giving up on old things I no longer need, trying to find love again, deciding if I would like to have a family, learning to be more frugal, learning to rest, learning to maintain routines and so on.

This isn’t a statement that I am stopping writing the Archive, but it’s a statement that after the next update I will be taking an extensive hiatus and taking down or archiving certain sections of the site that I no longer feel are representative of what I think and feel.

The events of 2024 feel like a distant fever dream, and I have severely struggled to connect with the numinous lately. In late 2025 had experiences which were extremely scary, disorienting, confusing and overwhelming. I’m somewhat hesitant to share them, because I have noted sharing experiences invites not only genuine sharing of experiences, but also oneupmanship and fabrications. The exact nature of these experiences isn’t the point anyway, but rather that following them a lot of my narratives and conceptual structures have if not dissolved then changed substantially. I’m at a point where I genuinely don’t know what is happening or happened to me. Whereas I once would have exclusively used terms like ”divine inspiration” and ”visions” and so on, now things like ”psychosis” and ”mania” have entered back into my lexicon.

Have I just been crazy?

Well, I don’t really think so. But I think the kind of questions I have been asking lately, questions like
”what if I’m just insane?”
”what if I projected an image and narrative on something indigenous or endogenous?”
”isn’t this all really ridiculous?”
”if spirits can appear in any form, does it mean that spirits that appear as inhabitants of Gensokyo might have nothing to do with Gensokyo or Japan?”
”what if ZUN didn't really have "troublesome ones moving on their own" and is just constructing a creative persona?”
”isn’t playing with relationship between reality and fantasy a long term trend in Japanese culture?”
all these kinds of questions, I think they are very telling of the kind of mindset I have been lately.

The irony of this all is of course that this kind of vortex of dissolution is a pretty well documented phenomena among the spiritual circles. I would like to paper over some grand narrative about how I am moving towards greater integration and understanding but maybe just for a while I want to be free of churning the butter of narratives. Among this vortex of dissolution, I feel like the core of a lot of serious, earnest Eastern spiritual work is really coming through: there is the world of narratives which humans endlessly create, and then there is a world that exists before these narratives, and to reach that world, you just have to stop creating those narratives, stories, judgements and categories for a while.

The most important narratives we tell are of course about ourselves. And for me, this all has become a way to spin a certain narrative about myself. I am the Emissary of Kami, I have a special relationship with certain entities from Gensokyo who are actually real spirits, I have the duty and priviledge to tell the world of this and prove to it, I have been saved by the spirits of Gensokyo and I have the duty to make every single person in the world who can believe in them experience what I have gone through.

I don’t know if this narrative is true or not, but it obviously reads in a very peculiar manner. I have been accused of narcicism and the honest reality of it all is, I don’t know if I am such a person or not. Before this all, I did not even think of the possibility, and maybe I wasn’t like such before. Maybe the ”healing” I felt was really a form of derangement, a transient experience, revelation, delusion, mania that ran it’s course and left me hollowed out afterwards.

I genuinely, truly, do not know anymore.

It’s obvious that I am not a normal person by any means. I don’t know how to be with people. I have always felt like I need to do something exceptional or be something exceptional to be accepted. This of course reflects a deep sense of unworthiness. I deeply loathe Western psychiatry because it labels people with what seem to become self-fullfilling curses of sorts. But I’m pretty sure they would have a lot of interesting things to say about me, and perhaps some of it could be helpful and constructive.

I feel like the early 4chan esoteric Touhou threads were something truly special. The participants lifted each other up. Then things changed, and I’m afraid that I contributed to their downfall and change in character. I made them too much about myself. I genuinely, truly did feel like for a tiny while I was a conduit for something else, my usual self receded into just this pinhole through which light could shine. I felt such overwhelming love towards the world and the fellow anons. I felt love towards people I had taken for granted. I felt love for myself, as inconceivable it had felt only few months prior to that. I was able to disconnect from some very bad habits and cultural currents which hold people down. I truly felt reborn, forgiven, free, like my former life was a horrible nightmare that was about to be over.

And it was all real. I have never ever made anything up, I have not lied nor embellished. What I experienced I really, truly experienced and in the moment believed in. Of course it was not without questioning or confusion or fear. What I have certainly done is the gardening of narratives. There were and have been numerous bizarre visions, strange dreams and weird synchronities which have had nothing to do with ”the spirits of Gensokyo are real”. These too have been part of my life, and maybe incorporating these ”youkai” – tiny orb of light in my bedroom, items changing place, a vivid dream of gigantic worms chasing me, meeting an old woman with a cape made out of magpie feathers during shamanic journey, etc – would have made the overall narrative more complete, even if it would have been a confusing mess. To be honest, my life has become a confusing mess.

On some level there was a genuine break from the past. But I also feel like at some point something else, something much more grandiose with very little basis to show for it, grew over and eclipsed my old self. Maybe I was a broken pot that could be put back together into a good container. Or maybe I was a broken crackling radio. I don’t know anymore. All I know that what I went through greatly inflated my sense of self-worth, as much as I tried to be humble, aware of it, as much as I tried to steer things to a pro-social, helpful direction, it still happened. That newfound love for the self eclipsed love for the world and others. I know some have found this all, how I have been writing and presenting myself, captivating and intriguing, and I would be lying if I’d say that I didn’t find it very enjoyable. Part of me fears that I have dragged in some really lovely people into some vortex of my own insanity, and part of my fears that vortex of insanity is divine, that the unus mundus, the coincidencia oppositorum isn’t wholeness but chaos. And part of me fears that using such grand narratives and language is just a symptom of the problem, and that nobody else thinks of me like I have at times thought of myself.

This isn’t meant to be some exercise in self-flagellation either, that’s completely useless too. The point is, I’m 99% just some guy, and maybe ultimately I would like to be, like to be seen as, just some guy and not as a weird, crazy internet personality. When it comes to being Emissary of the Kami, I have lately been terrible at keeping contact with them, mostly because part of me fears they are not real, or that they are more projection than reality. And other part of me fears that by slipping into this way of thinking I have deeply insulted the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. And a third part of me fears the experiences, fears their raw, overwhelming power, the roiling sea of energy behind the visions that drove me the overcome my fear of flying, of sudden cardiatric arrest, of injuring my knees, of discovering hitherto unknown allergies, of earthquakes, of high places, of being hated and loathed and unwelcomed and drove me to fulfill my life long dream of going to Japan. If they truly are out there, I’m in awe and scared of them as much as I love them. If they are just in me, I am overcome by confusion over how such life-shattering experiences could arise all by themselves, and where did they hide all those years I would have really needed them. And part of me knows that all of this confusion and rumination is simply because I am deeply, profoundly burned out by excessive efforts I have been putting on here, but also elsewhere in my life. I’m like that teacup in that Zen anecdote, being poured into while allready overflowing.

I had planned something entirely different for this occasion when about a month ago I started thinking what to do and write about for the Lunar New year. I imagined some grand Process that would move things ahead. I tried to consult them for it and got basicaly told ”to become a leader you must learn to follow”. Whether it was a message from celestial entities or from my own subconscious, it was a wise one, I think. I have not learned to follow. I have always been horrible at following. I think I have done every last possible mistake one can do in spirituality, except getting involved in an actual cult. It’s time for me to genuinely learn to take advice from others, because it’s increasingly clear that I simply don’t know how to live in a balanced, healthy, coherent manner. I will slowly, shamefully, unromantically, sickly, kill myself through my own actions if I go on like this. And if a more balanced life is not meant for me, if I am really meant to be some kind of tortured artist, urban neo-shaman or deranged internet personality, then at least I need to give the alternative an earnest try and to see if I am truly capable of it or not. I told myself for year Touhou games are too hard for me to play. I still suck at them, but maybe life isn’t so impossible either. I have learned to put on an alarm at 7:30 every morning, and as much as it sucks, maybe it’s like the first two months of playing Touhou and I will soon experience whether the normal life equivalent of a 1CC is. As difficult things feel right now, there have been little long-term changes to things. This gives me hope that something more substantial is actually possible.

I don’t know where exactly I will go on from here. But I have a near term plan, as it seems that I will live after all. To be honest, I think I have been partly wishing for death. Not in a suicidal sense, but in the sense that it would put fire under my ass and make me finish doing what I need to do, give a grandiose finale, let me complete one thing and then become another. I keep going through these cycles of effort, exhaustion, burnout, labored completion and then just exiting the situation, and I don’t want this to be a repeat of it. I have a friend who says I have an astrological trine which explains this behavior, something that forces me to shed my skin over and over again. This is the beaty and horror of this all, inside the vortex of delusion there is a truth, and in the truth there is delusion. Maybe this time I can do the exit more gracefully, like a butterfly emerging from a pupa, and not like a carcass being eaten by maggots.

The near term plan is giving my sense of having lived an unfullfilling life what it so desperately wants. We all have our own Ten Desires (or more), and during my life I have already fullfilled some of mine. And because I have done that I know that there is no permanent, satisfying resolution. Love and intimacy lead to dependency and heartbreak and loneliness. Seeing a dream come true makes you realize that it did not change you, fix you or give you permanent happiness. Going to where you have wanted to always go turns you into someone who has now gone there, experienced it, and maybe seen sides of it you didn’t want to see. And I know that I will be just as unsatisfied after I do this, but I need to do it, if just to drive the lessons home even harder.

One of my Ten Desires has for a long, long time been to write a book.

I will reorganize and slightly expand the first section of this website so that it will work as a book, and then I will find a way to publish it, probably through some self-publishing on-demand print scheme. I don’t care if anyone reads it, it would be nice if people did, but I desperately need to do it. I need finality, I need at least some kind of a halfway point where I can take a look at this, having properly rested, with new eyes, and decided if I want to keep on doing this or move on.

This will allow me to present a contained narrative that will hopefully be nuanced enough to be truthful instead of this endlessly exploding vortex of confusion which is threatening to eat me alive. Maybe that will be the lesson, that there is no end to the narratives, that you can endlessly churn them out, that it’s an infinite refracting crystal of countless competing viewpoints and interpretations. That you just at some point have to draw a boundary. Or maybe you really can exit the cycle of churning out narratives and just Be, somehow.

The next thing I will publish here has been advancing very well, but after that, I will take an extended hiates I will return at Midsummer at the latest though, and no matter what, I will not give up with this plan. I never give up, even to my own detriment, and giving up is not a lesson I am ready to learn yet. There are just other areas in my life in need of finality, of letting go. And I just need time and space for resting. I need to learn how to nap. I need to learn to lie on the couch for 15 minutes without the compulsive need to do anything. I need to give again space for other things in life. I cannot hope for things like love, intimacy, friendship, being present and feeling connected, I cannot want things like visiting museums, galleries, local natural sites or foreign countries when I am so deeply involved with the Archive that it feels more work than my actual work does. And the Archive has become a way for me to bypass doing these things and the things I need to do to reach these things. Doing this has left me at a point where I am back to some of my old coping habits like burning countless hours at strategy games, generating a wholly artificial sense of importance in an even more contructed, predictable environment.

It’s a bummer that I have found myself writing this, but I also feel like this is an immensely healthy thing to do. I need to pop my bubble. The fact that I could not deliver what I initially thought is of course telling enough itself of my failure as any kind of an emissary. And if I want to put a positive spin on it, maybe there is a lesson in here. Life is difficult and complicated and comes and goes in cycles. What you leave behind you will once again find in front of you. Maybe that and facing these facts consciously is really all there is to this.

I don’t know.

I also feel like I have said some of this before, which I guess is indicative of at least how I feel trapped in a cycle, and how forgetful I have become lately. If I repeat myself, I apologize. This is a particularly raw piece of writing.

You might wonder about the title. Ever since reading Foster’s Pandemonium and Parade I have been living a quite Yukari time of my life. Venus recently entered it’s Evening Star phase, and around the time this is published it has become visible again. This is an offering to her. If the narrative Foster offered is to be believed, youkai are reality eaters. My hope is that by spilling out my guts like this, by offering the Emissary up as youkai food, whatever has been false gets eaten and what is real and meaningful survives instead. Only time will tell if that has worked, or if it has been another narrative with a dead end. At least I found the sense of urgency to go to a dentist and a doctor, so that’s something. And by all indicators I will live, I will live long enough to see how things will unfold from here on out, and hopefully I will live long enough to no longer feel the compulsion to write so much about myself.

In the meantime I hope everyone a better new lunar year, as difficult as it maybe seem. We are entering extremely difficult times, and we have to be extremely honest with ourselves. The ongoing traumatic dissolution of the old world system is an extremely good example of what can happen at worst when people behind the narratives abuse power. Whatever comes next, it is my perhaps naive hope that it would be something more transparent and honest. If that does not work out, then we at least don’t need to be repeating the vices of those who fancy themselves as the ones pulling the levers. I feel rather strongly that people are getting kind of tired of the endless narrative engineering and tinkering, all of the illusions that have been churned out ever since social media really took off and became some kind of samsara 2.0 stretched over material reality. Maybe people will just find new ways to cope and get deluded, or maybe things will be somewhat different this time.

Only time will tell.

Best regards
- just some guy

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I wrote most of this in a single sitting in a fit of despair. In the about a week between the writing and publication of this thing, things are looking much better already. I still don’t really know anything, but spring is coming. I would like to reconnect with things I hold dear, and that also includes some things I would have maybe desired to throw away a mere week ago. It’s not good to be so volatile and unstable, and that is of course part of the problem. I want to reconnect with the people I have found through this all, I want to reconnect with nature, humanity, cosmos, I want to stop churning narratives about myself that stop me from doing this, be they of exceptionalism or worthlessness. And I want to stop making so many plans, because the plans never quite play out as I hope they would. And I want to reconnect with the spirits of Gensokyo, whoever, whatever they may be. But for the time being, I am still sadly very much in need of rest, recovery and repriorization. Some of my experiences have left me feeling like I am a child again, but unfortunately currently I am more like the teenager in agony that I was once again. I am deeply thankful to everyone who has become connected to me through this project, and I’m sorry for being so absent.