┌─╷─┐ ╵┌┼┐╵ polyphanes.smol.pub ╷└┼┘╷ by polyphanes └─╵─┘
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I go by the online handle "polyphanes". In English, I pronounce it "puh-LIH-Feh-neez", although as a classical Greek name, it should probably be pronounced more like "Po'-li-fah-NEYS". I originally coined it to mean "many appearances" (the joke being that it's the name I use across all different platforms), although it actually has a more conventional meaning of "conspicuous" (as in "much apparent"). I'll still respond if you pronounce it like "PAH-lee-faynz", although I'll smirk about it. Other people just call me "Sam".
I'm a writer and blogger, Hermetic mystic and mage, Lucumí olorisha, geomancer, gamer, Discord server admin, and dingo. I have two cats. I earn my keep as a software engineer of statistical programs. I drink a lot of sugar-free sodas and tea which helps with all the foregoing. I'm gay. I promise it all makes sense in context.
Broadly understood, "Hermeticism" refers to a kind of current in Western esotericism that is associated with a mythic-divine figure known as Hermēs Trismegistos (or "Hermes Trismegistus" or "Mercurius Ter Maximus", all meaning "Hermēs the Thrice-Great), a Greco-Egyptian syncretism of the Hellenic Hermēs and Egyptian Thōth. Although this term has come to refer to any number of things related to alchemy or eclectic para-Masonic Rosicrucian lodge-based systems of magic, in a more limited sense, Hermeticism is at its core a specific kind of Greco-Egyptian spirituality that blends mysticism and magic for divine ends. I'm a student and practitioner of this, focusing on the classical stuff that arose in Hellenistic Egypt during the Roman Imperial period. Although my involvement with esotericism and the occult goes back to the 1990s as a young child, I've been involved with Hermeticism in one form or another since 2010.
Lucumí is an ethnonym for the descendants of (who we'd now refer to as) Yòrubá who were brought over to Cuba from (what is today) Nigeria during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Along with their blood and language, they also brought over their religion of worshipping orisha, which is still preserved today in Cuba as it is in Nigeria as well as across the Americas wherever orisha-worshipping people were taken, and which has since spread further in the African Diaspora. In Cuba, the religion as it formed over the centuries became known as "la regla de ocha Lucumí" ("the protocols of Lucumí-style orisha worship"), often shortened to just "Lucumí", but is also popularly (sometimes derogatorily) known as "Santería" due to Catholic syncretism. My first brush with the religion was around 2013, and with the blessing and support of my godfather and community, I was initiated as a priest in 2016, consecrated specifically to the orisha Ogún.
Despite popular conceptions from mistranslations of Chinese practices as much as roleplaying games and fantasy stories, "geomancy" refers to a kind of divination that arose around 1000 CE somewhere on the Arabian peninsula or in the Sahara. Its Arabic name "`ilm ar-raml" means "science of the sand", since it was performed by drawing marks in the sand which was abundant as a writing surface; when it was brought over into Europe, this name was directly translated in Greek as "geōmanteia" meaning "seeing by earth". However, unlike hydromancy or pyromancy, geomancy as a divination system has nothing specifically to do with earth as an element; rather, the system makes use of sixteen binary figures associated with all four elements and manipulates them through a kind of recursive mathematics to provide a set of symbols by which one can ascertain information through occult means. I've been studying, developing, practicing, and teaching this form of divination since the late 2000s.
My older cat is Nephthys, a long-haired black cat aka my little eldritch idiot goblin girl. She has an extra digit on her forepaw and also no teeth. Because her name is a little hard for some people to remember, I also call her "Nipples".
My younger cat is Set, a Bengal bastard who makes up for it by being adorable. He is very food-driven, loves ribbons, and often steals my spot in the bed.
As you'll see on my homepage and page/post headers, I use a symbol as a "logo" of sorts. I started using it years ago for my website, "The Digital Ambler", and it's become something of a personal emblem/icon/profile picture for myself on pretty much any and every platform out there. Suffice it to say that it's representative of my own sense of spirituality and spiritual progression, combining the notion of "always forward between heaven and earth" and "I rejoice in the splendor of the works of the Light".
I started polyphanes.smol.pub in late July 2024 (funnily enough shortly after Mars entered the zodiac sign Gemini), after a good few months of checking out Gemini. I've always been a fan of older systems of computing and information retrieval/display, having an affinity more for CLIs than GUIs, more for textfiles stored in a directory than misc objects stored in a database. Although I was unfortunately born a bit too late to get much into Usenet, I was very much into minimalist Linux setups on the system console, a suckless.org-esque approach to computing, and similar. After chewing on various software and server options and browsing Gemini servers allowing hosting of capsules (Gemini's parallel to websites) and gemlogs (Gemini's parallel to weblogs), I eventually found smol.pub, got an account, and spent a bit getting myself set up here. Even though I've had an active website and blog ("The Digital Ambler") since 2010 with a number of smaller websites or social network pages here or there going back to the days of Tripod and Angelfire, I've still wanted something smaller—and the smolweb and the Gemini Protocol definitely satisfies that itch.
official Gemini Protocol main page (FAQ, client list, etc.)
