Ely’s Heartbeat remains in heavy rewriting, revision and editing. It is perhaps the most personal of my current novels, and certainly one that has resisted being written in a single, obedient form. It has passed through many iterations because the material beneath it has been accumulating for more than thirty years.
Those years include occult study, Druidry, heathen practices, chaos magic, Tarot and what I think of as Tarosophy — the meeting of Tarot and philosophy. These influences have not produced a manual, nor a catalogue of secret correspondences. They have produced questions about consciousness, suffering, identity, free will, perception and the ways in which a human being changes without always recognising the change.
At the centre is Cuthbert Raines, confined within the Victorian world of Mendip asylum. He encounters Ely, a woman whose presence is at once intimate and uncertain, and whose questions are often harder to endure than the institution’s routines. The alchemy of the novel occurs not in a laboratory but in Cuthbert’s relation to his own memories, his body, his thoughts and his longing to act.
A letter through the four Aces
I wanted to share a little of the philosophical structure of this book. The four familiar stages of the alchemical Great Work — Nigredo, Albedo, Citrinitas and Rubedo — are not presented as a ladder by which a damaged person climbs towards perfection. In the novel they are changing conditions of experience. Each speaks through one of the four elements and one of the four Aces of the Tarot. What follows is not a set of keywords. It is a small letter from the imaginative ground of the work.
Earth: The Ace of Pentacles and Nigredo
Imagine a man who has walked the same six paces in a cell for decades, until he can scarcely distinguish the rhythm of his own thought from the discipline of the building. Everything has weight: the basin, the iron cot, the lime in the walls, the names entered into a ledger. Then an ordinary stone breaks, and inside it lies the impression of a fern. The leaf has vanished as living matter, yet its shape has survived through pressure.
This is how I approach the Ace of Pentacles. Not as a promise of money or reward, but as the troubling fact of embodiment: a life leaves a mark even while it is being worn away. Nigredo, the Blackening, asks what happens when the identities we have inherited become too heavy to continue carrying. It is not a dramatic destruction of the self. It is a slow recognition of everything that has been deposited within it. Even the soil of our failures may still be capable of receiving a seed.
Water: The Ace of Cups and Albedo
Now imagine that same man entering the asylum’s bathing room. Steam gathers on the windows; warm water touches a body trained into endurance; childhood arrives not as a tidy sequence of events but as the smell of a garden, a remembered voice and the sensation of having once been held without judgement. Nothing has been solved. Yet something that was fixed has begun to loosen.
The Ace of Cups is not merely love offered in a decorative chalice. It is the frightening capacity to receive feeling without immediately converting it into an explanation. Albedo, the Whitening, is therefore not innocence restored. It is a softening of the boundaries that once made survival possible but have now become another form of confinement. Water does not return the past unchanged; it reveals what the body has continued to carry.
Air: The Ace of Swords and Citrinitas
Then the air clears, and clarity is no longer comforting. A question from a physician, a distinction made too precisely, a familiar conviction inspected from another angle: each becomes a blade. Cuthbert must confront the habits of thought by which he has preserved himself. Is a memory the same as evidence? Is the language of diagnosis necessarily more truthful than the language of symbolism? Does understanding a life mean possessing the causes that made it?
The Ace of Swords is not the glamour of a weapon. It is the cost of seeing what our preferred account has concealed. Citrinitas, the Yellowing, is thought reaching a difficult dawn, where discernment exposes both the necessities and the limitations of reason. To cut something apart may disclose its structure; it cannot, by that act alone, tell us what the whole has meant to a living person.
Fire: The Ace of Wands and Rubedo
Sooner or later, thought has to encounter an action. In a neglected glass garden house, among dead plants, damaged panes and the remains of ordinary materials, Cuthbert discovers that intention is not the same as having done something. A gesture enters the world. Its consequence can no longer be recalled into the safety of pure imagination.
The Ace of Wands belongs to that moment before movement becomes irreversible. Rubedo, the Reddening, does not award the hero perfection, nor make him ascend beyond his body. It asks whether the earth that held him, the water that opened him and the air that questioned him can now enter one living act. Here desire is not simply appetite. It is the difficult impulse to become present in one’s own existence.
And the fifth movement: Aether
There are four Aces, and there are four classical phases in this arrangement of the Work. Aether is not another card or a fifth prize placed at the summit. Within the novel it is closer to the relation that lets the four continue to turn: the breath between opposites, the movement of a spiral, the awareness that no one stage can claim the whole of a person.
That is also why Ely remains important to me as a figure of uncertainty. Is she someone separate from Cuthbert, or a way in which his interior world has become capable of addressing him? To force that question into a neat answer would close precisely the space the book is trying to open.
The manuscript, and what comes next
There is still considerable rewriting to do. I am working to make the philosophical material inseparable from the actual story — from the cold of a corridor, the weight of a hand, the difficulty of speech, and the human consequences of the questions. The symbols must be lived before they can be interpreted.
My present hope is to self-publish during the first or second quarter of 2027. That is a provisional aim, not an announced publication date; the manuscript will determine when it is ready.
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From the writing desk of Tarek von Bergmann.