“The Platonic Socrates… stated…that man is a being potentially “superior to himself”. “(Peter Sloterdijk 2009)

For Plato, the universal forms, equated with the Sun, was a celestial attractor that subjected humans to vertical tensions. This-to use Peter Sloterdijk’s term-“vertical tension” divided the sacred from the profane, heaven from earth, meaningful from meaningless, knowledge from ignorance, inhale from exhale, excellence from mediocrity and illumination from blindness. The vertical ascent has to do with discovering what is of value-beyond price.

The Form of the Good, Plato says, is to the intelligible realm as the Sun is to the visible realm. As if from a fountainhead, sight receives its power of vision from the Sun. Just as the Sun-Plato’s symbol of the universal forms-illuminates and make things intelligible, the Jaguar was thought to be the same Sun stalking the depths of the cavernous earth at night, illuminating the dark ground. This fabric, transparently woven with phantom threads reveals depths that avoids capture. It is woven on the dark loom of deep-time.

In old hydrographic maps, where the known world ended and unknown territory started, they drew lions, (or dragons) and they wrote: “Hic sunt leones.” (there are lions here) This was where Freud discovered the dark continent of the body as something that is outside the radar of the conscious mind. Indirectly captured in “Freudian slips” and free association, these “lions” churn our course towards deep maelstroms-portals to truth.

The spotted Sun-the mathematical Sun-is fraught with background, with body, with _mythos:_logos is haunted by mythos. The enemy is in the figure, embodying the dialectics.

The rational subject of modern physics-initiated by the _event_(to use a Badiouan term) of Galileo Galilei-attempted to objectify nature, quantifying “it” in the language of mathematics. Galileo wrote: “the book of nature can be written in the language of mathematics.” The irony in this is clear, by virtue of the blindspots of every system of totality claiming to overcode reality. The rational subject of modern physics is as spotted as the jaguar-the underworld Sun.

The Jaguar dwells in the heights of the trees, as well as in the depths of the caves. It hunts at night and day, ancient people understood it’s spotted coat as the starry sky, scintillae illuminating earths dark body. It embodied the opposites-apex predator embodying the _taboo_function of traversing opposites. Signifying the spirit’s perennial need for transcendence.

In 2000, when Bill Clinton was holding a speech on DNA coding, he said-referencing Galileo-:”Today, we are learning the language in which God created life.”