Similarly, there can — or cannot — be several correct design projects for a firmly standing building.This also holds true for fortune telling: what it tells you can be a good project or a dud.

Besides, any project is nothing but a drawing until someone puts it into practice.Considering fortune telling in this light can result in a variety of setbacks.

For example, if the fortune teller tells you that you will meet a blond man, marry him, have triplets, and live long and happily, chances are you might meet that blond man — but no one can make you marry him unless you want to.

But people often do see fortune telling as a description of force majeure events, a scenario where the foreseen future happens as a matter of course, allowing you to keep right on sitting on your sofa, nodding your head in approval.

I’ve mentioned “correct” design projects. What are those?

Building engineering uses highly specialized calculation principles such as the theorem of moments. The theorem holds thatthe sum of all moments about any point of a correctly engineered building equals zero. This is a variety of the law of conservation of energy in the space plane.

When engineered that way, your destiny meets either none or minimal (or, if everything is right, even negative) resistance from the external environment.

Unlike unplanned actions, a well-calculated destiny stands a good chance of being fulfilled.

Indeed, even if you get into a tank and drive it, like a drill bit through concrete, toward your future, you’re likely to sooner or later break your neck all the same. Only a good road map will get you to your goal — even if there’s not much you can do.

And that’s what the PM is: a law for engineering the future with a backlash kept to a minimum. The very form and rules of the PM proffer laws that allow the sum of the moments of forces involved to be reduced to zero, meaning the backlash down the road to your goal will be as small as possible.

To sum up, the Patience of Medici is a variety of the law of conservation of energy, presented as the rules for building the layout of a four-dimensional energy tensor that describes all possible states of Matter in the four-dimensional world.

Chapter 14. The rules and layout structure of the patience of Medici

We’re finally done with all the preliminaries and can move on to the main part of this book.

To keep their knowledge from dilettantes, hermetists like to cipher it using various hermetic keys, and so could I — but I won’t.Instead, I’ll try to explain it to you as clearly as possible, to decipher any obscurities with a set of keys, including hermetic ones.

For ease of understanding, I’ll omit the theory and footnotes where feasible. I want my explanations to read a tad like a grimoire, not a PhD paper.

So, here are the basic principles for laying outa Patience of Medici game.

1. Only the full Minor Arcana deck—56 suit cards of the 78-card deck of Tarot cards, four suits with 14 cards each — is used. The Minor Arcana’s four suits are Wands, Swords, Cups, and Pentacles. Each suit contains ten numbered cards, Ace through Ten, and four court cards — Page, Knight, Queen, and King. Pentacles correspond to the modern deck’s Diamonds; Cups, to Hearts; Swords, to Spades; and Wands, to Clubs.

2. The cards are first laid out to arrange a grid of four rows and fourteen columns.

3. Adjacent cards are stacked by number or by suit.

4. This results in subsequent cards getting on top of the initial cards, which kind of gets them out of sight. Obviously, this is similar to the flow of time.

5. For this addition to be possible, the following rules must be followed. Each column must contain all four suits. In essence, together the four suits yield an energy coordinate in space. It’s like latitude and longitude coordinates crossing each other on a map or a 3D drawing projection. But here we have a 4D projection since our visible physical world is four-dimensional.

6. Note that the numbers of the cards in a column must not coincide. (This doesn’t apply, however, to columns 12 and 13, Horsemen, and flag cards.) Here’s an example:

7. Column 14 is the last one, and when a given card’s part is played in real life, the column is for what are called target cards — the cards that symbolize the events you want to eventually cause or provoke (more on those cards later). The column can contain any cards other than Horsemen and Knaves — that is, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, Queen, King, and Ace of any suit. Keep in mind that all the four suits must be present.

8. Column 13 belongs to Horsemen (Knights). The card can be described as a fair-wind, get-in-the-saddle, or draw-the-reins card. It plays a special part, and I’ll discuss it later.

9. Column 12 is for Knaves (Pages in Tarot). This is a flag card, meaning, on the one hand, that it signals the patience is charged and, on the other hand, that it tells the world that the stalker is ready to discharge the patience. (More on this card later.)

10 I recommend placing the suits in the last target column by theelement, one by one. That way, shifting the assembly point is easier and more natural. That is, the order of suits, from top to bottom, is as follows: Earth, Water, Fire, Air — Pentacles, Cups, Swords, Wands — Diamonds, Hearts, Spades, Clubs.

11. Alternatively, if the stalker’s position is passive to the Absolute (e.g., if the stalker is seeking awakening), the order of suits should be reversed: Air, Fire, Water, Earth — Wands, Swords, Cups, Pentacles — Clubs, Spades, Hearts, Diamonds.

12. The remaining forty-four empty