It is not enough to latch onto inner silence — a Borges seated in the lotus position beneath the tree of our mind, every thought drained of distractions and escapes, yet a brick that builds imaginary cities, Tlön, the tigers and the pointed towers, hanging gardens from which to observe one’s own life as a landscape, or the unconscious and submerged Atlantis of ourselves, unconscious, oceanic. To verbalize the breath like the chant of a priestess with her nails on an oracle, to feel heart, lungs and liver working and pulsing separately, oiled by blood and by that dark energy that escapes astrophysicists and that only some Don Juan has grasped by the tail, for a moment, left with eagle feathers between his fingers.

Nor is it enough to find one’s own well in the geography of our metaphysical viscera, not in a place with terrestrial coordinates, hills that have hosted nests of machine guns or woods where grotesque but wise sylvans drink. To descend into oneself, into that inner bowel, from esophagus to rectum, vertical like a literary erection by Henry Miller, in Montparnasse or Big Sur, one must first come to terms with the guardians, the two oblique cards in the upper part of the Well Path spread, who watch the rim of the well.
I cannot say who yours are, these psychological minotaurs, but I can tell you of mine, when I faced them on the balcony of my old house in Marseille, in the port district, among rapacious seagulls and rats with super-powers who collected the toes of drunken or exhausted immigrants, and that intermittent line of the sea, down there on the right, a Morse code between the buildings, paying the rent of my hunger for wonder, for things resilient to everything, even to man.

The first to show himself had been the golden guardian, whom I imagine as an anthropomorphic being in oriental garments, a Malik from the Mamluk cards, the fertile Nile of the tarot I will speak of in a future post, with scimitar and arabesques for eyes, flamboyant as he appears in the mind, with the geometric yellow and gold fields of his elegant jacket, but without features.

It was he who prevented me from approaching the well, for months, with the disproportionate blade that sliced the air in whirlwinds of forged steel, small cyclones that forced me three steps back, every time: it was my arrogance, that of a thousand books, and then another thousand still, studying the cultural gravity of the world, the quintessence of East and West, but not oneself; I thought I already had the passport for all Edens and Nirvanas, of that same Borges’ Tlön, of Jerusalem, Calcutta and a second Qumran, ten thousand caves inhabited by Essenes who had resurrected Pythagoras, who as king sat upon a throne of jars containing geometric and existential knowledge, an Alexandria library of clay and raw ceramics.

The golden guardian finally one afternoon lowered his scimitar, letting me draw near the well, when I whispered in his ear that I could pay him with a special coin: the death of the ego fattened by erudition, a toothless pasha who swallows without chewing. I showed him the severed head of my ego — that is, the three of the human Cerberus that lived inside me: Henry Miller, Truman Capote and Joyce — and I used the pages of the apocryphal Gospel of Mary to polish his golden boots.

I no longer knew anything and I knew everything. I was allowed two steps forward, and the well was near, with its arcane inscriptions on the circumference, I already thought of entering the esophagus of myself and then quickly arriving halfway, to the small intestine, already in the section of the future, but the red guardian pushed me back, then opened his robe as a shadow-traveler and showed me two perfect, young breasts. Two oysters for eyes, no swords or other weapons, his empty hands let dust fall to the ground, yet I could not advance anyway, because this psychopomp touched the mind and set it ablaze with impulses, with odalisques whose atoms were round and perfect as Ingres knew them.

Flesh so beautiful that it counts the hours, depending whether you find yourself before it in the morning or in the evening, flesh that then macerates in the vinegar of time until it becomes dust, which the red demon kept pouring onto the ground from his hourglass hands. He had finally formed a desert with that human sand, and it now reached my calves. Each time the same scene, from Marseille, from the inner silence that sealed the traffic and the fish market, to that mental Rub’ al Khali, the Empty Quarter, immense dunes, a horizontal abyss.
​
The well could no longer be seen, the red guardian knew how to deceive the senses, with his infinite deserts, and that was precisely the point: the senses domesticated by pleasure, lust, the triumph of the unstable. I passed the red guardian without saying anything, only letting go of the metaphorical hand of one of the Salomes dancing inside me, persistent in their burnished secret that fused with mine, and fixing my mind upon myself in the mirror, old and grey, a conscious animal, my body as short destiny, like a painting by Lucian Freud in the splendor of the perception of the limit, but with stars tattooed on the naked skull, painted blue.
​At last my well was again there before me, and the two guardians suspended, oblique, at the sides of my mind, disarmed, not exactly pleased at no longer being able to bite me.

Some structures do not begin in theory. They appear first as images whose meaning cannot yet be explained but whose form refuses to dissolve.
The Well Path — the seven-card interpretive descent used in Lucian Morel readings — began in this way.

In the middle of an ordinary night, a well opened inside a dream and refused to close. It did not offer revelation. It revealed structure.
What followed was not a story in the conventional sense but a movement through architecture: rings tightening around memory, mirrors fracturing the present, migrations repeating themselves in the future. At the deepest level the well ceased to be water. It thickened into earth. Identity loosened its edges.
The image persisted.

Over time it returned in fragments — not as explanation but as insistence. Gradually the geometry suggested by that dream condensed into what would later become The Well Path, a method designed not to extract meaning from symbols but to descend through them until their structure becomes visible.
The Dream of the Well is a short text that returns to that origin.

It does not attempt to teach the method formally. Instead, it explores the symbolic landscape in which the idea first appeared — a space where personal memory intersects with literary echoes, where opera houses revolve slowly through darkness, where manuscripts scatter into wind, and where the same tarot card returns with quiet persistence: The Star.
Across seven movements — threshold, guardians, descent, past, present, future, emergence — the dream unfolds as an architecture of resistance and return.
This book does not explain a method.
It exposes the structure from which the method emerged.

The Dream of the Well is now available on Amazon.
​

Silence did not arrive suddenly in my life. It did not descend as revelation, nor as discipline learned from books. It came earlier, quietly, the way certain companions appear in childhood and never truly leave — unnoticed at first, indispensable later.
Like many only children, I learned to inhabit absence before understanding company. Afternoons stretched wide and unguarded, populated not by voices but by imagined worlds. I constructed cities no map could contain, universes governed by private laws, landscapes explored entirely within the mind. At the time it felt like play. Only much later did I understand that imagination was merely the visible surface of something deeper: silence learning to take form.
Silence, when one is young, is not emptiness. It is expansion.

The Pythagoreans understood this with a severity modern life rarely tolerates. Initiates entering their school were required to remain silent for years before speaking publicly. Not as punishment, but as preparation. Speech, they believed, must follow understanding — and understanding begins where noise ends. Knowledge was not transmitted through explanation alone but cultivated through attentive stillness, through the slow alignment of perception with harmony.
Silence was the first teacher.

In Eastern traditions, the same intuition appears again and again under different names. Meditation is often imagined as immobility, yet some of its deepest forms unfold in movement — walking, breathing, repeating gestures until action dissolves into awareness. The Hindu ascetic walking endless roads, the Buddhist monk sweeping temple floors, the martial artist repeating forms until intention disappears: all seek the same threshold. The mind ceases to chase the world and begins, instead, to observe it.
Daily life rarely allows this condition. We move inside repetition — schedules, obligations, conversations performed almost automatically. Buddhism calls this Samsara: the wheel of recurrence, not dramatic suffering but ordinary continuity, the subtle exhaustion produced by endless doing. The spirit survives there, but in the background, like a forgotten instrument still resonating beneath louder sounds.
Silence becomes the door through which one briefly steps outside the wheel.

I discovered this consciously at sixteen, though it had been waiting much longer. I had begun writing poems — secretly, for no audience but myself — under the spell of Jorge Luis Borges. His stories felt less like narratives than architectures of thought, cities built from paradox and time. Tlön fascinated me not because it was imaginary, but because it behaved as if imagination itself possessed physical laws.
Reading Borges required a particular stillness. His worlds did not reveal themselves to hurried minds. Time inside those pages seemed suspended, as if meaning existed slightly behind language, accessible only through patient attention. Writing my own verses became a way of entering those labyrinths — keys fashioned from imitation, opening corridors I barely understood.

One afternoon I disappeared entirely into that interior geography. Hours passed unnoticed. School obligations, friendships, appointments — the fragile skeleton of adolescent life — simply dissolved. Only later did I realize I had missed a sports commitment by nearly three hours. I had recently begun practicing judo, discovering balance not only as physical technique but as awareness of weight, center, and breath.
Reality returned abruptly.
My mother entered my room, wearing her favorite black wig — fashionable at the time — looking at me with the cautious suspicion reserved for teenagers who appear too distant from the world. Perhaps she feared substances, rebellion, or some invisible crisis. Instead she found me surrounded by books and silence.
My room had slowly transformed into a private reliquary: novels and poetry by cursed writers stacked unevenly, posters of Cézanne and Manet watching from the walls, Japanese prints whose violent contrasts had once astonished Van Gogh — The Great Wave rising endlessly above my desk. A stereo far too large for the space filled the air with Bob Dylan that day, though on others it carried Mahler’s vast architectures of sound. Small Oceanic figurines rested near the window, inexpensive objects yet echoes of the same primal vision that had reshaped Picasso’s understanding of the human face.
It must have looked less like a bedroom than an unfinished sanctuary.

From those early escapes I never fully returned — nor wished to. Silence had revealed itself not as isolation but as orientation. Sometimes accompanied by music, sometimes absolute, it became a place where thought deepened and perception widened beyond personal concerns toward questions larger than the self: meaning, reality, time.
Years later, when tarot entered my life not as curiosity but as practice, I recognized the same companion waiting beside the cards.
During a reading, silence is not absence of speech. It is a threshold. The everyday mind — hurried, practical, entangled in repetition — gradually loosens its grip. One steps, briefly, outside Samsara. The cards do not speak louder; rather, the reader learns to listen more quietly.

Symbols require calm attention. Archetypes do not reveal themselves to impatience. Only when the mind abandons urgency do the conceptual maps hidden within the cards begin to appear — patterns linking memory, desire, fear, and possibility into a coherent landscape. The reader does not impose meaning; he observes it emerging.
Silence allows the cards to exist before interpretation.
In those moments I feel less like an interpreter than an apprentice standing beside an ancient language. The task is not to speak first, but to wait. To let the images arrange themselves. To allow the symbolic field to breathe.
The same silence that accompanied a solitary child imagining worlds, the same silence cultivated unknowingly through poetry, philosophy, music, and disciplined movement, becomes the invisible partner of every reading.
It walks beside the reader.

And perhaps this is the paradox: tarot is often associated with revelation, yet revelation rarely arrives through intensity. It arrives through quiet attention — the willingness to step back from noise long enough for meaning to surface on its own.
The cards do not demand belief. They ask for listening. In silence, they finally begin to speak.
​

In the next note I will speak of my grandmother Olga. For now, let me begin where memory insists — not with explanations, but with presence, with the faint smell of summer dust and stone warmed by a sun that seemed older than time itself.

She lived in a countryside house in central Italy, a white-and-red villa built in an improbable Spanish style, with saracen shutters that creaked like old conspirators when the afternoon wind arrived. I spent many summers there as a boy, suspended between boredom and revelation, two states that are secretly the same when one is young enough to listen.

Olga was not a kind woman. Kindness bored her. She stood straight, carried dignity like a weapon, and possessed that subtle arrogance rural matriarchs sometimes cultivate — the certainty of having survived too much to soften. From her mouth I heard, for the first time, a word I would never forgive her for: negro. Seasonal workers came from Africa to harvest the fields, and she repeated that word too easily, as if language did not wound. Even now, memory refuses to absolve her.
And yet human beings rarely belong to a single moral geometry.

She could tame cards like a conductor commands an orchestra. A worn Marseille tarot deck lived permanently on her kitchen table, beside knives, bread, and unfinished conversations. Pregnant women came to her. Sharecroppers. Neighbors carrying worries heavier than their bodies. Sometimes even I sat before her, legs swinging from the chair, pretending courage. She once predicted I would become a writer — perhaps a journalist. She was wrong about the profession, but not about the words. Words never abandoned me; they simply waited until I learned how to descend into them.

One afternoon a hornet stung me near the orchard. Panic, as always in childhood, felt indistinguishable from death. I ran to her asking whether I would survive, whether the cards knew anything about poison or destiny. She shuffled calmly, unimpressed by mortality, and told me to sit still. The future, according to her, was rarely interested in children who screamed too loudly.
Behind the house stretched fruit trees — figs, apricots, and plums so sweet they seemed almost fictional. Beyond them stood the well. Not picturesque, not gothic, not cinematic. Just a functional countryside well: stone rim, pulley, rope, water used for plants, garden, survival. A tool disguised as a hole.

One summer I became obsessed with a large green lizard that sunbathed daily on its edge. A ramarro — ancient, immobile, sovereign. A friend had told me those creatures could bite off a finger and never release their grip, even in death. Fear turned observation into ritual. Every day at noon it appeared, perfectly still, absorbing the sun like a priest receiving revelation.
But it never entered the well.
Hours passed watching it. The heat was unbearable; the water below must have promised relief. Why remain outside? Driven by curiosity, I ran to Olga.
“Why doesn’t it go in?” I asked. “Wouldn’t the water cool it?”
She did not look surprised. She rarely was.
“Lucian,” she said, cleaning green beans in a metal bowl, “that is not just a hole in the ground. Lizards know this well. It is dangerous to enter a place where you might see yourself. Try.”
Children obey mysteries more easily than orders.
I leaned over the stone rim. At the bottom, water shimmered faintly. My face appeared — a messy-haired boy distorted by trembling light. Then, slowly, beside my reflection, another face emerged. Mine. But older.
Ten years, perhaps more. The same features, yet sharper, tired in ways I could not yet understand. The eyes carried a knowledge I had not earned. I turned immediately to my right, convinced someone stood beside me.
No one.
When I looked again into the well, the water showed nothing. Not even the child I had been seconds before. Only darkness pretending to be depth. Perhaps the light had shifted. Perhaps imagination had played its usual tricks. Childhood is generous with explanations.
Olga approached, bowl in her arms, laughing softly as she pinched my cheek.
​
I never looked at a well the same way again. It was not a hole in the ground. And it was not only imagination.
I understood that many years later — when I realized that some places do not show what is there, but what is waiting.

When tarot returns to my thoughts, it rarely arrives alone. It brings with it the escorts of the dead — Hermes moving sideways through myth rather than ruling it, Anubis weighing silence more carefully than souls, shadowed figures half-erased on Etruscan walls, dogs waiting at riverbanks no map records, pale birds crossing northern skies carrying away something no legend dares to call a soul. I do not think of them as religious images or anthropological curiosities, but as recurring intuitions humanity never managed to abandon: the certainty that crossing is never solitary, that every threshold requires a presence beside us, something that does not control the mechanics of passage yet makes passage possible.

What strikes me, what binds all these figures together, is the act of crossing: no one passes alone, every threshold requires a presence, a guide, something that does not master the mechanics of transition but makes it possible. During a reading this becomes evident. Nothing happens outwardly, and yet perception slips imperceptibly out of alignment. More than an observable event, it is an inclination of reality, like when a room in which we grew up suddenly seems larger or smaller, altered: nothing has been moved except our experience, shifted by years, by what we have lived, by the diamonds of illusion and the stones of uncertainty.

At that moment, seated at the table, my beloved rings on my fingers and the minor and major arcana ready to be unveiled, I am not simply preparing to interpret the cards but waiting for the dark companion to arrive, if the mind succeeds in unplugging itself from the chaotic energy of Samsara, from the turbulence of daily life. When the companion finally appears and shows itself, trusting me, sniffing me perhaps to see whether I smell of too many expectations or weekend adrenaline and projects, it does not have a human face. It is not a deity, nor an inner voice; writers and poets call such presences Muses and wait for them adorned with platinum anklets like dancers of the seven veils.

Years ago I began calling mine the white dancer, not a woman, nor a symbolic figure in the usual sense, but a bird resembling the cranes that appear in Eastern paintings, almost devoid of narrative weight. I first saw it years ago in a quiet winter marsh near the Po, after spending an afternoon wandering through a small riverside gallery exhibiting faded landscape studies by minor twentieth-century painters — canvases filled with mist, reeds, and unfinished horizons — and stepping outside just before dusk, where a solitary white heron rose from the fog with a slowness so deliberate it felt less like flight than permission. That image never left me.
With its improbable balance it settles beside consciousness. It tilts its head, makes small adjustments, as if calibrating something I cannot see. It does not come from the cards. It arrives when the cards cease to be regarded as tools. When it rests there — and the sensation is always precisely that — the multiple connections of the mind call a kind of truce, each loosening its chemical claim to specialization. Thought remains suspended long enough for something to show itself without being interrogated.

I will confess the abstraction that overtakes me at that point: I find myself inside a vast metallic egg, sealed and luminous, where images and brief sequences glide along curved walls, and the cards become my eyes. Separate events begin to brush against one another, to merge and blur; distant memories shorten their distance and decisions not yet taken tremble as if fizzed by a magnetic field. I certainly do not see the future, nothing of the sort, but I watch fragments of events detach from the spinal column of linear time and wander, becoming everything they can be, kaleidoscopic, mutable, feathered with the chromatic plumes of sliding doors and free will or perhaps a glass of cognac too many, possibilities dressed in a thousand colors and hairstyles Roman, Celtic, or seventies.

The bird, my light companion, remains motionless while this unfolds; it guides by stabilizing, and that is the true labor of the psychopomp: to keep the passage open long enough for perception to traverse its possible stages without breaking or closing its eyelids out of skepticism. For this reason I stopped long ago thinking of the seventy-eight cards — or more, depending on the deck — as autonomous entities. They seem rather like the feathers of my companion, a small Prometheus who descends to earth only to return again. When the reading ends, the bird leaves without a final gesture; I do not expect to notice its departure immediately, nor any farewell. Daily reality returns with almost brutal speed: notifications, noises, demands, the compact surface of things. And yet something remains slightly misaligned, as if gravity itself had been adjusted by a few degrees.
​
Perhaps the ancients were not wrong to multiply psychopomps, not because there were many of them, but because each era must reinvent the form of its escort. Ours, discreetly, may be made of printed paper. Or perhaps not: the paper is merely the place where the bird chooses to land.

I did not choose three readings.
Or rather — I believed I chose them, as one believes to choose a road already waiting beneath his feet.

The number three has pursued me with the patience of ancient symbols, appearing not loudly but persistently, like a recurring dream whose meaning refuses explanation yet shapes every awakening. Before numbers were counted, three was already lived: arrival, passage, departure. The first architecture of breath. The hidden grammar of existence.

The Greeks understood this long before certainty became fashionable. For the Pythagoreans, three was the first true number — not accumulation, but harmony. One is solitude, two is conflict; only with three does tension find form. A line hesitates, a pair struggles, but a triangle stands. Stability is born from the third presence, the invisible mediator between opposites.
Centuries later, stone remembered what philosophy had whispered. Medieval cathedrals rose like petrified prayers, each arch repeating the same ternary secret: ascent requires balance, and balance requires three points of faith. Father, Son, Spirit — theology translated into geometry, belief stabilized through proportion. Even those who entered without faith walked unconsciously inside a triangle.

The philosophical three is also the initiatory three. Every initiation unfolds in silence through three thresholds: ignorance, fracture, recognition. The triangle is not peaceful; it is decisive. It closes the wound opened by duality. It says: the world is no longer divided — it has direction.
Perhaps this is why, without consciously deciding, I shaped my readings into three paths: The Threshold, where one stands before the descent; The Well Path, where one enters the symbolic depth; and The Thoth Well Path, where the descent becomes language itself — sharper, more demanding, illuminated by a different fire. These are not services but distances from the same center, three ways of approaching the same dark water.

For more than ten years I have used only three tarot decks. Others sleep in drawers like dormant constellations, waiting for another sky. Yet my hands return, stubbornly, to the same three presences. Repetition becomes ritual; ritual becomes recognition; recognition becomes fate.
My grandmother Olga — whose story belongs to another night — lived with three cats, all black, as if shadow itself required repetition to feel complete. She never explained anything about tarot. She simply practiced attention. From her I inherited not knowledge, but permission: permission to look longer than others look, to remain where meaning begins to tremble. Perhaps The Well Path began there, not as a system, but as an atmosphere quietly planted in childhood.
Three loves have marked my back with scratches that time refuses to erase. Not wounds — inscriptions. Desire writes in threes: longing, union, disappearance. Every love believes itself singular, yet each repeats an older geometry already traced in the body.
I have read Black Spring by Henry Miller three times. Each reading erased the previous one. The first was hunger, the second disillusion, the third recognition — the unsettling discovery that books do not change; we orbit them like planets completing invisible triangles of time.

One could spend an entire lifetime counting the ternaries hidden in ordinary existence. Life itself unfolds in three movements: birth, existence, death — or perhaps transformation, which is only death seen from the other side of continuity. And then, according to certain traditions, the story refuses to end. The Bodhisattva stands at the threshold of Nirvana and turns back, choosing return over completion, compassion over silence. A third way again: neither escape nor attachment, but presence.

Three is persistence. Three is memory learning to take shape. Three is the moment when chaos consents to meaning.
The Well is never entered alone. One descends. One confronts. One returns.
Always three.
It should come as no surprise that the symbols marking the three levels of reading I propose are triangles.