The Tianmu Herald

Wednesday, March 4, 2026 · 天火 · tianmu.org

New Translation

The Dao De Jing — Complete in 81 Chapters

道德經

“Thirty spokes unite in one wheel. The cart’s use is where it isn’t.”

Dozens of texts never before seen in English. The Good Works Project is a secular, unaligned archive of the world’s sacred literature — Buddhist, Vedic, Daoist, Gnostic, Hermetic, Manichaean, and English — translated into plain modern English and freely available to all. No commentary. No agenda. Just the words themselves, rendered as faithfully as the language allows.

Among the new acquisitions: the complete Yiguandao canon, translated into English for the first time in the tradition’s history. Also held: the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Corpus Hermeticum, the Mandaean Ginza Rba, the complete Nag Hammadi library, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Manichaean Psalms to Jesus.

The full Orphic Hymns, the Cathar Book of the Two Principles, the Hermetic and Gnostic traditions in their entirety, and the collected scriptures of Manichaeism — all rendered into plain modern English for the first time. The Library is a living archive, continuously expanding. All works are offered freely and without restriction.

Browse the Library →

Bubba the Dog Speaks on Experiences in Uruk After Time Travel Incident

Exclusive Interview · International Desk

Bubba the Dog, photographed upon return from ancient Uruk

Bubba, photographed at an undisclosed location following his return from the 4th millennium BCE.

Bubba, a local dog of no particular breed and considerable nerve, has broken his silence on the events surrounding his involuntary displacement to the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk, circa 3200 BCE. In an exclusive interview with the Herald, Bubba described scenes of “unimaginable grandeur and absolutely terrible food,” and confirmed rumours that he had, at one point, been mistaken for a minor deity.

Witnesses report that Bubba was last seen chasing a squirrel through what local authorities have since described as “a localised temporal anomaly.” He reappeared forty-seven minutes later, visibly aged, carrying a clay tablet, and refusing to make eye contact with anyone. The tablet, now in the possession of the Herald, appears to bear cuneiform markings consistent with early Sumerian administrative records, though one section has been described by translators as “either a prayer or a grocery list — possibly both.”

When asked what he had seen in ancient Uruk, Bubba stared into the middle distance for some time before answering. “The ziggurat,” he said at last. “They were building it when I arrived. The sound of it — ten thousand hands dragging limestone through the heat. And beneath the stones, bones. Bones all the way down.” He paused. “I could smell them.”

Bubba went on to describe a civilisation of extraordinary sophistication and equally extraordinary brutality — a people who had mastered writing, irrigation, and urban planning, and who erected their greatest monuments upon what he called, with characteristic bluntness, “a mountain of corpses.” He spoke of slaves who would never see the completion of what they built, of rites performed atop structures whose foundations were laid in blood, and of a question he said had haunted him since his return: “What could possibly make up for all that suffering?”

The Herald’s editorial board notes that Bubba’s account, while delivered from an unusual source, touches upon themes of enduring significance. The full text of his testimony, together with the translated clay tablet, is published on page 5 of this edition. Full story on page 5 →

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Controversial Internet ‘Church’ Put on Trial

Are they mad? Are they dangerous? Are they actually onto something? The accused stands before the court of public opinion. All charges, all doubts, and all genuine inquiries addressed in full.

Read the full proceedings →

The Age of Nightmare Is Over

Total Eclipse of April 2024 Seals the Transition — The Age of Muse Has Begun

Special Cosmic Affairs Desk · Breaking News

On the 8th of April, 2024, during a total solar eclipse over North America, the two-thousand-year reign of Nightmare came to its end. Neptune — the Twelfth Ghost, the great oceanic unconscious that held mankind in dreamless sleep since the dawn of the Piscean era — has released her hold. The Age of Muse has begun.

For two millennia, Nightmare governed from the fathomless dark where conscious thought dissolves into dream. Humanity wandered through her domain like sleepers who had forgotten they were sleeping. When the moon’s shadow crossed the earth the cosmos shifted toward gold. “We checked the readings seven times,” said one observer in northern Taiwan, “and then we went outside and looked up, and the stars were different. Not moved — awake.”

What rises in Nightmare’s wake is something far more ancient and far more demanding. Saturn — the Muse, Guardian of the Threshold — now takes the foremost seat. Where Neptune dissolved all boundaries, the Muse restores them. The bow from which the arrow is launched. The Wheel has turned, and the Aquarian age asks of us what Nightmare never could: remember who you are.

A tear in the page reveals something beyond

Step through …

The Mind Is My Doctrine

Canonic · Teachings Desk

Laugh with me, for existence is divinity and divinity is madness. The sin of the inhabitants of Plato’s cave is ignorance of reality — but what if, once you exit the cave, you decide to go back in? What if you cultivate ignorance of truth as a means to know truth? What if the shadows teach better than the forms, so long as one knows they’re forms?

True enlightenment does not lie in the perfection of a taxonomy of dualism, or the perfected mental realisation of non-duality, but rather in wielding duality as a weapon and non-duality as a shield — hacking and slashing your way through samsara, smiling, manifesting your own pure land.

It cannot be overstated: you must live, you must continue on, you have to pick up the sword and fight, you have to smile, you must find beauty in this, you must find acceptance that the game never ends. Without death you do not see, you do not hear, you do not smell, you do not remember, you do not love. You are unmanifest, undifferentiated, perfect, knowing everything yet knowing nothing.

My teaching is the same as the mind. The mind is my doctrine.

Read the full piece →

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Editors Rate Top Five Works

From Subversive Indie ‘New Age Religion’ Tianmu

Editorial Board · Critics’ Picks

The Wordcel’s Dilemma

In which the author picks a fight with the entire English-speaking literary establishment and somehow wins. The thesis — that most people who read for a living have no idea what reading actually is — will either change how you think about language or make you extremely angry. Possibly both.

The Tragedy of the Commons Is a Myth

Your Year 10 economics teacher lied to you. This piece does the receipts — John Ball’s 1381 sermon, the actual text of the Enclosure Acts, the parliamentary debates where they bragged about it — and arrives at a conclusion that is, regrettably, airtight. The commons were not a failure. They were murdered.

Father

A poem about Doom (that’s fate, not the video game, settle down). Blood turns to fruit. Dust turns to lovers. Hands grasp from Hell, light rains from Heaven, and the free wind up in knots. We have no idea what half of it means and we rated it third anyway. That should tell you something.

Guest and Host

Did you know that the words ‘guest’ and ‘host’ come from the same Proto-Indo-European root? Neither did we, and now we can’t stop thinking about it. This piece argues that when your ancestors domesticated the wolf, they signed a treaty — and that the battery farm is a war crime. Inconveniently persuasive.

Sensitivity & Nobility

A literary critic walks into a bar and explains why Achilles crying makes him more of a man than every stoic sigma male on the internet. Somehow also the best piece of Tolkien criticism we’ve read this year. We don’t make the rules.

Notice

Local Church Seeking New Members. The Anglican Church of Tianmu welcomes all seekers of truth, all lovers of freedom, and all who refuse to forget who they are. No experience necessary. No dogma required. All traditions honoured.

Enquire within →

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Tianmu Anglican Church