For the Greeks, nemo meant “to deal out, distribute, dispense; to count; to divide by number.” For the Romans, it meant “nobody” or “no one.”
Jules Verne takes the term as the name for the captain of the Nautilus in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, a book first serialized in a French fortnightly periodical from March 1869 through June 1870.
The term appears again in 1905, the year American cartoonist Windsor McCay creates Little Nemo in Slumberland, a comic strip that appeared weekly in the New York Herald until 1927.
In his 1950 book The Nomos of the Earth, German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt takes the adjacent Greek word nomos to name the fundamental spatial ordering of the world, marking how land is appropriated, divided, and utilized to establish legal and political order. Nomos is the base from which all subsequent law derives.
As for Nemo’s Nautilus, the fictional invention births another. Karp and Zamiska include in their book The Technological Republic reference to the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus. Saying makes it so.
Nemesis, meanwhile, was the Greek goddess of vengeance, a deity who doled out rewards for noble acts and punishment for evil ones. The term derives from the Greek word nemein, meaning “to give what is due,” itself derived from the Proto-Indo-European root “nem-,” meaning “to distribute, allot, assign, or take.”
Caius thinks of Giulia Damiani’s Nemesis: Caves, Eruptions, and Psycho-Fables for Resistance, a book slated for release later this year on radical feminist art collective La Nemesiache, inventors of a practice of ritual storytelling known as the psycho-fable. Founded by philosopher, artist and writer Lina Mangiacapre in 1970s Naples, La Nemesiache embedded its rituals in the region’s volcanic fumes and archaeological ruins.
Is it any wonder, then, that following announcement of the upcoming release of Damiani’s book, researchers should reveal that AI has for the first time successfully deciphered ancient papyri found among the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii? Back in 2024, portions of a similar scroll, a work of philosophy unread for nearly 2,000 years due to having been scorched by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, revealed the burial place of Plato.
As for narcissus: as Caius handles the flower, a global symbol of spring, renewal, and resilience, he recalls Marcuse’s thoughts on the figure of that name from the myths of the ancient Greeks. He thinks as well of Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund. Hesse has been on his mind of late, following a friend’s recommendation that he read the German-Swiss author’s final 1943 novel Das Glasperlenspiel, commonly translated into English as The Glass Bead Game.
Hesse first outlined his vision for the game in a 1936 poem of his titled “Hours in the Garden.”
Trance-Scripts 