welcome to
Gehenna.
Inspired by Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, specifically his Barromean Knot structure, Gehenna’s Conquest tales the breaking of the mind. Thus it is important to understand Lacans three orders of the mind: The Imaginary, The Symbolic, and The Real. These three orders create the structure of human subjectivity. If any single ring is cut or broken, all three separate, demonstrating that the cohesion of the self requires all three orders to work coherently and together.
Gehenna's Awakening
Pain and trauma are an oblivious realm navigated in apathy and resentment—a limbo. Gehenna resided in this limbo for years, unable to grasp the loss of her parents nor confront it. Here, she wandered in sin and decay.
It wasn’t until Gehenna returned to her parent’s bedroom and faced her rotting mother’s corpse that an escape from this limbo emerged. As she began to play the organ, a spiritual guide appeared. One that would deliver her on a journey through her own internalized hell—a nightmare dreamscape to conquer her mind.
The Borromean Hunt
A young woman cultivates into her adulthood by her proven ability to provide for herself—considering her future husband would work out of the countryside, away from the home. Thus it was tradition for every girl to be taken by her father to hunt on her eighteenth birthday, an act Gehenna’s strict mother thoroughly opposed. A gamey dear would signal impending misfortune for the family, a meal endured nearly every generation. A tender deer, contrarily, signaled fertility to come. Something rare.
“Shoot it!” Gehenna’s father yelled, pointing at the deer.
Aphanisis
A vanishing or fading of a subject, particularly the extinction of the self, representing the fear of losing one’s capacity for pleasure and desire.
Upon the dawn of her dark descent, Gehenna bared witness her deepest trauma—the mutual slaying and murder of her parents. In a moment of fear and exuberance, an escape from her parent’s captivity, all she could do was run. Run from the trauma, run from the pain, run toward the darkness, and escape the world she had so long resented.
Hell: Through the Valley of Gehenna
Manifesting in this world, Gehenna trailed her younger self falling deeper into her psychosis driven state. This world began to abstract from the one she was familiar with. Here her fears and traumas coalesced into realms and circles of the mind, reflecting her harshest terrors and sins. Architecture reflecting divinity and the profane exemplifying her repressions materialized on this path to redemption. Each a monument displaying her descent to madness that she now must understand in order to defeat, a mirror into her unconscious.
Jouissance
A paradoxical enjoyment that goes beyond the pleasure principle, involving an excess of pleasure often bent with pain, self-destruction, and intense discomfort.
A choice was made at the demise of her parents—whether conscious or not. Either absolve her deepest desires and traumas, coinciding with the vanishing of her mother’s spirit. Or spiral down a path of exploitation, with sin and desire. Gehenna was chained to life and pleasure became euphoric. Nonetheless, such a paradox further allowed her pain and suffering to ensue.
Lust and desire are mere facades of pain and pleasure in the mortal realm, drives created by the mind and further suppressed by it too. They are concepts which encourage one to consume the self and the gods, beings fictionalized and feared upon by the imprisoned mind. Through the gates of Gehenna, a Citadel loomed. A Citadel of the mind, a holy place and likewise a prison. Here Gehenna lied prisoner and perished, leaving a shell of her body in the limbo realm praying to be saved. Thereby, her prophecy had begun to be fulfilled. Gehenna must blindly see herself as glorious, but not divine. She must witness her consumption of a false self and see her glory in order to free her captured psyche.
Consumption of the False Self
Through the Battle of Revelation
Witnessing herself as a false god and the suffering she brought upon herself delivered a newfound profoundness to Gehenna. It brought a sense of pure divinity to her conscious. However, a battle presented itself past the grand exit of the Citadel of Gehenna’s mind: a battle of revelation. On the left a king of serpents and a black swan stand, opposing an Ox, Headless Man, Eagle, and Lion—the four angelic creatures of revelation—on the right. The match is still standing; Gehenna must make it past the battle without interfering, allowing herself to reach the divine top of her mind.
A Thorned Statue Atop the Citadel of her Mind
At the very top of Gehenna’s mind stands a garden of revelation—the highest point of her life and her first moments of realization. Gehenna’s mother holds her outward over a stream of blood, a river of consciousness which will flow till her death—a sacrificing of her daughter will occur. As Gehenna reaches the very top, she runs past a council of herself playing a match of chess. Behind stands a grand golden baldachin covered in roses and mirrors on top, demonstrating Gehenna’s thorned relationship with her mother. Below stands two sculptures harking back to Gehenna’s deepest trauma: a depiction of her repressed murdering of her mother. Chessmate.
Beware A Mothers Wrath
Beware a wrathful mother for she will punish her daughter for a lack of perfection. As well as respect—and knowledge, or experience. A wrathful mother will inflict pain on her daughter to chisel her divine creation. This mother will lead her daughter to madness, a madness only derivative of generational pain. The same pain she endured from her mother and one unable to merely dissolve. This is for trauma is a figment of the mind. A puppeteering of pain and repression.
Awoken: Gehenna's Conquest
Gehenna’s trauma has been tamed, the deer she first hunted now stands as a figment of her imagination. She has emerged victorious from her descent through her imagined hell, glorious and adorned in armor that now stands as a relic of her defeat. She holds her sword out, which has now dulled from a sharp point for protection into a structure of her mind. A weapon turned to staff, a signal of grief and strength. Gehenna’s mind conquered.
©2026 by Julian Yazijian.