The Garden of Delights (central panel detail), by Hieronymus Bosch, c. 1490–1510. Museo del Prado, Madrid.
The world moves in cycles, and it certainly feels like the end of an era.
We sit in our shrinking safe places, scrolling between cake recipes and doomsday news. We witness the atrocities human beings are capable of, against their own kind, against the natural world, against every other creature they share it with. Where is all of this leading?
As Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov: “The devil struggles with God, and the battlefield is the human heart.”
We are, undeniably, capable of the worst. And yet alongside the beauty we have built, the science we have grown, the art we have made, the life we have nurtured, we also watch the madness we inflict on our own kind. A professor of social studies once observed that the people who feel they no longer need community, because their wealth and power have placed them above it, are most often the ones responsible for the suffering of the many. These days, the kind are dismissed as weak. The righteous are called emotional. The just are accused of being mad.
But the deepest mark of human intelligence is empathy. The first sign of evolution is an act of empathy, the understanding that our well-being depends on the well-being of the other. We are, after all, gregarious creatures.
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Penguin Classics edition). Cover art: Detail from The Night Before the Exam (1895) by Leonid Pasternak.
It is in this spirit that we conceived this year’s Zenobie T-shirts. Two standalone ideas, sharing one heart: A New World Order and Warrior of Light.
Anonymous, Sun Rising over the City (1582), from the alchemical manuscript Splendor Solis.
Stone relief of an Ouroboros and the Big Dipper constellation.
The Limbourg Brothers, The Fall and the Expulsion from Paradise (c. 1416), from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry.
A New World Order
A man and a woman, hand in hand, encircled by their ecosystem and bound within an Ouroboros.
Their gesture is one of equality and quiet respect. They look at each other and recognize the light in the other, seeing themselves in their counterpart’s soul. They stand in reverence of the nature around them, flourishing.
They are part of it: their bodies, even their reproductive selves, are made of leaves, of flowers, of small living things. They are born from nature, and they reproduce under its rhythm and balance. The Ouroboros is a call for the continuation of this cycle.
The new world order Zenobie calls for is not one against patriarchy, nor one that replaces it with matriarchy. It is a system that honors every living thing, from a grain of sand to the sun above our heads.
The sun is untouched by our smallness. Nature will always regenerate, always survive. We are the lesser creations here, and it is time we moved into a humbler order: one where we live as part of our habitat, not against it. In balance. In harmony.
ZENOBIE, New World Order Light Yellow T-shirt
Diana the Huntress, Roman fresco from cubiculum W 26 of the Villa Arianna at Stabiae, 1st century AD. National Archaeological Museum of Naples (Inv. 9243).
Warrior of Light
A new world order cannot be born without warriors willing to imagine a new way of life. A single small candle can push back a great darkness, but we need legions of them. The Warriors of Light are called to stand up and claim their world, against the lies, the fears, the fabricated realities. Their mission is to reclaim power within the system. The kind should be valued. The just should be followed. The gentle should be respected. Those who lead with heart and empathy should be celebrated. In a world where greed, force, and dominance have been crowned as the highest places of power, it is time for a different way of seeing.
Warriors of Light exist. I have met many. They are part of your
everyday life. You only have to look around.
ZENOBIE, Warrior Light Yellow T-shirt
This year’s T-shirt collection is not just cool apparel. It is the beginning of a community, of people who think alike and want to rally toward a better future. A world where women, men, fauna and flora stand as equals, and where we each take on the role of Warrior of Light as a shared quest. Imagine recognizing one another through what we wear. Knowing, without a word exchanged, that we are walking the same path.
— Zenobie —
