Lantern
in the fire
Info
Author Moisés Morao
Role Author & Art Director
Overview
Lantern in the Fire is an autobiographical memoir and visual system developed around survival, archetype and the alchemical integration of the shadow.
The project focused on translating a decade of personal collapse: sexual abuse, drug addiction and a psychotic break, into a visual language capable of holding extreme emotional weight without aestheticizing pain.
Through a combination of editorial direction, symbolic photography and Jungian narrative structure, each chapter of the book is reflected in one of the Major Arcana of the Tarot, utilized not as divination but as the archetypal map of the unconscious that structured the author's own recovery.
The result is a body of work built to coexist between literature and contemporary art, transforming a private testimony into a shared act of recognition for any reader still standing at the window.
A palette
descended
from shadow
and
amber.
To inherit a father's breaking is not a biological curse. It is a map waiting to be read.
What began as a private notebook became, over four years, the slow archaeology of a body that had survived more than the mind was able to remember. The Major Arcana of the Tarot appear here as architecture, not content: thirteen archetypes holding thirteen chapters the way a riverbed holds a river, invisibly, structurally.
This is not a redemption story. It is the record of the exact instant a body decides to stop running, lie down in its own darkness, and call the monster by its true name, only to discover that the devil had always carried mine.
THIRTEEN MIRRORS
Thirteen chapters
I was eight years old
the first time I learned
that silence could
have a weight.
— FRAGMENT FROM CHAPTER 3
For one hour,
out loud, until the
word lost its wound:
Moisés, the devil is you.
— FRAGMENT FROM CHAPTER 6
THE BOOK
exists as a physical object.
FROM COVER
Currently in final edit.
Madrid, 2026.
Not a catalogue.
Not a portfolio.
A book.
BACK COVER
— SEAL
This
tattoo
has been
on my
left arm
for
fifteen years.
I N S C R I B E D · 2 0 1 0
D E C I P H E R E D · I N T H E B O O K
The lantern, the king and queen, the number 13, the all-seeing eye, INRI, the swords of the archangels, the letters S and M — every symbol that would later structure the book was already there, drawn on the skin by a younger self who could not yet read what he was carrying.
I only understood what
it said while writing
this book.
