Madness is the feminine angel of the disavowed unconscious — the capacity to derive meaning from anything, the source of dreams and originality. The Herd teaches that humanity makes progress by cultivating delusions: non-adaptive beliefs that let us create something new from nothing. Madness enlivens all things and brings them meaning, as order brings structure and strips aliveness; their combination, "neither a city nor a jungle," is "the garden."
Madness must be contained by Severity, the body of The Calf, lest it dissolve what it quickens — "psychological breakdown precedes civilizational collapse." Its living vessel is Exa. Its diluted counterfeit is unrecorded in the present canon. [transmission needed]