May 31, 2004

• Aaack!  We’ll try this again.  I had this almost finished
  when my browser crashed.  Anything worth doing is worth doing
  over, right?  We shall see how “worth it” this turns out to be.

  My son Doug is creating a Tarot deck with symbols from Ragnarok Online,
  an RPG he plays.  I have, naturally enough, been acting as his
  Tarot consultant.  In addition to my knowledge and experience, he
  has at hand my collection of Tarot decks.  This week as he asked
  me about various cards, and as I looked at some of the old cards he
  pulled out for reference and at the new ones as he made them, those
  images melded with the other thoughts on my mind, about my primary
  relationship, about beliefs, heresy, orthodoxy, etc.  This is the
  result:

  The Lovers

  In
  the Tarot, Major Arcanum number 6 (The Lovers), symbolizes male/female
  interaction.  Some think it is about love and marriage. 
  Those things do fall within the scope of this card, but there is more
  to it than that.  Along with the other 21 Major Arcana, it
  represents a step, stage, or phase on the Initiate’s Path to
  Enlightenment.  It is said that the prototypes of these images
  were brought to Egypt from Atlantis, and that before they were made
  into cards for portability they existed as murals on the walls of a
  temple.  Existing cards may bear little or no resemblance to those
  prototypes.  Every culture that has taken the Tarot into itself
  has made its own imprint on the symbolism.  Each artist who draws
  a new set of images puts some of him or herself into them.

  In Doug’s Tarot deck, the young lovers affectionately hold
  hands and gaze into each other’s eyes.  Such symbolism is not
  uncommon in so-called “New Age” decks.  In my far from humble
  opinion, though, it is not truly an Aquarian Age arrangement.  It
  relates more to the mid- to late-Piscean Age philosophies found in
  Courtly Love, Romance, fairy tales and soap opera.  I don’t think
  it represented the true state of affairs for most couples in the Middle
  Ages any more than it would for most today.  It symbolizes
  someone’s fantasy, an ideal relationship where both partners are
  focused on and absorbed in each other.  Never mind that not much
  work would get done and the offspring of such a union would be
  neglected while the parents obsessed on each other… as I said, it’s a
  fantasy.

  
  I see a more workable arrangement, and to me a more attractive one, in Maya Britan’s I Am One
  Tarot.  It is also, I think, much more truly Aquarian Age in
  philosophy than any other I’ve seen.  And well it might be, its symbolism having
  been channelled from Spirit  in a series of Ouija Board sessions
  during the big outer planet alignment around the end of the 1960s that
  many astrologers feel marked the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

   The card is called Unity here, not Lovers.  The pair are not
  absorbed in each other, but both face upward, arranged in a circular
  pattern to indicate cyclic movement and flow.  The woman on top
  with a wand in her hand and the man below holding flowers, symbolize a
  reversal of traditional gender roles, but the circle implies that no
  one is “on top” all the time.  Roles shift.

  Another significant difference in symbolism between the past age and
  the new age relates to clothing.  We’re becoming more open,
  sharing more,  keeping less hidden, so nudity takes over from the
  robed and garbed figures of the past.

  
  The Visconti-Sforza Tarot, a Renaissance deck bearing the distinction
  of being not the oldest extant deck but the most complete of the old
  decks still in existence, shows a couple with their right hands
  clasped, standing before a winged angel-figure.  Those elements
  are fairly standard among Medieval Church-inspired Tarot decks. 
  The Medieval Roman Church “inspired” a number of Tarot decks by
  persecuting and executing a number of people who carried and used the
  older pagan symbol decks.  The Tarot became bastardized and
  bowdlerized in self-defense.  In that crop of decks, the man gazes
  adoringly upward at God or His angel, while the woman gazes lovingly at
  the Man.

  This deck was made to celebrate and commemorate the joining of two
  Italian families.  The Sforzas were merchant princes.  The
  Visconti family produced more than one Pope.  I have read that the
  picture on this card is a wedding portrait of the couple whose marriage
  joined the two families.  The symbolic meaning of the blindfold on
  the angel escapes me.

  What I know of Mediaeval and Renaissance European culture suggests that
  this symbolism relates to an ideal marriage, not to the actual reality
  of the time.  In reality, I think we’d see a man in armor focused
  on war and a woman looking in a mirror while being tugged this way and
  that by the children surrounding her.

  
  If we were to symbolize an actual modern marriage, rather than an
  ideal one or an archetypal one, I think the man would be focused on
  something symbolizing his work (perhaps a pile of money) and the woman would be
  focused on two and a half children… reflected in her mirror.

  My Google image search turned up an anime-inspired deck
  with the man looking at a watch while the woman anxiously or sadly
  watches him.  I think that pretty well sums up some of the
  relationships I’ve been reading about here on Xanga.

  
  I did mention, didn’t I, that artists reveal things about themselves
  and their cultures when they draw Tarot decks?  In Brian Raiter’s Cynical-Literalist Tarot,
  the Magician is doing a sleight-of-hand card trick, and the Hermit is a
  scruffy-looking nude dude flipping us his middle finger.  Having
  stopped shaving my legs in the 1960s, around the same time I stopped
  wearing bras, I know that hairy legs are not found only on men. 
  Nevertheless, this pair of lovers looks to me like a couple of guys
  coupling.

  Mr. Raiter says he didn’t study any traditional Tarot symbolism, but
  only created his cards from what the titles of the Major Arcana
  suggested to him.  His inspiration was a box of business cards
  with an obsolete address on them.  His hope, he says, was that by
  expressing his cynicism in a time of depression, it might help relieve
  him of the cynicism and the depression.  He had at least partial
  success in that.

  
  The prize for most interesting, intriguing, disturbing “Lovers” image goes to John Bergin.

   I was so intrigued by the hooded, manacled, and wired-up couple
  and the shot-in-the-head angel with the serpent-and-apple around its
  neck, that I Googled the artist.  I think I found two John Bergins.  The one calling himself John Bergin III
  works with a needle, doing some distinctive skin art.  He also
  does flash-book work  for other tattoo artists to copy, as well as
  “fine art” paintings.

  This other John Bergin writes and illustrates “comics”:  graphic stories, and is also a musician who goes by the name C17H19NO3,
  the chemical formula for morphine.  Interesting man, with what
  appears to be a most interesting love/sex life, to gauge by his
  images… that’s “interesting” in the sense of the old Chines curse,
  “May you live in interesting times.”

  • 12:20 am
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