The Game

The Hanged One is one of my favorite tarot cards. I think all tarot people have cards they look for that will sell them on a deck if they’re good, and the Hanged One is one of mine.

A lot of artists draw an upside-down figure when they reinterpret the Hanged One. And upside-downness is important, but they’re so much more than that.

The Hermit is who you are when you’re alone, and everything you can learn while you’re in that state. They’re all the things you can only learn in that state.

I think the Hermit is a symbol of increasing importance in our time. We’re all a little more of the Hermit these days, as the world demands we be ever-more connected than before. 

The Hierophant is the reassuring truth that wise people lived before you did and wrote down their best ideas, and the refinement of that process created the body of knowledge you live in without questioning.

The Hierophant is also the demand built into the accumulation of knowledge: you have to protect, maintain, and serve any institution that houses it.

The Emperor is the divine masculine. He’s the old way, the way things maybe had to be in a more militaristic, lawless, and more violent world. Even if it isn’t really his prime era, he’s still powerful; he is power. He never goes away.

He’s this hard truth: power makes the rules. This is an uncomfortable truth, and he’s uncomfortable with it too. He often decides…

The Empress is the force of abundance—she’s everything you get to have when there’s more than enough resources to go around. That’s art, civilization, celebration, culture, pretty much everything we enjoy and call life. She’s the good stuff.

There was a time before her where we didn’t share and didn’t settle down, an animal way of living in our distant past but not erased from our genetic memories. That time was…

The High Priestess is a figure of conscience, of intuition, and of secrecy. She’s God as a woman, in the very-tarot language that describes woman as internal and man as external. Thinking of her as the God inside you helps explain the meanings associated with her card: she’s pangs of guilt. She’s conscience. She’s serene calm in the face of temptation.