Isabel Cooper's Blog, page 12

Stuff

Continues to be going on! So Drunk Tarot next week, I promise. Meanwhile, here is a clip of Stephen Colbert being awesome and also geeking out hardcore about LotR:

Not Tarot, Directly

Because I am LARPing this weekend. Instead, have a short story-ish-thing that I wrote some years back, when I did a bunch of microfiction based on Tarot cards or runes. This one is about the Four of Pentacles: stasis or stability in material things, caution, security.

There’s a hole in the back of the closet, and the sky beyond is a different color.

There’s a path between the buildings where a strange light shines, not quite sun or moon or stars; not fluorescent or incandescent.

There’s an archway made of flowers she never saw in her life, and she’s sure they’d be in no book either.

She always pauses. She always hesitates. She always thinks this should have happened when I was younger.

Younger, you don’t think about the practicalities. You don’t wonder whether the world beyond has air you can breathe or food you can eat, much less birth control and dental work and a good facial scrub that doesn’t take too much effort. You don’t wonder how you’d get by. You can think of running away for a summer and washing dishes to get by, and not remember that you hate washing dishes and you hate retail and what if you break a leg out there without any insurance? Younger, everything is excitement. Saving the world. Talking white horses and summer days with no mosquitoes.

Younger, you don’t think how hard you’ve worked to get here. You don’t have those summers of eternally standing behind a counter that smells of Windex and raw meat, or the winter nights trying to grind the principles of algebra into your brain so that you would pass and pass again, or the desperate months of resumes and interviews, praying that the stockings will wait to run and the manicure will wait to chip until after because People Notice These Things, remembering names for references, storing experience away like dragon gold–two months makes a year and two years makes five and then I’ll be safe, then I’ll be okay no matter how bad it goes here.

Hurdles, one after another, like the track meets she never ran or the gymhankas she read about when she was younger. And then…

…then a place that her grandparents would have envied at her age, that plenty of people would still give their right eyes for. Safety. Stability. Security.

“S”, twisted little serpent-sound, is such a weird letter for solidity, and yet there it is. Again. There’s a joke here about other words that begin with “s”, but…it’s a pretentious little joke, a perennial-extra-in-RENT, clove-smoking, never-had-to-pay-your-own-bills bit of idiocy. Youth, again. Adults take the good job and the nice place and the steady relationship and are grateful.

She thinks all of that. It should satisfy her. It shouldn’t hurt.

And then she looks at the doorway again, whatever form it’s in this time, and she thinks about balance, and whatever the fallacy is that says effort on its own justifies more effort.

She thinks that younger, she wouldn’t have been able to say goodbye, that she’d have been someone’s job to look out for, that even a note wouldn’t have reassured anyone. She wonders how much it would reassure them now: I don’t know where I’m going, but I think I’ll be all right.

The air on the other side smells sweet when she takes one half-step forward, and it doesn’t kill her. The flowers brush against her fingertips without raising red marks.

She thinks that maybe, if she were in charge of…whatever…she would pick someone old enough not to expect featherbeds and pastel horses. Maybe she’d pick someone old enough to be cautious, to turn away and go about her business the first time, or the second.

She thinks maybe there’s a place between foolish and…

…she’s not sure what the word is.

She stands, and reaches her fingers out, and doesn’t step forward.

Not just yet.

 

More Tarot!

This is wicked late, and also on a Thursday, for reasons that involve me being distracted by Los Angeles and then stranded in WA–in a very pleasant location to be stranded, with very pleasant company, but still–and generally consumed with other stuff, some of which will be revealed in time. (Hard to reveal things out of time, to be fair.)

So here we are at the Ace of Pentacles, which is, well, a pentacle. Traditionally, a disembodied hand is coming out of a cloud offering said pentacle to all and sundry. Why? How? It’s just the sort of thing that happens. Disembodied Cloud Hand is a classic on all the aces; it’s one of the great unrecognized protagonists of our time, and someday I will write a three-book series about it.

The Ace of Pentacles, by the mnemonic system I mentioned before, is new beginnings in things of Earth, and in most by-the-book systems is similar: new opportunity, prosperity, manifestation. You might get a new job, move to a new and better house, meet someone hot or start sleeping with someone you already knew and found hot, buy a boat, etc. It’s generally a positive card, but it’s not the World or the Ten: it’s the start, but not the fulfillment.

On the other hand, the Aces and Tens have a thing where they replicate the Fool-World cycle on a smaller and more specific scale. So while the Ace is the start, it also contains everything after it–the seed, appropriately for this suit, that has all the genetic information it needs to become a tree. Whatever this new thing is, it absolutely has the potential to take you as far as you want to go where that aspect of Pentacles is concerned.

Two of Pentacles is some variety of dude, juggling two pentacles, usually inside an infinity sign, and no, these cards do not ever get measurably less trippy. Often juggler dude is standing on a seashore with one foot raised; one deck has him on a tightrope. As you might guess if you’ve been reading this blog or know, like, slightly more Jung than Dan Brown assumes*, these represent balance: elemental balance in the first case, not falling off a fucking tightrope in the second.

And yeah: balance in things of earth is the deal here. If this card comes up in a reading, you’ve got a lot going on, but you’re making it work, to fall completely into 2008 and the heyday of Tim Gunn. That or you’re going to have a lot going on and you’ll need to make sure you’ve got all your ducks in a row–and that you can keep them in that row, adapting on the fly when you need to schedule two dates in the same week or have a sudden deadline-intensive-but-rewarding project to rock at work.

When there’s balance, of course, there’s also the potential for growth, which is where the next card happens.

Three of Pentacles.

As I mentioned last time, all threes are about real growth in an area, so I’m just gonna put this link here. Symbolically speaking, when a man with a giant chin and a woman with the most seventies hair possible love each other very much, balance leads to growth. I have no idea what the football players mean in any occult sense, though, nor the very distressed octopus.

The Three of Pentacles shows one or more people working on pentacles. Because those things don’t just grow on trees. Except for the cards where they do.

More specifically, the meaning of this particular three is teamwork, success, satisfaction, or mastery. (Although so does working alone, and you don’t have to kick anyone out of bed in the morning.) (I’ll be here all night. Enjoy the veal.) To get things done in the material world (materia-aal), it often helps to work with other people; conversely, if you’re kicking ass and taking names, you’re probably going to draw other people to you.  That’s why you get followers at Level 9.

I’m gonna try to go back to a regular weekday schedule on this. Next week I have a LARP, though, so you might get a story instead. Meanwhile, all my books are available on Amazon, and all but the self-published ones are also at Borders, at Powell’s (which is awesome–I went to the physical store when I was in WA, and bought far more than I actually needed), and on the Sourcebooks website.

*I had been under the impression that cup=vagina is, like, the first day of Symbolism for Stoned Freshmen, but apparently you can buy yourself a fucking yacht presenting a fictional world in which this is a goddamn shocking revelation to all of your otherwise-educated characters.

Book Tour and Stuff

Hey, everyone!

This week I’m away from the office and also my normal amount of drink, so Tarot will continue next week. (I’ll be in California, with my family, and thus probably drinking a lot. I do not rule out the possibility that my interpretation of one or more cards will either be I LOVE YOU MAAAAAN or DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOUR PORBLEM IS I’LL TELL YOU WHAT YOUR PROBLEM IS, ACE OF PENTACLES.)

Meanwhile, the third of the medieval Highland Dragons books, Highland Dragon Master, is out 3/5–and has been named an Amazon Best Book of the Month in Romance!

You can find an excerpt on USA Today’s Happily Ever After, here: https://happyeverafter.usatoday.com/2...

Have a good weekend!

 

 

Pentacles!

Hey so I’m back!

Having gone through the Major Arcana, we’re moving on to the Minor. These are the ones that, if you take out either the Knight or the Page from each suit, correspond basically to playing cards. Swords are spades, to reverse the Sting lyrics; wands are clubs; cups are hearts; and diamonds are pentacles.

Now, with the Minor Arcana, I learned a good general-and-easily-remembered interpretation that applies to all suits. I’ll be going through the cards in more individual detail, but this is a good baseline to keep in mind. Each card number has a more or less similar meaning across all the suits, but interpreted in the light of what a particular suit is about.

One: The beginning, new beginnings, breaking ground.

Two: Balance and harmony, the potential for new growth.

Three: Actual growth and progression.

Four: Stasis, rest, stillness, stability.

Five: Dark luck–luck that at least looks bad on the surface, though it may be for the best.

Six: A quest or search.

Seven: Bright luck: things are looking good, though it might, as the fish dude says, be a trap.

Eight: A challenge–but unlike the Hanged Man, this is one you can handle. If the Hanged Man is the final fight with the leg sweeping and so forth (hey actually the position corresponds decently to that–holy shit, could I do a paper on the mystical/Tarot symbolism of The Karate Kid? I think I could. Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be English majors…) then your Eights are the training montage where you keep getting your ass kicked until you can do push-ups on hot coals, to unrepentently mix my martial arts movie analogies.

Nine: A whole lot of whatever this is, but either it’s not enough or that’s not all there is to the situation.

Ten: ALL OF THE THING. ALLLLL OF IT. For good or bad. The tendency in Tarot is for this to be really good in cups and pentacles, really bad in swords, and neutralish in wands. I can and will come up with a few theories when we get to specific cards, but I welcome others because I really don’t know.

Like the correspondence suggests, pentacles are to some degree about wealth. More generally, they’re about earth stuff: money, stability, sex, health, food. If it is or directly affects your physical body, pentacles is the suit you’re going for. The upsides of pentacles, or of people it describes, tend to be the expected sensual or physical things, plus being “down to earth,” all practical and level-headed. I wouldn’t say that they balance their checkbooks easily, because first of all that’s more an air/swords thing and second it’s 2017 and like five people use checkbooks, but they’re unlikely to splurge on designer shoes or big-screen TVs unless they know they can afford and will use them, say.

The flaws inherent in pentacles are stubbornness, laziness, and a tendency to concentrate on or overindulge in material things. Four of the seven “deadly sins” are pentacle traits, for reasons to do with Christian neoPlatonic weirdness. (Wrath is probably wands, albeit it makes sense as swords too–and there’s a whole occult controversy out there about whether swords are fire or air, so–and I’d stick Envy in cups and Pride in swords.)

(Pride in Swords sounds like a Japanese fighting game.)

In Tarot that’s less pure elemental and more specific, like the Rider-Waite interpretations, Pentacles is one of the “happier” suits: fewer of its cards mean dire shit, and the ones that do indicate challenges, like the eight, generally show up as “a complicated task lies ahead” rather than “holy shit, conflict and heartbreak and entrapment.”

Next time, we’ll get into some of the specifics, and I might actually make myself a for-real cocktail rather than straight-up pouring butterscotch schnapps into tea. We’ll see!

Rum, Judgment, and the World

Runner up traditions of the British Navy?

If one thing has become clear over writing this blog so far, it’s that there are a million and two Tarot deck variants, so I would be deeply unsurprised to find that both Sodomy and The Lash are cards somewhere. Which would then make the Admiral from Penzance the Emperor, probably, and…okay, I’m going to stop this line of thought now.

So here we are at the last two cards in the Major Arcana. Twenty-one seems like a lot at the beginning, not so much when you get there, insert sex and/or drinking joke here.

Judgment! (The musical! No.) Not Judgement in the parallel-to-Justice, having-opinions-on-people’s-choice-of-footwear-and-boyfriends sense; this is Judgment like before Day. New Heaven, New Earth, we shall all be made perfect and spiritual and ascend to join our brethren on a spaceship following the Hale-Bopp comet, depending on the eschatology you prefer.

Tradition depicts this as an angel (Wikipedia helpfully notes that this is “possibly Metatron” but said angel also has a trumpet so it could be Gabriel? Fucked if I know; angels are weird) blowing aforeparentheticallymentioned trumpet and thus RAISING AN ARMY OF WALKING CORPSES or maybe just resurrecting everyone so Jesus can look at them and either give the thumbs up or say “naaaaah,” and cast them into the outer darkness with wailing and gnashing of teeth and maybe releasing an album in Norway.   Less Christian-influenced decks have phoenixes and similar. The Thoth deck renames it Aeon and the image is two Egyptian gods, one superimposed on the other, plus a Greek letter and general trippy fuckery.

Like I said, this is generally about the end of things. Obviously not all things; like, this card has come up in readings and the seventh seal has not yet been opened, as far as I know. But, to steal liberally from Terry Pratchett: worlds end all the time. Someone dies, that’s the end of the world with them in it. You graduate from college, or get a new job, or have a kid? End of one world, because “world” (to steal liberally from John Michael Greer) comes from “weoruld,” or “age of man,” and basically means “a way that things were.” And it’s not that there’s nothing after this, or that the end of that world is always welcome–hey, if you believe Revelation-y Christianity, the post-Apocalypse world will be kinda great for people on the right side–but Judgment means you’ve got to leave that world behind to go do what’s waiting. To steal liberally from a song I heard a bunch (hey fuck you when did I ever claim to be original), every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.

(Small sentimental aside: when my folks retired, I went to the farewell dinner the school threw for them up in Maine, and I had to leave early the next morning to get to a game. I remember getting in the car at 6 AM and driving out of the small town where I’d spent bits of vacations–and some bits of unemployment–for twelve years, where I can still remember the layout in my mind and picture the house. It was a summer morning, and the sun was just coming up over whatever mountains they have up near Bethel, and, indeed, “Closing Time” started playing on the radio. You can say a lot about the impartial majesty and/or cruelty of the universe, but…sometimes it gives you a good soundtrack.)

And I guess that takes us to The World, as I’ve already touched on the etymology and one possible meaning of the word.  (The Thoth deck calls this The Universe, and…shut up, Crowley.) Naked woman, surrounded by a wreath and various evangelical/astrological/elemental/generally cool symbols.

The World means completion–and if you’re surprised, please log off, because you’re probably overdue at the barn raising–of one sort or another. “Having it all,” is the simple meaning I learned, and it’s true as far as that goes: if this card shows up as your future, you’ll probably get what you asked about and it will be as good as you think and life will be awesome.

But nobody has it all for long, right? This isn’t a movie: you don’t get the one final kiss and the swelling music and the end credits. Life keeps going, and the Wheel of Fortune is going to keep turning (it’s reasonably symbolic that the Wheel, Strength, and the Hanged Man, all of which are about endurance and patience and fate, are halfway between the Fool and the World, depending on how you’re dividing the deck) and “all” evolves, right? Your ideal life when you’re sixteen isn’t what you want when you’re twenty-six, which in turn isn’t what suits you at thirty-six, and so on.

Besides, everyone knows: when you reach the highest score, the counter flips over and you start at zero.

So The World is both “completion” and “new beginnings” and the pause between them, where you can reflect on where you’ve gotten to and be content there, before finding your next goal and starting again as The Fool. New Game Plus, if you will; sexy nurse outfit and/or lightsaber optional.

* * *

If you enjoy my ramblings here, you may enjoy my books! They exist on Amazon, at B&N, at the Sourcebooks website, or wherever fine smutty literature is sold.

 

Late Tarot Post

So I was reading American Crime Story recaps yesterday and then it was like 10:30 PM, so…belated Tarot at work!

Today, the first card is The Moon. It involves the Moon, le duh, shining (and in many decks, casting weird sun-looking rays down) over a beach or a riverbank, with two Stonehengy pillars, a dog, a wolf, and a crayfish/lobster/crab/other mayonnaise-adjacent marine mammal.

The Moon is about night and the things associated with it: secrets, mystery, imagination, hidden worlds, dreams, danger, and the wilderness. While it doesn’t necessarily mean deliberate deception, it does mean that you can’t entirely trust your perceptions, particularly visual ones. The moon doesn’t always give very much light; sometimes it doesn’t give any–although you can rely on it to move in its own particular cycle, suggesting a “trust but verify” element, or that you can rely on the situation to be what it is and people to be what they are, just don’t expect anything more–and darkness is confusing. To crib a passage from Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, sight is our most advanced conventional sense, but our capacity for abstract thought is what really sets us apart, and when we lose some of the former, the latter starts working overtime.

From the Star to the Moon, the deck is also going from a reliable but faint source of light to one that can be pretty illuminating but isn’t always–and then, with The Sun, to about as much light as we generally get outside of an operating theater, on a basically regular basis. It’s Apollonian AF to the Moon’s Dionysian: the respectable, material daylight world, where everything is solid and open and there aren’t a whole lot of secrets or unknown stumbling blocks. I heard somewhere that Metropolis is supposed to be NYC by day and Gotham is supposed to be NYC by night, and the dichotomy is an appropriate one here–the DC Tarot as per Google* has Superman as the Emperor, and I guess that works, but I’d say The Sun.

The card also means joy, success, accomplishment, and generally straightforward good things: there’s an order in the universe, and you’re in tune with it, so yay. In some interpretations, the Moon is associated with femaleness, and the Sun with maleness: this has a lot to do with Greek mythology, but also with the qualities assigned to each card, which are very yin-yang, and, like yin and yang, are also not innately male or female, but…magical power of cultural associations as symbols, hello entire different post for a day when I’m not at work.

Next time: I wrap up the Major Arcana with Judgment and the World, and probably get a new type of booze for the minor cards!

In closing, I’ll remind you all that you can buy my books at Amazon, Sourcebooks, B&N, and other fine websites. (Amazon also has the two works I’m self-publishing at the moment, Hickey of the Beast and Raising the Stakes.)

* Of course there’s a DC Tarot. This isn’t the Stone Age.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Izzy and This Herbal Tea Get Some Sleep

Yeah. Tarot next week. Meanwhile, enjoy this article on the Mary Sue and the related Twitter feed wherein my friend and fellow author Melissa Caruso discusses the logistics of fighting in various fancy outfits. I have some of the same experience she does (fighting in a corset is fine, for the record, it’s sitting down that kills, and you have to eat small amounts spaced out) but hadn’t thought to break it down this way; I will be using this thread in other situations!

Also, Pop Sonnets is here for all the pop-lyrics-in-Shakespeare-form you never knew you needed. But you do.

As usual, you can buy my work at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Sourcebooks, or other places that let you exchange currency for the written word!

 

Izzy and Coffee Explain the Tarot

Still writing at work! Now with the bonus that I woke up every two hours last night and have turned to various caffeinated beverages to stay focused, or at least give the appearance thereof.

As an occasional reminder: if you like my writing, you can find more over on my Amazon page, Barnes and Noble, Sourcebooks, or other places books are sold. I don’t talk much about the Tarot there, but I do write about people in a variety of times and places getting it on while in the middle of occult hijinks; on Amazon, you can also find my 1930s con artist and elf romance and my non-romance YA novel, Hickey of the Beast. These reminders will keep showing up in text, because the alternative is actually updating the links on the right, and uuuugh.

Last week, I rambled about Temperance and existing in two different worlds. The first card today, The Devil, is in part what happens when Temperance fails, and is one of two successive cards that are usually some variety of bad news.

There’s not much variation in appearance on this one. The Devil, in some form (often horns, often fur, sometimes waaay too many eyeballs–Jesus, medieval art is fucked up) hangs out on an altar while a naked man and woman (who are also sometimes demons, or at least tieflings, judging by the horns) glare at each other while chained to his pedestal. Classically, the poses of all three figures parallel those of the Lovers. (Exceptions: Robin Wood has the man and woman chained to a locked chest, for the reasons below, and the Lisa Frank Tarot features a banana in sunglasses and a leopard-print bikini, flanked by a watermelon slice and a pineapple, also in sunglasses; this is the best depiction of the Devil ever, and is also one of the images on my Twitter feed.)

This isn’t one of the Fucking Obvious Tarot, because it usually doesn’t represent the literal Devil or even necessarily a bad influence, but the meaning is generally pretty simple and unvarying: fear and desire. To quote a teacher of mine, these are two sides of the same coin (for the science-minded, flight-or-fight falls into the first category, and the other two fs are in the second, where your nervous system is concerned–though fear can also increase desire, which is one of the reasons taking a date to a horror movie *can* be a good idea, if you’re into that sort of thing) and each of them has its place in the world. Fear keeps us from getting ourselves killed, and desire makes us want to stick around and enjoy life. (And replicate, if you’re into that sort of thing.)

But they can both be a trap. The hazards of fear are obvious; those of desire are more about going full Queen and trying to get *everything* or holding on too tightly when you should let go, like the story about the monkey and the jar full of nuts. Temperance is about balancing two worlds, but the Devil is about being focused so much on the here and now, or the material, that you don’t see the bigger picture, whether that’s the spiritual elements of life, the social or interpersonal damage you’re doing while you chase your goals or avoid what you fear, or just that a different thing over there would actually make you happier.  Notably, in most traditional depictions, the bindings on the man and woman are loose to nonexistent: they really can get out if they want.

The way I learned to read Tarot is that, when your hopes card and fears card come up, they generally refer to things you shouldn’t hope for or fear, either because they’re going to happen anyway or because they shouldn’t and should happen, respectively. One of the more valuable things my mom told me, for instance, after a breakup in college, was that at thirty I likely wouldn’t be the same person I was at twenty, and I probably wouldn’t want the same person, either. Likewise, most things that seem like the end of the world aren’t, and most things you think are the Holy Grail probably won’t solve all your problems. If the Devil comes up in a reading, it’s likely a sign to think about what you fear and desire, and how that might be holding you back.

Speaking of being held back…The Tower.

It’s a tower! It’s falling! Usually there’s lightning involved and also bodies plummeting from the windows. This, as you may imagine, does not mean anything immediately good, or at least anything immediately comfortable for the people involved. Danger, crisis, destruction, cats and dogs living together, and so forth. However…

Fact I picked up from a book on religious experience and have wanted to use somewhere for a while: in Ancient Greek, “apocalypse” literally means “uncovering.”

So you kind of know where I’m going here. If you don’t: think Ragnarok. Or the Masque of the Red Death. The tower is destroyed, and that completely bites in the short-term, maybe even the medium-term, but the destruction has to happen, because the tower in the image, whatever it was originally, ended up being a trap. Set up impregnable-enough walls and you have a hard time getting out, until some event comes along and shows you both that there’s a world outside and that the things you’ve built and hoarded can’t keep you safe.

In other words: if you buy into what the Devil’s selling, this card is a reminder that you can’t take it with you and that, if you eat right and exercise, you’ll die anyway.  It’s pain and loss, but it’s also freedom and a tough sort of enlightenment: an event that breaks down some kind of borders (physical, emotional, societal, mental) and literally lets some light in, or one that destroys what had to go and leaves the field clear for new growth,

Like the man said, a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

And when it’s finished falling, we have The Star, one of the most good-omened and in a way most complex cards in the deck.

Like Temperance, the central figure in this one has one foot on land and one in the water. Like the figures in the Lovers and the Devil, she’s naked. There are stars above her and a reflecting pool in front of her, and she’s pouring one flask into the pool, one onto the land (which is generally all verdant and healthy-looking). Everything’s calm and peaceful and very free: nobody is binding this woman, or striking her with lightning, or bothering her in any way.

There are a lot of meanings here. “Hope” is the most basic, and the one that comes up the most in some form, as do cleansing and renewal, wisdom through meditation and intuition, and occult adeptness. (Unlike the Magician, the woman here isn’t showing off for potential patrons; unlike the High Priestess or the Hierophant, she’s not serving a role in an organized community; unlike the Hermit, she hasn’t defined herself by shunning that community. She just kind of is, and knows what she’s doing, and does it.) As with Temperance, her feet show that she’s comfortable in two worlds at once, but she’s pouring all of the water out into different places, not balancing the contents between two containers. She’s not being careful about excess or not: I’d argue that she knows that part of life will work itself out.

In reading methods or decks where The Moon and The Sun can mean the experience of being female or male (respectively) or of finding the ideal partner of that sex, The Star (despite being the only one of the trio with a naked adult on it) means the experience of simply being a person, independent of gender. It might actually go further than that, and mean the experience of being a person independent of societal roles, reactions to or attempts to manage those roles, or any of the necessary “clutter” of mortal life. It’s being in the moment and the world, while knowing that there will be others of both, and being okay with all of that. Take a breath, do what you need to do, and trust that the rest will work itself out.

Next time: More Cosmic Forces!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Surprisingly Sober Tarot

Mostly because work is slow, yet inexplicably frowns on me doing shots at my desk. I did eat half a cup of “Pub Mix” from the breakroom, though, so there’s at least the symbolism of being alcohol-adjacent.

The first card today is Death. This is the card that’s always coming up in movies and either portending horrible things or having the medium explain patiently that actually it just means change. Rider, often skeletal, often on pale horse, corpses, sickle, etc.  The Robin Wood deck has a Ghost of Christmas Future-looking guy in a red robe in front of a blossoming white rose; the Lisa Frank deck has a bunny in a tutu riding a rainbow-maned unicorn and laying waste to all multi-colored teddybears in her path, because of course it does.

In one sense, Explanatory Movie Medium is right. Death very rarely means actual death or catastrophe (if there’s a card that unambiguously means things are about to go pear-shaped, it’s generally the Ten of Swords, and in some contexts the Devil or Tower); it does mean comprehensive, profound change; and it specifically means change that you don’t have a lot of say in. You know that platitude about how when God closes a door, he opens a window (or a dress, if you’re Roger Sterling in Mad Men)? This is that. And however you might feel about the window, the door is still closed. Thus, as one variant fortune-cookie ending in college used to go, ending the age of wonders.

Like the Hanged Man was kind of a bigger and more cosmic Hermit, Death is kind of a bigger and more cosmic Wheel of Fortune. Not only does shit happen, shit happens, on occasion, in a really decisive way that you can’t work around. There are forces in the universe greater than you are, and sometimes the answer is “No.” You can maybe prepare for it a little, if only by not getting too focused on any one particular path; you can’t fight it; and it’s probably better to roll with the punches than rage against the heavens.

Going with the parallel theme, Temperance, like Justice, is about balancing two sides. Where Justice involves making a decision about human issues of morality or law, though, Temperance is about keeping all aspects of life balanced: everything in moderation, including moderation, and so on.

The card shows an angel pouring liquid from one goblet into another. Usually they’re standing with one foot in a river and the other on its banks; with that and the wings, you get three of the four cardinal elements. In a card that means not getting carried away, it may be fitting that fire, and thus passion, doesn’t appear so much.

In the Thoth deck, this is Art, and while I still maintain my “Crowley was pretentious as fuck” stance, there’s a certain way in which this makes sense. If you take it as read that the two goblets contain different liquids (water and wine, traditionally), the angel is getting up to some quasi-alchemical, or at least alchemy-suggestive, business here. Art (magical or creative) is about combining different substances to produce something new, thus connecting with alchemy on the other end.

And, of course, this could all apply to making cocktails.

Yes, this can be the tiresome grownup card of tiresome adulthood, and mean balancing your budget and skipping the extra drink at the party–but the traditional depiction suggests more, and justifies its place toward the Cosmic Forces end of the deck. The one-foot-on-land, one-foot-on-water pose gets us back to the Scarborough Fair stuff I mentioned last time, and the wings add to it. This is, or can be, a card about living in more than one world simultaneously, whether that’s balancing normal life with cosmic awareness, working an office job but partying on the weekends, or, I don’t know, business in the front and party in the back.