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Numerologically, the Devil signifies a halfway point in the Major Arcana’s second cycle of ten. As the fifth card, it signifies a departure from the four-pointed, circulatory stability of Temperance, toward the spooky quartz and smoke of realms unknown. Temperance views our physiology as clearly-lit, merely a matter of proper balance, nutrition, and dialogue. The Devil seductively acknowledges that aspects of the body remain unknown to us. These mysteries are fecund ground for creativity, lust, and abstraction.
The Devil is intersex, genderless, all-gendered. The Devil is queer, playful with their own body, monstrous to some while inspiring awe, attraction, and imitation in others. The Devil is our patronness of weird fictions, leather, becoming-animal, everyday theatre, kink, serious play. In the Devil’s presence, boundaries between artificiality and “realness” become insignificant, as if they were never there. Everything is real and permitted in the body that takes joy in itself. Everything is real and permitted when we allow our bodies its crevices and shadows, its flora and animalia, its strangeness.
In another sense, the Devil can be seen as an emissary, a translator. Like a priest, the Devil can speak to us with the words of another world. It is one thing to listen to these words (which we all do sometimes, in moments of “abandon”), and another to pursue them, to become the Devil’s disciple. It’s the difference between hearing and heeding our calling.
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Common interpretations of the tarot’s Aces posit that the Ace of Swords and Ace of Wands are active, while the Ace of Cups and Ace of Pentacles are sitting, passive cards. It’s true that there is no explicitly human element here-- while a hand appears in the Aces of Swords and Wands, the Ace of Cups is ornate and unpopulated. But these dualities of passive/active (just like the binary of masculine/feminine) are only one way to enter.
The Ace of Cups is a case study in allowing the shapes and gestures of a card to guide us. The blue plumes descending from the cup’s walls are active, leading, while the walls are stagnant and monumental, lit like candles. This is an object of ceremony, but also of unexpected overflow, movement. Numerologically, the Aces represent complete potential; in the case of the Ace of Cups, complete potential for love and emotional fulfillment. The cup’s stagnant qualities remind us that love, courtship, and affection is full of ritual and tradition in our cultures. We light candles in our windows, we build ornate houses around what we want to say. But a called love-- a love with a calling-- has the potential for bottoming out these rituals, overflowing into new and radical avenues. What would happen if we abandoned our old rituals of love? What would happen if we challenged our rites of courtship and partnership? What traditions and cliches confine us, and what clear water flows if we slacken them?
INTERPRETATIONS OF THE MARSEILLES AND RIDER-WAITE DECKS, A CASE STUDY: ARCANUM XIII
In the Marseilles deck, Arcanum XIII is unnamed. The 20th Century British mystic A.E. Waite took the liberty of naming this card “Death” for his own deck, a choice which has reverberated throughout tarology and nearly every subsequent deck.
On the left is Marseilles Arcanum XIII, and on the right, the Rider-Waite Arcanum VIII. Nearly everything about the earlier Marseilles card changes in translation-- we still have a field of severed bodies in either card, and a skeleton, but otherwise there is little likeness.
The Arcanum XIII numerologically signifies a burst of energy and action after a time of accumulative energy. The Marseilles card shows us a fleshy, dynamic skeleton of red (blood), blue (intellect), and beige (flesh). This is clearly not a skeleton in the normative sense but an active body, albeit stripped to bone and its most simple, un-gendered self. The skeleton is plowing a black, fertile soil sprouting gold leaves. Spookily, there are also body parts strewn about the earth, yet there is no blood-- perhaps these are artifacts of the skeleton’s former life. This gesture might signify a radical shedding of dress and adornment, of gender and habit, of dressings and expectation. That which is shed is then folded into the soil to fester, compost, and yield new life.
This is a surface reading; much remains ambiguous about the Marseilles XIII. It is the only unnamed card in the Major Arcana, signifying an arcane quality beyond basic interpretation. Has the skeleton severed the heads we see in the soil (implicating it as a mechanism of destruction)? Is the skeleton the owner of these fields, or a mere tender? Is this an act of aggression or care? Labor or joy? Mechanism or liberation?
In the Rider-Waite card, the active skeleton of the earlier Marseilles card is drawn more typically, and dressed in a suite of armor. There is a white horse (its harness studded with skulls and crossbones), a black flag, a papal figure standing very small before the horse, a sun rising in the background between two towers, three bloodied and/or pleading figures on the ground. With this heightened imagery comes a reduction in ambiguity-- a cornered reading, further cornered by “Death.” This skeleton is clearly a destroyer of worlds. Signified by its armor and sheer largeness, it is invulnerable, as opposed to the naked and fleshy skeleton of the Marseilles. It is powerful and militaristic.
As students of the Marseilles, we revere it for its subtlety, which lends its cards to endless interpretations and endless gifts. Examining the Marseilles and Rider-Waite Arcanum XIII signifies broader stylistic differences between the decks, but differences in their degrees of interpretation. The Marseilles is a constant invitation. It is internal, soft, fluid, fluxing, subjective, ever-changing, ever-alive. This contrasts with the more rigid, florid imagery of the Rider-Waite that often signifies power, authoritarianism, gender norms, and destruction without rebirth.
The circulatory system maintains homeostasis, distributing blood and lymph, air and oxygen. As a system it exemplifies the constant conversations our bodies necessitate in order to maintain balance, circulate necessary aid and nutrients, and heal. It’s important to note that Temperance comes after the nameless Arcana VIII (commonly mis-read as the “Death” card), in which a skeleton can be seen upturning soil with a scythe. Arcana VIII plows and agitates the earth’s soil as a means of fertilizing-- this is how nutrients are fostered, how life is curdled out of death (compost, metabolism). It follows that the angel of Temperance is reaping those rewards. The angel pours water from one urn to another, yet the woven strands of water suggests a pouring up and pouring down: this is a gesture of circulation, conversation, and dynamic flux. The Marseilles teaches us always about the perpetuity of change, healing, and protection. This card is a great omen for protection through means of discourse and necessary movement. In a well-fertilized system, we make sure the proper aid is distributed evenly, constantly. There are no competing or opposing energies here, but only mutual support and dissemination.
The Hermit signifies crisis, walking backward into the unknown. The Major Arcana contains 22 cards; discounting the first (Fool) and last (World) cards, we therefore have 20 cards, or two sets of ten, each of which narrates an additive, transformational cycle. At 9, the Hermit signifies the end of the first cycle, arriving after the sated stability of Justice, and before the immutable passage signified by the Wheel of Fortune. The Hermit illustrates the crisis that besets us after sweet, harmonious stability-- the perfection of a craft, the humming peak of a relationship, the high point or crest. We fall quickly backward into the void. Our lantern glows red with virile blood. We are elderly at this moment, and masculine, pressed into the history of stoicism that might bolster us at this moment of self-crisis. When we cannot rely on our selfhood, we might fall back on the stoic statues of history as models for how to act and survive. This is our armor as we walk blindly into an unknown future, while looking backward for wisdom, toward the past.
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Our world abounds with metaphors that tell us if we’re sick, we deserve to die. Metabolized illness, expulsion of contaminants, purity, whiteness.
All pain radiates outward and beyond the body. Anyone who studies the mechanics of immunity knows that the body is more porous than we think, and there is no such thing as private health. This is true literally, physiologically— by the principle of herd immunity, we can only experience the benefits of vaccination if enough people around us also vaccinate. Health and immunological shields are never insular; rather, we cultivate a culture of health in which we rely on one another.
I also mean this energetically. Trauma travels. Anyone who studies epigenetics knows this to be true. Psychoanalyst Erik Erikson writes that the epigenetic principle is whereby “anything that grows has a ground plan, and out of this ground plan, the parts arise, each part having its time of special ascendency . . .”
Trauma roosts not only in the body, but in our inheritable chromosomes, which sometimes arise sporadically down the generational line. A young person whose great-grandparents survived the Great Depression must eat everything on their plate, no matter how hungry they are. These slouches, chronic pains, needling discomforts in the spine, flinches, and involuntary trembles—they have origin stories. Even in mice models, this has been demonstrated.
To put this simply: I am worried for the near future, but also intergenerational futures. I am worried about lead in our tissue and bones, where metals tend to nest after running our bloodstreams. I pulled the Pope, the High Priestess, and the Hanged Man.
I’m struck by how much the Hanged Man presents himself as progeny; the Pope and the High Priestess, fixed in each others’ gazes, exist in a cloistered and insular coupling. I’ve rarely noticed so instantly how the Pope appears to be ignoring his disciples in favor of his counterpart. Both are inside, shielded in heavy robes.
If the Hanged Man is their cast-out or forgotten child, he represents the sick or poor in this case. Burdened with debt, pre-existing conditions, illness, and/or trauma, he is outside amongst nature while his “parents” are inside, cloaked and protected. As we’ve previously discussed, illness is a state of nature. The Hanged Man is also archetypally paralyzed, caught in suspension. I am sick, but I cannot get help. I am hurt, but I cannot stop my wound.
He also shelters his parents’ untransformed trauma. The intergenerational, epigenetic damage to their nervous systems, brains, and wombs is now for him to contemplate. This speaks to me of unwanted inheritance. The state of a country, perhaps.
Where there’s hope in this reading, it’s in the disciples at the Pope’s feet, who are cloaked in the light blue robes of intellect, and who wear spirals in their hats, which signify movement and wisdom. It’s also in the Hanged Man’s state of incubation. While the High Priestess numerologically represents a process of incubation, the Hanged Man represents what is itself incubated. He is the contents of the egg she keeps behind her. He is waiting to be born, for his “time of ascendency.” While he waits, his mind, in its close proximity to earth, makes itself receptive to profound earthly wisdom-- the hum of metals, crackling seeds, the soil that speaks to us. He is also more androgynous than his parents, which speaks to me of the queer, sick youth who feel cast out or alienated by their ancestry.
I also see hope in his proximity to wands (signifying creativity), natural growth, and greenery. Healing may be possible for those who make themselves receptive to wisdom that is older than their parents, and those who invert themselves in times of authoritative crisis.
CHRONIC ILLNESS AND THE FLUX OF HEALING, A CASE STUDY: THE HIGH PRIESTESS
Illness is a state of nature. The cloistered cell belongs to itself. Not everything cold waits to be reheated.
Capitalist discourses of recovery tell us that after violence, after illness, we are imperfect until we return to a normative state. We metabolize injury until it is waste, until we shed our experience like clothes. In reality, experience ferments. Fermentation changes not only the sugar or yeast itself, but its environment. Gases and acids. Expansion and collapse. Digestion, no matter what we say, is not a clean process, but a transformative one.
The High Priestess sits in gestation, wrapped in fabrics and dressings-- dressings for ceremony, dressings for wounds. I know women like her, gazing off from their books in high towers, wrapped in their gauzes. In one reading, she’s been changed by something. She sits there to process what has occurred, and to decide how to live.
My mother. Stone-faced matron. Garments complex, enthroned in academia, in the dark belfry, she bears three grave crosses: what she did, what she wanted, and what is now possible. Her skin matches the egg behind her, guarded and strapped: her frozen plans. Pale and shrouded, she is chronically ill.
After sexual violence, we are told to heal until we can have “normal” sex again. After domestic violence, we are told to heal until we can be in monogamous, stable relationships again. After illness, we are told to heal until we can return to our prior mode of production, the shrewd and boyish Magician, who believes that everything can be controlled with his own instruments and two hands.
The accelerative heat of capitalism, rooted in linearity and progress narratives, tells us that coldness, “frigidity,” and illness are states of shame. What becomes of us, then, who are ill throughout our lives? We may never work, fuck, date, or live in normative patterns. We know that the triumph narrative of recovery is not ours.
Traditional readings of the High Priestess interpret her isolation as repression. We wait until she wakes up, closes the book, and leaves her tower for the warmth of the world. We must imagine a future in which this never occurs, and doesn’t need to. Healing is not an annulment, but a movement which is frequently non-linear and sometimes takes all our lives, subjecting us to constant flux. Illness is a natural state. The tarot, with its unceasing messages of fluidity and change, teaches us that flux is a wild, powerful end in itself. So we take healing at its face.
If illness is natural, it’s not necessarily exclusive of the ravenous joys of nature— one can be ill and also vibrant, adventurous, wise, and carnal. In the Priestess’ state of contemplation, we might imagine how this is possible.
READING: THE EMPRESS, THE MOON, THE HIGH PRIESTESS
This reading I pulled for a friend who was deciding where to move—her two options were stark and disparate, and each came with its share of baggage: different jobs, a relationship either broken or sustained, pursuits of entirely different passions.
The visual logic here is arresting. The Priestess and the Empress gaze at one another—the receptive Priestess looking behind her to the past, and the active Empress looking forward. The dogs howling at the Moon appear to be their emissaries, traveling and communicating on their behalf. In the Moon card, we glimpse fragments of their respective fortresses. There is a clear conflict between the active and perceptive mind. One piece of us longs to wait and accumulate, while another longs to burst into the world at once. But the Moon—a far more mature and spiritual card than the High Priestess or the Empress— exposes this binary as superficial.
Do we wait or act? Are we active or receptive people? The tarot teaches us that no card is purely active or receptive. Here is an elegant transposal of this principle onto a wider scale. We often obsess over material, binary conflicts without acknowledging the deeper thirst that swells at the base of our troubles—our sea of intuitive and spiritual well-being. It is here that we communicate directly, like the crustacean, with lunar radiations that we cannot explain. This reading asks: is our relationship with our intuition well-nourished? Has our intuition served us well lately? If not, why not?
When we dream our wildest, anti-capitalist dreams, what do we imagine for ourselves? When we fixate on material and immediate problems, or when we reduce our lives to binaries, what emotional needs do we neglect? If we saw every material possibility of our life manifested, and in each one, we were still unfulfilled-- what new strategies would we develop for ourselves?
The wise will align themselves with water in this case: fluxing, intuitive, yielding, rhythmic.
QUEER POSSIBILITIES IN THE MARSEILLES, A CASE STUDY: ARCANUM VI/THE LOVER
When we search, we can find queerness and queer potentialities all over the Marseilles deck. Gender is indistinct and fluxing. The most masculine-presenting figures, like the Emperor, harbor a core of femaleness, and many figures are intentionally drawn with ambiguous or no gender. One of the earliest, most clearly queer examples of this is Arcanum VI, the Lover (commonly mis-translated as the Lovers). But since the Marseilles deck as in constant dialogue with itself, I find it helpful to start with the Emperor, who might be seen as an earlier incarnation of the middle figure in the Lover card.
This is what’s fun about the Marseilles deck-- there are clues all over the place hinting at continuities. The Fool, a masculine character wearing red shoes, becomes the Emperor (Arcanum IIII). He’s kept his red shoes, but grown a beard. Perhaps having arrived at the end of his journey’s first leg, he’s markedly older and more experienced than the Fool, more materially stable, looking left to the past on what he’s done, achieved, and accumulated. He leans back on his hidden secret-- a female eagle (as signified by the egg she sits on). He’s comfortable and stable, but he hides a feminine, nurturing part of himself from the world, choosing instead to posture as uniformly masculine: bearded, holding his wand aloft.
The red-shoed man then grows into the middle figure in the Lover, Arcanum VI. We see him here looking younger, less masculine, and a good deal more vulnerable.
What is even happening here? Let’s dwell on all the hands. The figure on the left (whose gender is entirely indistinct) has theirs on our protagonist’s pelvis, signifying initiation, a clear desire for sex. The figure on the right has her left hand on the protagonist’s chest, like a sign of ownership or protection. Her red sleeve signifies bold action, even as the rest of her dress is blue, soft, floral, and receptive. It’s unclear whether the blue-sleeved arm belongs to her or the middle figure-- it’s as if their bodies have joined, becoming indistinct.
To make it all more complicated, the middle figure (we’ll call him the lover) is about to be pierced by the cherub’s arrow. There are many possible interpretations of this ambiguous situation. We can project infinite relationships between these three figures, and infinite consequences of the arrow. Here’s one, for our purposes.
Since being a bearded emperor, the lover has taken off his pants, become naked and markedly more feminine, and begun to socialize. Judging by the complexity of these postures, we can assume that he has shed the material stability of the Emperor card and bravely walked into the realm of ambiguity. This is not to say he’s having a bad time. Arcanum VI is traditionally viewed, numerologically and otherwise, as a card of new, informed love and pleasure. For the first time, the lover does not only what is stable and comfortable, but what he desires. He is shedding the trappings of masculinity that did not suit him. He is acting on the queerness that he used to hide from the world.
It’s tempting to reduce the lover to a binary sexuality-- maybe he’s ditching his wife or girlfriend for a man, since coming out as gay. But this is problematized by two details: first, he doesn’t seem all that eager to leave the woman on the right. In fact, they are bound by some complex, bodily dissolution of boundaries; they share an arm. They also mutually appear to be touching one another in a protective or loving gesture. I think it’s fair to say that the lover is not attempting to leave his female partner, but to broach the confines of his straight, monogamous life.
The second problematizing detail is the fact that we don’t know the gender of the figure on the left. So this is clearly a markedly queer relationship, beyond the gender binary. This is what demarcates queerness, after all: normative, binary sexualities just don’t cut it anymore. We leave the material stability and security of the Emperor’s straight, normative lifestyle, which also comes with bodily safety. This is not a simple or minor fact. To prize our true, strobing, wild desire over safety is not a choice many of us are willing or able to make.
It is a possibility. The sun torches in this new life, the arrow lingers above us. We might get shunned, beaten, pierced, or killed. Some of us might choose to lean back on the Emperor’s chair, guarding our femininity or gender non-conformity with the steadfastness of a warden, all our lives. Who’s to say it’s wrong to protect our bodies? But imagine what might happen if we shave our beard, stand beneath the sun, or gaze into the eyes of someone new . . .
