Day Eleven. October 25th. Knave of Pentacles.
Definition: The traditional interpretation is application, study, reflection, news, messages and the bringer thereof, and role management.
Detail: What is the Elsewhere Tarot presenting?
This one feels obvious to me. Students in a classroom, sketchy and dark like the shadow figures on prior cards, and a central one of them doesn’t have a head. They’re shadows, like the ones at the consignment shop. They’re us without the things that create us, actualize us? And the headless one, the knave, is the apprentice who can’t think for themself, can’t get off the directed path, the path of heritance, of objectification and exploit of others, of dealings in the commodified life. This is the young MBA student, the privileged son of wealth who’s never going to question the ideology he’s been taught, who’s never going to be spiritually actualized.
Day: Hmm. I feel I have constant encounters with this kind of dude. Young dudes straight out of college who think they know how the world works. Analytics. Workflows. Agile methodology. Sales. Scams. Pickup artists. Crypto. Grind. No true intuition. No compassion. No artfulness.
I actually don’t love Esther Lisa Freinkel Tishman shoehorning the “Day” prompt into #dropm78 this year. It feels like forcing me to try to connect with tarot as a divination tool, and not the conversation with a deck creator about the workings of the world that make it compelling to me. I’m not like this dude who’s never going to be spiritually actualized, and though they’re everywhere, there isn’t one of them who I interacted with today. Though I can say I wished today that my games and writings had wider appeal, and understand they don’t because dudes like this won’t ever appreciate their metaphysical purpose.
Discovery: So, the figure on Pamela’s Page of Pentacles is supposed to be a student. Studying a pentacle? Studying the Earth? Studying the commodification of life? It certainly matches the Elsewhere Tarot classroom scene. And the Elsewhere Tarot tells me that this is a student incapable of thinking for himself. Incapable of skepticism. He’s learning the systems of the contrived world. He’s surrounded by a lovely, natural world, but his attention is on the object of commodification.
#tarot #dropm78 #ElsewhereTarot #KnaveOfPentacles #Pentacles