I’ve decided to do the #dropm78 tarot challenge again this year. It’s choosing a deck that’s new/unfamiliar to you and working through the cards one per day in a specific order to find your understanding of them, starting with pentacles. (The organizer’s intro video for this year is here.) I tried it last year with the Mary-El Tarot and only made it eight days, but I think I learned more the kind of deck I might connect with better for the whole thing.
So this year the deck I chose is the Elsewhere Tarot.
Day One. October 15th. Ace of Disks.
Definition: Waite says “In old tarot packs this suit used to be about money.” He wants them to be about earthly life. That’s always felt forced to me for Pamela’s cards. She had such frustrations with money in her life. She said that drawing the cards was a lot of work for not much money. I love her. It was her idea to do pictorial minors and I’ve never felt like Waite gave her as specific art direction on them as he did for the majors. So the minors are her understanding of the world, and for her the pentacles are about our human relationship with money. We live in a world made of it. It tells us who we are, and what our value is. It directs our actions in unwelcome ways. It corrupts us.
So the Ace of Pentacles? With money we have taken the mystery and metaphysics of life (the pentagram) and commodified it (by forming it into coins). Aces are beginnings. The Ace of Pentacles represents the flow of time and the temporal world making a starting investment in you. It is heritance and venture capital, as well as being given a path and obligations.
Detail: In the guidebook to the Mary-el Tarot Marie White refers to the Thoth Tarot as “occult” and the Rider Waite Smith Tarot as “mystical,” and it was then clear to me why I connect better with some decks than others, and why I didn't connect so well with the Mary-el, which is very beautiful but also very steeped in alchemy and the occult. A “mystical” deck is an expression of what its creator understands about the world from their own lived strivings in it. And as I've thought about it, maybe only the minors in the RWS deck are a “mystical” understanding of the world from Pamela's perceptions in her lived life, and the majors are Waite's more occult thinkings. So for the #dropm78 this year I was looking for a deck that's more fully mystical, the perceptions of its creator in contending with the turnings and challenges of the world, across all the minors and majors too. And I feel the Elsewhere Tarot may be this.
So...what is the creator presenting on the Ace of Pentacles?
A convoluted assembly line with a human figure turning half-dark objects into dark objects. The lightbulb above is on, meaning the assembly line is moving. A video monitor is watching the human figure, meaning we are subject to judgement and expectations when we participate in the engine of commodification of life.
Day: This is the new category the creator of the #dropm78 Esther Lisa Freinkel Tishman added this year. I'm supposed to find an understanding of how this Ace of Pentacles informs where I'm at in my life on this day, today. And...I don't know. Do I feel I'm on an assembly line? Am I feeling judged on my participation in the commodification of life? I don't know. I'm busy. I'm juggling multiple writing projects, as well as parenting my son. But that's all meaningful stuff to me. My assembly line is meaningful to me. My #JournalGaming and writings about it are acts of contending with the contrived world. I'm striving to connect with others. And maybe that's it. Though my work is meaningful most of my human connections are distant, and occasional, and through a computer monitor. The forces of the contrived world are strong and I have not escaped them. My work is still subject to their judgement, and my relationships are still made distant by them.
Discovery: I chose a side deck, a calibration deck. It’s this bootleg RWS deck with badly reproduced art and janky meanings printed on the cards that I bought at a thrift shop and that I love so much. I feel like Pamela is so present when I use it, annoyed at me. “Dammit Paul.” But I want her present. It's her view of the world I want. It's the same side deck I used last year.
And reading back, last year I wasn't feeling the Ace of Pentacles. I wrote that the coin from the air felt like a trust fund to me, but that was pretty much it. This year I understand better. A trust fund, a VC investment, a family lineage, inherited beauty, a parent successful in a material sphere, they get you started down a path, with possibility, but also not one you've fully chosen for yourself, and they come also with expectations from the world and obligations.
So, the Ace of Pentacles in the Elsewhere Tarot. I think the creator totally gets it, but theirs is...narrower and maybe bleaker in what it's saying than Pamela is with hers? You've been given a role, with obligations and scrutiny, in a contrived engine. But Pamela sees, I think that the Pentacles themselves are made from a worthy and metaphysical essence that we deserve and might be able to connect with. Other later RWS Pentacles feel pretty bleak to me, but not the Ace. Pamela sees that heritance and investment puts you on a path, but a world believing in you like the Ace does is still very enlivening and rich with potential for you.