Day Twelve. October 26th. Knight of Pentacles.
Definition: The traditional interpretation is utility, serviceableness, responsibility.
Detail: What is the Elsewhere Tarot presenting?
A speaker at a lectern with a massive, sketchy, winged shadow looming above and behind him. It protects him. He speaks from its influence. He is not the mercenary aspect of commodified life of Pamela’s Knight of Pentacles, the beautiful doer of horrid deeds. He’s the silver-tongued voice of it, still an agent, but one in the sphere of influence, politics, narrative, lies.
And there’s this strange tendril from the audience, going up around the speaker’s legs and into the winged thing, making it like a dialogue balloon in a comic strip. And that’s what the winged thing is in a way. It’s the ignorance of the audience as a force that gives power to the speaker, that he uses in his narratives to shape the doings of his listeners in the world. On the Elsewhere Eight of Pentacles we saw a spiritually actualized figure in white and black robes rise above the contrived city, but these Elsewhere pentacle court cards aren’t a continued narrative of that figure. They are the students, agents, and powerful figures of the contrived world.
Day: Yeah, geez. Like the Elsewhere Ten of Pentacles everything about this card corresponds to the current U.S. Presidential election, and also to the bizarre politics of ignorance that’s everywhere.
Discovery: Lots of the printed meanings on my janky, bootleg RWS deck are bizarre, but “a useful man” is perfect for this dude on horseback, holding a pentacle. He’s a condottieri, a mercenary. You employ him for the tasks of authority in the temporal world. He’ll collect taxes for you. He’ll rape and pillage and suppress the resistors for you. You can reward him with an estate like the one he’s riding through (he wants you to) and he’ll take a wife for you from your converted subjects and have children with her to dilute their bloodlines and loyalties. And he’s beautiful, which masks his savagery.
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