A darker view of the Three of Pentacles

Since June 9, 2024, I have seen the Three of Pentacles as being primarily a dark or negative card, even though Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot assigns it a positive meaning. Here I want to explore this darker view of the card, incorporating some comments by Bill Wright on my post "All the pebbles I have seen."

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1. Working in the dark to build a church from secret plans

Bill notes that on the card, "men are working on/ in a Cathedral or Church," and

The Three of Pentacles shows these men working literally in the dark - the men are juxtaposed against a completely black background and environment while they discuss their plans.

He further notes that the man on the left, wearing an apron and holding a maul, is a stonemason, thus suggesting Freemasonry and the Book of Mormon theme of "secret combinations." Working in darkness, secret plans, and (somewhat surprisingly) church-building are all portrayed in negative terms in the Book of Mormon. Many passages could be cited here, but one part of the book that hits on all of these themes is 2 Ne. 26-28, part of Nephi's long discourse that makes up two-thirds of that book:

And the Gentiles are lifted up in the pride of their eyes, and have stumbled, because of the greatness of their stumbling block, that they have built up many churches; . . . . And there are many churches built up which cause envyings, and strifes, and malice. And there are also secret combinations, even as in times of old, according to the combinations of the devil, for he is the founder of all these things; yea, the founder of murder, and works of darkness . . . . For behold, my beloved brethren, I say unto you that the Lord God worketh not in darkness (2 Ne. 26:22-23).

And wo unto them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the Lord! And their works are in the dark; and they say: Who seeth us, and who knoweth us? (2 Ne. 27:27, quoting Isa. 29:15)

For it shall come to pass in that day that the churches which are built up, and not unto the Lord, when the one shall say unto the other: Behold, I, I am the Lord's; and the others shall say: I, I am the Lord's; and thus shall every one say that hath built up churches, and not unto the Lord (2 Ne. 28:3).

Yea, and there shall be many which shall . . . seek deep to hide their counsels from the Lord; and their works shall be in the dark (2 Ne. 28:9).

Coming back to the Masonic angle -- and we must remember that A. E. Waite, the designer of this card, was himself a Mason and wrote several books on the subject -- it is perhaps significant that there are three men on the card and that the only Masonic implement detected is the Maul. In the legend of Hiram Abiff, which is part of a Master Mason's initiation, Hiram was murdered in the Temple of Solomon (which he had designed) by three ruffians, lesser Masons intent on extracting from him the secrets of a Master, and the weapon that dealt him the death blow was a Maul (sometimes called a Gavel). One Masonic pamphlet I've read (I can't seem to find it online) says that the Maul is the only Masonic implement to have no explicit moral lesson attached to it, and the writer proposes that, as the weapon with which Master Hiram was murdered, it should serve to remind us of the sanctity of life. In other words, the implement Waite chose to depict on this card is one which in Masonry has no other symbolic meaning than murder -- specifically, secret murder committed by members of an oath-bound fraternity.

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The Three of Pentacles and the Devil

Nephi, quoted above, refers to "the combinations of the devil, . . . the founder of murder, and works of darkness." It is interesting to note, then, certain iconographic connections between the Three of Pentacles and the Devil card.

Besides the 14 cards of the suit of Pentacles, two of the Major Arcana also feature pentacles or pentagrams. A quick glance at all 16 cards incorporating this symbol shows that two of them stand out as different:

As you can see, almost all of the pentacles on these cards follow the same black-on-yellow color scheme. The only exceptions are the Three of Pentacles and the Devil:

Once this has been noticed, other correspondences between these two cards suggest themselves. The Devil's number is 15, and a trio of five-pointed stars represents the same number. In the Golden Dawn system, the Devil represents Capricorn, and the Three of Pentacles is the second decan of the same sign. Both cards have a black background, with gray and tan as the other dominant colors. Both show two figures standing on the floor and a third standing on a raised surface. This third figure raises the left hand ("left" from our point of view) and in the right holds an implement with its head angled downward.

On the Three of Pentacles, the implement is the Maul. On the Devil, it is a torch. However, John Opsopaus's Pythagorean Tarot offers a different interpretation of the Devil, portraying him as Hephaestus or Vulcan and putting in his hand what may look an awful lot like Dr. Evil's spaceship but is in fact "a large hammer or mallet."

I have connected the hammer-wielding mason on the Three of Pentacles with the murder of Hiram Abiff, as told in the Master Mason's degree. The password of the Master's degree is Tubal Cain. In the Bible, Tubal-cain is the first smith, "an instructer of every artificer in brass and iron" (Gen. 4:22), and a fanciful folk-etymology derives Vulcan from his name. Given the, uh, spaceship-like shape of the hammer on Opsopaus's card, it is significant that Masons typically portray the secret name Tubal Cain via the rebus "two-ball cane."

The name Cain is of course closely associated with secret combinations. The Jaredite secret combinations, we are told, "had been handed down even from Cain" (Ether 8:15), and Cain took a title that many have seen as a very thinly veiled reference to the rank of Master Mason:

And Cain said: Truly I am Mahan, the master of this great secret, that I may murder and get gain. Wherefore Cain was called Master Mahan, and he gloried in his wickedness (Moses 5:31).

Cain was succeeded in this title by Lamech, and thus perhaps by Lamech's son Tubal-cain (Moses 5:49). 

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The Three and Nine of Pentacles

One February 13, 2026, I drew a single card from my Rider-Waite deck, put it face-down on the table in front of me, and, as is my usual practice, attempted to perceive it psychically before turning it face-up. I "saw" three pentacles arranged in a triangle and a figure in a red and yellow robe, so I very confidently predicted that it was the Three of Pentacles. When I turned it over, though, it was the Nine.

This false prediction made me notice parallels between these two cards that I'd never noticed before. On the right side of the Nine of Pentacles, we have three pentacles arranged in a triangle, much like those on the Three. On the left, we have this same triangular arragement -- this time oriented exactly like that on the Three -- repeated twice. As it happens, these are also the only two cards in the deck to show someone wearing a yellow garment with a pattern of red marks on it. The grapes on the Nine, together with the woman's curly hair, also suggest the female figure from the Devil card.

As I contemplated the card, I thought about the falcon. This is a bird known for its excellent eyesight, but on the card its eyes are covered with a hood, which made me think of the line "the seers hath he covered." As it happens, this line from Isaiah is quoted in the very section of 2 Nephi I cited above in reference to building churches and working in the dark.

For behold, the Lord hath poured out upon you the spirit of deep sleep. For behold, ye have closed your eyes, and ye have rejected the prophets; and your rulers, and the seers hath he covered because of your iniquity (2 Ne. 27:5).

I've always seen the Nine of Pentacles as a very positive card, and I still think that is its usual meaning. But every card has many meanings, and one of its meanings does seem to tie it to the Three.

The three-by-seven grid and the Sephiroth

I have been working with this layout of the 21 numbered trumps of the Tarot de Marseille.

I arranged the cards in three rows and seven columns for practical reasons. The dimensions of the above image are roughly 3×4, making it convenient to display the whole thing on a computer screen, to print it out on a piece of A4 paper, or to lay the cards out that way on a table. Three columns and seven rows would be a much more awkward 1×4.

Nevertheless, three columns seems more correct conceptually, as it calls to mind the three columns of the Tree of the Sephiroth. Actually, the standard 10-sephirah Tree of Life (absent Da'ath, which presumably corresponds to the Fool) arranges the sephiroth in three columns and seven vertical levels. If we overlay that on our three-by-seven grid, ten of the trumps would be mapped to sephiroth. Ther are four logical ways this could be done: We could start at the Kether level and move down or start at the Malkuth level and move up; and within each level we could go from left to right or from right to left. The most promising mapping starts at the Malkuth level and goes from right to left.

A few of these mappings are obvious "hits." Netzach means "victory," and that is the traditional meaning of the Chariot -- called, in the first known listing of the trumps, Lo carro triumphale, "the chariot of triumph." Yesod, "foundation," is mapped to the Pope. The first pope is supposed to have been St. Peter, of whom Christ said, "upon this rock I will build my church" (Matt. 16:18).

Most of the rest of the mappings are at least understandable and defensible. The first and highest sephirah, from which all the others emanate, is mapped to the Angel, called "Judgment," but representing the love of God. Chokmah, representing direct inspiration, fits well with the bolt from the sun; while Binah, representing reflective wisdom, is well symbolized by the reflected light of the Moon. Geburah, called the "left hand of God" meting out punishment, is the Devil. Tiphareth, "beauty," maps to the beautiful woman subduing a lion, and Hod, "glory," to the Hermit with his blazing lantern. At the gestalt level, the left and right columns correspond to yin/feminine and yang/masculine, as they should.

The only really jarring mapping is between Chesed, "mercy, kindness, benevolence," and Death.

Visualize the devil, and he doth appear.

I’ve been experimenting with truly random card selection, using Random.org. Since this means drawing cards “virtually” on a computer, I decided that just before each virtual draw I should visualize myself physically drawing and turning over a card.

The first time I did this, I was a bit surprised that when I visualized turning over the first card, it was a specific card that presented itself to my mind’s eye: the Two of Wands. When I clicked "Randomize," though the actual card I got was the Nine of Pentacles, which is not at all similar.

The visualization of the second card was vague and generic, with no specific card appearing in my mind.

When I visualized turning over the third card, I got a extraordinarily clear mental image of the 15th trump, called the Devil -- specifically of the devil's face as portrayed on the Rider-Waite version of that card. I dismissed this, thinking it had come to mind only because that card had featured prominently in my recent "Reading for 2022" -- but when I clicked "Randomize," the card that came up was in fact the Devil.

There are 78 cards in the deck, so if you guess the card twice, the probability of getting it right at least once is roughly 1 in 39 (or 1 in 26, if we count this as three guesses instead of two) -- not extraordinary, but still "statistically significant" by the arbitrary standards of the Studies Have Shown racket, so it seemed worth noting.

More on the U.S. presidency in 2022

What fascinates me about Tarot reading is not that what the cards say always comes true, but rather the simple, astonishing fact that they always do say something. Whatever question I put to them, they always address it. It is not the accuracy that impresses so much as the sheer responsiveness. In theory, it can all be dismissed as coincidence and apophenia; in practice, this becomes harder and harder to do with a straight face.

Sometimes I think people like me shouldn't be allowed to play with Tarot cards. You take a tool designed to turn synchronicity up to 11 and put it in the hands of someone like me, and -- well, isn't that a bit reckless?

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My January 4 Reading for 2022 involved drawing "before" and "after" cards showing how various people and things would change or develop over the course of the coming year. Included were "before" and "after" cards for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

On January 6, wanting further clarification, I drew "before" and "after" cards for the presidency as a whole. Below are the two cards from the January 6 reading, with the corresponding Biden and Harris cards from the January 4 reading below.

The Two of Cups, for the start of 2022, clearly matches up with the Biden and Harris cards from the earlier reading.  It has precisely the same layout as the Devil card: a woman on the left, a man on the right, and a central non-human figure looming in the background. The man on the Two of Cups is wearing practically the same tunic as the Page of Wands, confirming that he is Biden, the woman is Harris, and the lion/devil is the shadowy power behind the throne.

At the end of 2022, the Queen of Cups shows a woman alone on the throne, dressed similarly to the woman on the Two of Cups (blue and white clothes, laurel wreath). Strength shows a woman with a lion. In my earlier reading, I was unsure as to which of the figures on the Devil card this lion represented, the man or the devil. In the Two of Cups, though, the lion clearly corresponds to the devil. It appears, then, that the year begins with Biden and Harris sharing nominal power but in fact controlled by a hidden "devil." By the end of the year, Biden is out of the picture and Harris is in control, in partnership with the "devil."

Leaving aside the Five of Wands, in which the five figures are not readily identifiable as individuals, we have the following mappings:

• the Devil = the lion-headed caduceus on the Two of Cups = the lion on Strength
• the Page of Wands = the Devil's male captive = the man on the Two of Cups = Joe Biden
• the Queen of Cups = the Devil's female captive = the woman on the Two of Cups = the woman on Strength = Kamala Harris

Let us look at each of these in turn.

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The Devil

Looking at the Two of Cups in isolation, I would never have thought to connect it with the Devil. Once the connection has been made, though, another image immediately comes to mind as the "missing link" between the two: Éliphas Lévi's famous drawing of "Baphomet" or "the Sabbatic Goat," first published in 1856 in his Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, and since coopted by self-styled Satanists. 

There is no question that Waite was very extensively influenced by Lévi, and his Devil is very clearly patterned after Lévi's Goat. We see the horns, the pentagram, the torch, the position of the arms, etc. -- all rather different from the way the Devil is typically portrayed in the Marseille tradition. However, Lévi's drawing also features feathered wings and a caduceus -- which appear not on Waite's Devil card but on his Two of Cups.

There is no lion's head on Lévi's Baphomet, though. For that, we need to look at another image: the myterious "Leontocephaline" (lion-headed) figure associated with Mithraism.

Notice the lion's head, the feathered wings, and the caduceus -- all the elements that feature in the Two of Cups. The exact identity of this figure is a matter of speculation and scholarly debate, but it has become conventional to refer to it as Arimanius -- that is to say, Ahriman, the "devil" of Zoroastrianism, whose name would later be used by Rudolf Steiner (and later still by my own circle of Romantic Christians) to refer to the materialistic, bureaucratic, "lawful evil" aspect of the demonic.

Are the two people on the Two of Cups drinking a toast to the devil, then? Ah, but the cups combined with the caduceus give an added meaning.

The cup and serpent is the Bowl of Hygieia, symbol of pharmacy. Here we have two cups and two serpents -- but the serpents are combined to form a caduceus, symbol of commerce. Isn't such an unholy combination precisely what we have in mind when we say "Big Pharma"? And isn't Big Pharma one of the primary manifestations of Ahriman in the modern world?

In this context, another detail of Lévi's Baphomet image becomes interesting: The monster's raised right arm is labeled "Solve," and his lowered left arm is labeled "Coagula." These have an alchemical meaning in their original context, but in the context of Big Pharma in 2022, it is impossible not to notice the resonance with a particular medical intervention, being pushed relentlessly by the Ahrimanic establishment, which is supposed to "solve" a supposed crisis but is actually causing a real crisis having to do with hematological "coagulation."

In addition to whatever Mithraic meaning it may have, the winged lion also appears in the Bible (Daniel 7) as a symbol of Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon. The "guardian of peace and security" statue that was briefly installed at the UN headquarters at the end of last year was connected by many with this beast, as well as with the Beast of Revelation -- which also represents "Babylon," meaning Rome.

Babylon, Rome, 666, the UN, Big Pharma -- Ahriman. The devil figure on these cards represents not some particular person who is the real power behind the throne, but rather the Ahrimanic System which is the power behind all thrones -- at least "till the thrones are cast down" (Dan. 7:9).

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The Page of Wands (Biden)

There is little to add to my discussion of Biden in "Reading for 2022." However, the addition of Baphomet to the mix suggests a possible interpretation of the Devil setting fire to the Biden figure's tail with the torch he holds in his left hand. The corresponding arm on Lévi's Baphomet is labeled coagula -- could this be a hint that Biden could be removed from action by pharmacologically induced thrombosis? That would be a very plausibly deniable way of offing him wouldn't it -- Alec Baldwinning him next time he does a fake peck photo op? The effect needn't be immediate, either. The Devil card shows his tail being lit as if it were a fuse, which makes me think of these lines from the They Might Be Giants song "Hide Away Folk Family."

Tippy-toe to the front door, Mother,

'Cause there's a guy with a long, long fuse

And the one thing you can't hide is all the fear you feel inside

As the fuse is spelling out these words

Chorus:

Hide away folk family

Or else someone's gonna get ya (Someone's gonna get ya)

Someone's gonna get ya

Hide away folk family

Better hide away

Better hide away

Tippy-toe to the flat-bed, Father,

Because they're pouring out our gasoline

And sadly the cross-eyed bear's been put to sleep behind the stairs

And his shoes are laced with irony

Chorus

Hello. This is Lesley Down with the daily home astrology report.

Taurus: Contemplate domestic turmoil.

Aquarius: Abandon hope for future plans.

I'm not sure if the Taurus and Aquarius references mean anything, but it's interesting to note that Inauguration Day is often the day the Sun enters Aquarius.

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The Queen of Cups (Harris)

Looking at all of the cards we are considering, we find Harris represented four times: twice as a woman with a cup, once as a woman with grapes growing from her tail, and once as a woman with a lion. This theme of cups and grapes reminds me that in Aleister Crowley's version of the Strength card (renamed Lust; in order to maintain his cred as the Wickedest Man in the World, Crowley renamed all three virtue trumps), the woman is portrayed as the biblical Whore of Babylon and is holding a cup.

Crowley himself characterizes this cup as "the Holy Grail burned with love and death," but in the Bible it is "a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication" (Rev. 17:17), and "the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication" (Rev. 17:2). 

The identification (divinatory, not literal!) is clinched by the way this character is introduced in Revelation: "I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters" (Rev. 17:1). If you look at the Queen of Cups, you will see that she, too, sits upon many waters, her throne being on a tiny island or promontory, with water all around. Note also that Biden and Harris are often disparagingly referred to as "Joe and the Hoe" -- the latter title being nothing but a dialect version of the word used in Revelation.

Oh, and did I mention that "Crowley's" cards were actually painted by a woman named Harris?

Reading for 2022

On the morning of January 4, 2022, I decided to do a reading for the year ahead. Not having any cards handy, I did this in a rather unorthodox way: I put a list of the 78 Tarot cards into random.org's list randomizer, and for each card I wanted to draw, I concentrated on the question and clicked "randomize," and took the first card on the randomized list. To draw the next card, I didn't take the second card on the list, but rather clicked "randomize" again and took the first. As a result, it was possible to draw the same card more than once, and in fact this happened twice.

I decided to look at a few different aspects of the United States in 2022, and I drew two cards for each of these: one for the start of the year, and one for the end -- the idea being that comparing the two would suggest what if any changes would take place over the course of the year.

I'm not entirely sure why I decided to do this, and even less sure why anyone else would want to read about it, since my credibility as a Tarot reader is essentially zero at this point. Readers of this blog will know that I mainly write about the history and symbolism of the cards and rarely ever make Tarot-based predictions -- the one exception being my extremely confident prediction that Trump would win the 2020 election. I made this prediction before the election, when it seemed that I was just stating the obvious, and then I stood by it for months afterwards, insisting that, no matter how increasingly impossible it appeared, somehow the election results would be reversed and Trump would end up back in the White House after all. The message of the cards was just so unmistably clear!

I suppose this could in principle still happen -- my prediction won't be definitively falsified until the 2024 election, after which even if Trump comes back, it won't be as the winner of the 2020 election -- but I'm not holding my breath. I could also try to defend myself with special pleading -- saying for example that I had predicted the true winner of the election, not the usurper who actually took power -- but I'm not going to do that. To all appearances, my prediction simply failed. Given free will, that happens. "Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail" (1 Cor. 13:8). Let's see if I have any better luck this time.

Here's my spread:

A few things immediately jump out here. I have written extensively about the link (originally proposed by Richard Arrowsmith) between the Sun card and the birdemic, and the Sun appears in this spread as one of the two cards for the birdemic. My probably-failed prediction about the 2020 election was entirely based on the extensive links between the Judgement card and Trump, and that card appears here under Trump. Finally, I interpreted a variant of the Strength card as Harris controlling Biden, and the Strength card appears here under Harris. So that's a pretty impressive set of coincidences.

How impressive? The Sun is the only card I have associated with the birdemic, the chance of at least one of the two birdemic cards being the Sun is 2.548%. I have associated two cards, the High Priestess and Strength, with Biden and Harris. The chance of at least one of the four Biden/Harris cards being one of those is 9.869%. I have associated two cards, Judgement and the Sun, with Trump. The chance of at least one of the two Trump cards being one of those is 5.062%. The chance of all three of these things occurring in a single spread is the product of the three percentages given, or 0.01273% -- approximately 1 in 7,856.

Now for my tentative interpretation of the details of the spread.

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Birdemic

The Four of Swords often indicates rest and recuperation, corresponding to the widespread sense at the beginning of the year that the birdemic is winding down and will soon be over. The design of course also suggests death, and it is impossible in this context not to notice the resemblance of the swords to syringes.

It's not really over, though, because at the end of year we have -- the birdemic! In particular, the Sun card depicts the beginning of the birdemic, coming out of China and going forth "conquering and to conquer" (Rev. 6:2). There is widespread expectation that birdemic panic will be ginned up again in the lead-up to the midterm elections in 2022, or perhaps is will be a new phantom menace coming out of China.

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Biden

Biden begins the year as the Page of Wands, whose quarterstaff and feathered cap suggest Robin Hood. The main point, though, is that a page -- a personal attendant of a person of rank -- is not in any way a leader. As is obvious to everyone, Biden is barely even enough of a leader to qualify as a "figurehead"; he is taking orders from someone. A "page of wands" is literally a servant to a wand or staff, and Biden has said before that he's going to "get in trouble with my staff" for taking unapproved questions from the press. "As if the rod should shake itself against them that lift it up, or as if the staff should lift up itself, as if it were no wood" (Isa. 10:15).

The year ends with the Five of Wands -- a chaotic brawl. This same card appears at the end of the year for Trump, suggesting that the chaotic conflict depicted will be between Biden and Trump.

The good news, from Biden's point of view, is that he's apparently still alive at the end of the year!

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Harris

The first card for Kamala Harris is the Devil. Her middle name is Devi, so even the name of the card is a hit! One obvious interpretation is that Harris begins 2022 as "the devil" -- that is, as an extremely unpopular person no one in either party likes. A closer look at the image on the Rider-Waite card suggests a more interesting, reading, though.

Suppose we identify Harris not with the devil himself but with the only female figure on this card. Since it seems obvious that neither Biden nor Harris is really running the country, the devil figure in the background represents whoever or whatever is. The two chained figures, then, would be Biden and Harris -- naked to indicate that they are a public embarrassment. If you ignore the devil figure, Harris is standing on Biden's right, indicating that (to those who can't see what's really going on) he is the leader and she is his "right hand man." In  fact, though, the devil is the central figure and thus the leader, Harris is his "right hand man," and Biden is in the less important "left hand man" position. Furthermore, the devil appears to be using his firebrand (French brandon) to set fire to Biden's tail! I have mentioned many times my persistent premonitions regarding Biden and "spontaneous human combustion"; one dream even had people saying "Joe Biden didn't spontaneously combust" in much the same way they say "Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself." Whatever is to be made of this puzzling theme, this card would seem to reinforce it.

The Harris figure's own tail ends in a bunch of grapes, and this made me think of an old sync post which I had not connected with Harris at all at the time: "Vineyard shouting with the bee whom hump" (sic). Hump suggests camel and thus Kamala. Bee is interesting because of the other Harris card in this spread, Strength. As I have said elsewhere, the Strength card is a "female Samson" -- that is, it was originally a picture of Samson killing a lion, but the figure was later misinterpreted as female because of the long hair. The only real "female Samson" -- that is, the only woman ever to fill Samson's role of biblical "judge" -- was Deborah, whose name is the Hebrew word for "bee." The Hebrew name is actually more accurately transliterated as Devorah -- so the nickname Debbie would be equivalent to Devi. Furthermore, the word-salad title "Vineyard shouting with the bee whom hump" is from a Google search result for a video of a sermon about the Hindu goddess Durga, referred to in the sermon as Mata, "Mother." Kamala Devi Harris is named after a Hindu goddess (Kamala is an epithet of Lakshmi), and she goes by Momala even though she is not a mother. Durga, according to Wikipedia, "is worshipped as a principal aspect of the mother goddess Devi," and "is often depicted as a beautiful woman, riding a lion or tiger" (like Magna Mater in Rome). A woman riding a lion is obviously related to the image on the Strength card, and the tiger is interesting because the Year of the Tiger -- and thus of Durga? -- will begin on February 1, 2022.

If the year begins with Harris in a position of weakness -- chained and subjected to the devil -- it ends with her in a position of strength. Where the Devil card has three figures, Strength only has two, and the woman is in control. Which of the figures on the Devil card does the lion correspond to, then -- the chained man (Biden) or the devil (the shadowy power behind the throne)? In my post "Strength in the Grateful Dead 'Ripple' video," I discuss a variant of this card in which the woman is black and is controlling a wolf rather than a lion; I identify the black woman with Harris, and the wolf with Biden (whose horoscope prominently features the constellation Lupus).

Alternatively, the lion could correspond to "the devil, as a roaring lion" (1 Pet. 5:8) and thus to whoever is controlling both Biden and Harris at the beginning of the year. There is widespread speculation that the power behind the throne is Barack Obama, who is a Leo. It is intereting to note that the biblical Deborah controls a man named Barak. I have also floated the idea here that Trump, another leonine figure and a popular "devil," is actually the power behind the throne.

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Trump

Trump begins the year with the Judgement. As I have already detailed many times on this blog, the angel on that card unambiguously represents Trump, encoding his name, his birthday (June 14, Flag Day), and even his trademark orange/blond hair. The image shows that Trump begins the year as quite popular (though his supporters bear a disturbing resemblance to gray "NPCs") but also "in limbo," suspended between heaven and earth, his status unclear. He has no contact with the ground, suggesting that he is increasingly out of touch with his base -- as can be seen in his recent tone-deaf shilling for the pecks, causing his own supporters to boo him.

As mentioned above, the year ends with Trump and Biden locked in some sort of chaotic combat -- with staves, not swords; a brawl, not a war. Is it possible that, after all this time, the result of the 2020 election will be challenged in a meaningful way, so that the year will end with it still up in the air? It can be argued that, since Biden is going to be in office for a while, it is in Trump's best interest to let him serve two years and make his comeback as soon after January 20, 2023, as possible. That way, depending on how the courts interpret the 22nd Amendment, Trump may get a 10-year presidency -- being elected twice, in 2016 and 2024, plus serving just under two years of a term to which someone else was elected (Biden in 2020). I don't think this is likely to work, but it does seem likely that Trump will give it a try and may intensify his efforts to challenge the election around the end of this year.

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Cabal

By "Cabal," I mean Them -- the demonic Establishment, spiritual wickedness in high places. They begin the year with godlike power over the whole World and end it as -- the Knight of Wands? I'm not sure what to make of this, except that it clearly seems to be a step down from the World. There's also an obvious connection to Biden as Page of Wands. A knight is a page's master. The two cards also feature the same background scene of a desert landscape with three mounds or pyramids.

The most optimistic reading would be to note that the Knight of Wands traditionally represents departure or flight, and to see Cabal "on the run" by the end of the year. I lack such optimism, to put it mildly.

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Christianity

Nothing very clear here. The Queen of Cups often means "loyal but stupid; loving, but overlooking the obvious" -- all of which I suppose could be called a fair description of organized Christendom's pathetic loyalty to the satanic System.

The King of Pentacles -- "dogmatic, materialistic, doing only what is expected of him" -- strikes an even bleaker note at the end of the year. We might note that many of the themes from the Devil card -- horns, grapes, a pentagram -- reappear on the King of Pentacles. It doesn't look as if we can expect any mass Christian awakening this year.

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Daily life

Absolutely unchanged! The before and after pictures are the same: Queen of Swords -- representing loneliness, isolation, and pointless cruelty. 

Beyond coincidence

My interest in the Tarot, though deep and persistent, is largely theoretical. I hardly ever do readings, though of course I know how and even seem to have a bit of a knack for it. I would estimate that I have done fewer than 20 in my entire life.

The less often you do something, of course, the less likely it is that amazing coincidences will occur in connection with that activity -- but occur they do.

One of the most amazing of these occurred fairly recently when, under circumstances on which this is scarcely the place to elaborate, I had occasion to use the Tarot to interrogate a poltergeist so violent that its antics were later to become potentially life-threatening. "Who are you?" I asked, after shuffling and all the other preliminaries, and turned over the first card: The Devil. "What do you want?" I asked, and turned over the next card: Death.

The perfect answer, right? I don't mean that the geist in question was actually "the devil" or anything; I'm talking about dramatic appropriateness. I mean, if it had been a scene in a horror movie rather than an episode in real life, those two cards -- precisely those two, as answers to those two questions -- are the ones the screenwriter or director would have chosen. And those are the two I drew, by "chance," against odds of 6,084 to 1.

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This past Saturday night, I was trying to sort out my thoughts regarding Donald Trump. Despite my brain telling me that he's not on my side, and that whether he or Biden wins out in the end should be a matter of complete indifference, I find that I am not in fact indifferent -- that I think of him as good, that I will be elated if wins and would view a Biden win as an unmitigated disaster.

Brooding over this cognitive dissonance, I ended up turning to the Rider-Waite deck -- shuffling it, asking "Who is Donald Trump?" and drawing a single card -- and that card was The Sun.

Now, this is considerably less impressive than the other reading I have described in this post. Instead of yielding the single most appropriate card, twice in a row, it yielded one of three possible "perfect" results. I had already written that Mr. Trump's 2016 and 2020 victories were predicted by The Tower and The Judgment, respectively, and had identified The Sun as "the other Trump trump" -- so any of those three would have been "perfect." The odds of drawing one of the three from a 78-card deck is 1 in 26 -- not extremely low, but just low enough to be "statistically significant" by mainstream standards.

And if the Tarot wanted to decline to pass judgment on Mr. Trump one way or the other, it could scarcely have chosen a more perfectly ambiguous card. The Sun is traditionally given a positive meaning, but my own recent meditations on it have uncovered a dark side as well. It represents, among other things, the birdemic (the sole ill) and the number 666. In discussing these two sides of The Sun, I have borrowed a concept from Superman. There is the Yellow Sun of Earth (good) and the Red Sun of Krypton (evil), and the card represents both.

And what is President Trump's characteristic color? But of course: orange.