Card mode
I’m not sure I trust the Page of Cups.
As imagined by Pamela Colman Smith and A.E.
Or is he thinking about offering us the cup?
The set of his jaw is ambiguous.
So when I see the Page of Cups, I know that a creative opportunity is coming my way.
Every Tarot card has its reverse interpretation, however.
Draw the Page of Cups upside down, and the joy of insight becomes jealousy and stagnation.
My biggest fear growing up as a creative is someone stealing my idea, Cai says.
It’s a familiar dilemma for artists of all stripes.
If you constantly go to others for feedback, how many of your ideas are actually yours?
Cai doesn’t credit Tarot with the literal power to determine one’s fate.
The Page also helped Cai break into game development.
And when I got the reading, it was an upright Page of Cups.
The grant project led to her first game design role.
Tarot dates back to at least 15th century Italy, though its precise origins are unknown.
Over hundreds of years it has slowly dispersed across Europe and overseas, always changing.
The reason for Tarot’s spread is that Tarot is a game.
People still play games with Tarot.
It’s a bit of an old people pastime.
(Fasce himself was introduced to Tarot by his aunt.)
Some videogames riff on this oracular narrative structure explicitly.
Others evoke the idea of a live lived through the cards more obliquely.
Each game is an interpretation of single card.
Contributors include Tanya X.
That [may help decide] what the conflict of the game is, Cai notes.
Though there are some cards that are equally bad, upright and reverse.
The Death card can mean something is new, something has passed.
The Tower is like, everything’s in ruins.
In the narrative of the Major Arcana the Tower is followed by the Star.
And the Star kind of represents hope, because it comes right after.
It’s not just ‘oh, I’m hopeful things will go well’.
It’s a more mature kind of hope.
[The reverse isn’t] about the lack of hope.
It’s like, there’s hope, but you are expecting things to happen without doing anything.
You should be actively reaching.
Stars, Fasce adds, are woven into the words we use to describe knowledge and its absence.
And so ‘desire’ is this lack of clarity of vision about what to do next.
Like Cai, Fasce doesn’t believe in Tarot as a literal means of prediction.
It’s not just about discovering cards, but how they bleed into each other.
Putney herself stumbled into the world of Tarot while studying classical and Biblical languages and literature at university.
Hebrew proved especially helpful for a budding scholar of the occult.
And Victorian English magic is all like, segued through Hebrew verbs for some reason.
The World card is now the Aeon, because he’s really into the new Aeon, says Putney.
What card would Putney work with if she were developing a game for Cartomancy?
Or as Putney suggests, doing yoga.
For Putney, the Hanged Man represents radical acceptance of the reality of a situation.
Far from being a symbol of torture, he’s an odd yet calm perspective on horrible events.
But it’s really important that he’s not hanging by his neck!
It’s important, too, that the Hanged Man looks more thoughtful than anguished.
So it’s pretty awful.
But the idea is that he’s not dead yet.
He still has options.
