this fuckin guy, am i right? this one was a challenge for me to be honest - mostly in figuring out how to start it , the best angle to make an approach . for this and the one before it , i drew the card a few days before making the entry and left it out on my desk , so i could kind of passively ruminate on it , and this one has been out for a good couple weeks . i think it's funny that it was there over christmas , because the guy in the Colman Smith drawing kind of looks like santa claus .
anywho , a charged card to be sure ... i think for a lot of us trying to practice tarot in now thru a radical lens , informed by anti racist , anti colonial , feminist thought , this and some cards like it beg a question like ... what do we do with this ? if we rightly align ourselves against all empires , it naturally follows that any emperor is a villain - does the tarot have villains ? certainly in the Waite-Smith system he seems to be held in high esteem - "the power of this world, clothed with the highest of its natural attributes," "the higher kingship, occupying the intellectual throne" and so on . he's taken to represent a kind of self-mastery and internal power , something like an ability to not be controlled by one's own emotions - to put the best possible light on it . so the question becomes what's lost to the overall system of archetypes , which is "complete" in a sense , if this one part is cut out , or renounced ? can the good be extricated from the bad by a careful untangling process ? should it , or should the bad be simply acknowledged and integrated , and the man held in lower esteem ? or both , to some degree , and then to what degree ??
it seems possibly a straightforward enough procedure to cut away the undesirable aspects of this card upon encounter , and read only that which the figure represents - the "lordship of thought" as Waite calls it . but i wonder what's lost to consideration in turning a blind eye to his more obviously distasteful aspects . like , to what extent is this guy the cop in my head , that i am sworn to kill ? internal mastery sounds good in the sense that , if you're ruling over your emotions , they can't rule over you ... but is it possible to have that second one without the first , by some other means besides domination ? can the logic of the empire be separated from the philosophy of empiricism at all ? is there an archetypal energy , deep at the core of this card , that may look nearly unrecognizable expressed with a different relation to the cultural project threaded from aristotle to "x destroyed with facts and logic" youtube ? i never really thought about the potential potency of that phrase outside a jokey context before , and im still kind of shitposting here , but is that what facts and logic do , destroy , inherently ? memes really out here revealing the collective unconscious ...
alright , thats quite enough of that . so here i turn to the work of others who have grappled with this - first thing to come to my mind was Cristy C. Road's Next World Tarot , a beautiful 2017 pack and tarot system focused on themes of revolution and justice , in the authors words "an illustrated oracle articulating the end of the world as we know it." here the emperor has been replaced by the teacher , a kind of researcher figure , openly depicting more of the intellectualism supposedly represented by the emperor . (represented where, btw? just his masculinity?) "Having learned from experience, failed from obstacles, and regrouped through experimenting with right and wrong, the Teacher gathers her reasearch and separates it into control and variable positions." while Roads' teacher still embodies some of those positive qualities from Waite's system ("she asks you to isolate your mind from the noise and shut down the voices that challenge your intellect,") she does indeed attempt (meeting quite some success i think) to shed some of the attending colonial and patriarchal values . i especially love this line: "She wants us to be able to choose between self-reflection and action - righteous control or an abuse of power." because of how it problematizes the figure , but ultimately leaves the choice in the hands of the reader .
so ok , there's at least one concrete example of another way it could be done , in another system . i think the continuous work of adding new systems for tarot is a really important way of interacting with it through time - the Smith-Waite itself of course being a system devised as an update and substantial re-working of the available packs and guidebooks in 1909 . and yet i also think that , for me , it's important too to look back and engage with the histories of the stories and symbolism at play . not to say it has to be for everyone - i could see using one or many modern systems that broadly align with ones values , being reasonably critical , and just like , going to town , telling fortunes , learning all kinds of stuff . but for me , partly because thats just how i am , partly because of this project , where (surprise) im gearing up to make a booklet for YATD by doing these blog entries , i feel drawn to working from material thats held widely in common , that forms a kind of foundation , i guess to form my own interpretations . anyway . for reading: mastery , of the self , of or by another may be called for , or a master may appear . there is power in this which may be harnessed , even to righteous ends - but beware power's tendency to corrupt , especially as it grows . jeesh , didnt expect this one to turn so big ... but here it is !!