Here's an elegant drawing by L. J. J. Dubois of the solar deity Ra, taken from Jean Francois Champollion's book Pantheon Egyptien. I like the simplicity and iconic quality of this image; I think it would make an interesting, Egyptian inspired Sun card.

I love this image of Apollo in his chariot, blazing across the heavens. The steeds are each partly in shadow, partly in the light, and so suggest the light and dark that one finds in most Chariot cards. That duality if further reinforced by the clouds, which are also partly dark, yet with bright areas.

* * * * * *

What jumps out at me is the horses' vitality and wildness. They look like they could break free at any moment, yet their immense power is deftly harnessed by Apollo, with only one hand, no less. He is in full control of these beautiful creatures. Apollo was also the god of reason, so his archetype dovetails nicely with the themes of discipline, self-control, and focus that this card signifies.

I'm absolutely smitten by this bust of Antinous, the Emperor Hadrian's beautiful Greek lover, and I realized he would make a great Page of Wands for my imaginary Classical Tarot. The wands represent a very active, masculine energy, and are also associated with fire; given the intense, passionate nature of Hadrian's and Antinous' love affair, this suit seems appropriate.

After his mysterious drowning death in the Nile River at the age of 20, an inconsolable Hadrian had Antinous deified, and in no time an enthusiastic, devoted cult sprang up to worship the young man. The love and adoration this man insipired, coupled with his untimely death, reverberates through the ages, giving him an archetypal quality well suited to the Tarot.

I received an e-mail from my brother-in-law, who lives in Thailand, informing me that Tony Jaa's long awaited film Ong-Bak 2 was released in that country early in December, where it has been doing very well. He plans to see the movie when his girlfriend comes to visit him in Phuket.

In spite of its name, the film is not a sequel to its predecessor, Ong-Bak. Set in 15th century Thailand, the muay Thai martial artist and actor plays the part of a young nobleman who is orphaned at the age of 10, and after learning various martial arts sets out to avenge the brutal killing of his parents by a power hungry lord. Although reviews have been mixed, I can't wait to see it. I've read that Ong-Bak 2 will be released in the States sometime in March.

I sometimes wish books still had frontispieces. This is one from a late 18th century work by Frederic Lewis Norden titled The Antiquities, Natural History, Ruins, and Other Curiousities of Egypt, Nubia, and Thebes. It's a real hodgepodge of images; I love it.

There are Egyptian ruins, a quasi-Minerva figure representing Imperial Rome, some animals native to Africa, and to top it all off (literally) an angel blowing a trumpet. It helps lend a mythic dimension to what is, I presume, a historical work.

Reflecting upon older or alternate meanings of the Major Arcana is a useful way for me to dig deeper into a card's meaning. The Hanged Man, for instance, was also known as Il Traditore, or The Traitor, as it was the practice in Renaissance Italy to hang people convicted of treason upside down. This image has not lost its symbolic power over the centuries. When Benito Mussolini and his lover, Clara Petacci, were summarily executed by the partisans, their bodies were also displayed hung upside down. The message the partisans sent by this act was stark and unambiguous: Il Duce had been vanquished, and Fascism utterly defeated. Of course, diehard Fascists might look upon this scene and see martyrdom for a noble cause. Thus, bound up in this one image are ideas of punishment, humiliation, warning, and sacrifice.

Only the idea of martyrdom has survived in current interpretations of The Hanged Man, which I think is unfortunate. I believe the presence of this card in a spread could indicate betrayal, either by others or by oneself (as in not being true to oneself or one's principles). I am not discounting other, commonly accepted interpretations of this card; but I do believe that the original name of this card can provide some rich insights that have been obscured by the passage of time.

Here's a single coin, with an image of Alexander the Great stamped upon it. I think it makes a fine Ace of Pentacles. Having the ruler's face on it nicely underscores the concept of turning ideas into action, making manifest one's desires, and proceeding boldly with one's plans.

"Catch it for me!"

the child cries for the Full Moon.

-- Issa

The Magician's Mirror No. 3 [Opus 1450], Alan Davie, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

"But time is not just an abstract measure. Time has its own moods and seasons, like a landscape of hills and valleys, dense forests and placid seas. We have trouble sensing this landscape because we are taught to think of time as homogenous and purely objective, a vision that is reproduced by our quartz watches and digital clocks and all the other temporal mechanisms that humans have been hammering out since Paleolithic shamans started tracking the moon with marks on bone. But even this objective-mechanistic view of time is melting down, as media and technology push our minds and productive capacities towards absolute speed. So whether you are a 2012 synchronicity groupie or a technofuturist charting out the oncoming Singularity, to say nothing of a fast-food slave in Bangalore whose every bathroom break and basket of fries is tagged to the nano-second, you can feel a tectonic shift rumbling in the flow of moments. Our times feel like the endtimes not because time itself is ending, but because the conventions of time may be ending."

-- Erik Davis, Slow Down