Synergy Tarot

The TdF's Devil is a big red guy with a serpent's body, covered in tattoos and eyeballs. There are 21 in total, but only 17 of them appear to be a functional part of him. The other four are merely tattooed onto his chest. In the background there are a mountain, a house, and a Sun which are split in half. He has his big hands wrapped around the necks of two smaller blue serpent-people creatures. They are blue and wearing black and yellow-striped shirts. One is male, the other is female, one's head is upside down, the other's right side up. One's stripes are vertical, the other's horizontal. One has a human nose, the other a pig nose. They are apparently the same type of creature, but have a collection of differences that are mostly exactly the opposite of the corresponding trait in the other, similar to the sexual dimorphism (sex/gender-based physiological differences) found in humans. They appear to be his servants, and happy to be in that position. They look li

There are 3 suns and 4 eyeballs/moons in this card. This adds up to 7 celestial bodies. Thus, this card represents the culmination of a cycle that started with 7, the Chariot. The Sun and the Moon are opposites, and Temperance is very much about opposites and their interaction. The backdrop is very cloud-forward, with a lot of stars. The overall feel is very celestial, and also airy-feeling. This is appropriate because this archetype is a faculty of the mind. More on that to follow. The central figure of the card, too, has only stars and night sky where their face should be. The figure is obviously some sort of divinity or angel. In fact, it is the witness/I-am consciousness/ Purusha symbolized by the Hanged Man. The message here is that Consciousness is the real doer. Consciousness is the sole actor in this drama. Consciousness is the animator, even of the mind and the intellect. The angel has four arms. The upper right hand is shooting water into a cornucopia held by the lower r

The Principle that the Tarot calls "Death" corresponds to the constellation of Scorpio, which is co-ruled by the disruptive planet, Mars, and the transformative planet, Pluto. It wouldn't be wrong to regard the two planets as octave iterations of the same energy. Scorpio is associated with the interrelated themes of sex and death. The Hebrew letter that corresponds to Death is Nun , a fish. In his Tarot: A Key to the Wisdom of the Ages , Paul Foster Case tells us that, as a verb, Nun means "to sprout" or "to grow." He attributes this to the fish being an animal that reproduces prolifically. As such they are also a symbol that represents the sexual impulse itself. The corpses of fish are high in nitrogen and, for that reason, have been recognized as a good fertilizer of food crops probably for as long as people have been engaged in agrarian activity. This image - the corpse, its decay and putrefaction, and what was once a rotten fish becoming a nutri

Originally, the Hanged Man was associated only with the Element of Water. The modern planetary correspondence attributed to it is Neptune, named after the Greek god of the ocean. Either would explain the Hanged Man's scaly Aquaman pants. The Hebrew letter attributed to the card is mem , which literally means "seas," but is understood to mean "water," more generically. The significance of the Hanged Man's inversion, in conjunction with his association with water, is that it is meant to imply that he is a reflection of the archetypes which have come before him in the same way that a person's reflection appears to be upside down, relative to them, when they're standing over a pool. The previous card (Strength in this deck) was the last of the five kañcukas , placing this Principle at a lower level in the hierarchy of manifestation, and making it the first of the Principles that are regarded as belonging to the physical world. What is being implied,

The TdF's Strength depicts a young girl in the mouth of a sea dragon; some sort of serpentine fish. Incidentally, the Hebrew letter associated with Strength is Teth , a snake. This is representative of Kuṇdalinī , AKA the Serpent-power. It has 21 eyes like the Tarot has 21 Major Arcana beneath the Fool. We could infer that the seabeast is the Fool itself, in that it contains all of the other Principles within itself. To the left and the right of the girl are two swords, which represent the Element of Air. Air, in turn, represents thought, the mind, and the astral realm. Although she has a stump where one of her legs should be, she seems to be triumphing over the beast, or at least in harmony with it, without making use of the swords. She possesses an awakened third eye. Thus, her strength lies in knowledge (the 3rd eye), but not in the sort of knowledge that is the domain of the mind (swords). Neither does her strength lie in literal violence. According to the Tantrik teaching on

The Wheel of Fortune corresponds to the planet Jupiter, if we are looking at it through an astrological lens. Jupiter is lucky, beneficient, expanding, high-minded, and synthesizing. In Hindu dharma, Jupiter (Bṛhaspati) is the Guru of the gods. Traditionally forecasting good fortune in a divinatory context, barring card positions or other card content that help to tell a different story, the TdF's Wheel of Fortune is uncharacteristically chaotic. I like that its symbols don't necessarily encourage a one-dimensional take on a reading that involve it, and encourage consideration of the archetype from all angles. The eyes, which are ubiquitous throughout the deck, show us that, even as Consciousness descends further and further into the sphere of Matter and diversity, Unity-in-diversity persists as an underlying fact. The creature at the top of the wheel is a harpy, which is a personification of the storm winds. The Norse god Thor, is a storm god and corresponds to Jupiter.