Today’s deck is the Tarot of the Divine.
I love this deck, it’s going into my regular rotation, and regrettably to explain why I like it I’m gonna need to be TURBO pretentious and pedantic for a moment.
The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell is a very interesting work of philosophy that some take for anthropology. I say this because it reeks of that thing philosophers do where they get a hammer they like and make sure that everything else becomes a nail, doing mental gymnastics until they are. And I’m not even getting into like… All the clear biases, obsolete ideas, and the fact that it subscribes way too much to Freudian ideas.
However, when you take it the same way one would take a work of philosophy, its idea of the monomyth is not without merit as a general concept. Even pushing aside how reductive it is to limit it to the Hero’s Journey, there’s imagery that’s universal, not just in tarot but (more to the point here) things like how there’s versions of Cinderella across plenty of cultures.
This deck gets that and focuses more on stories that fit the card at an aesthetic level but also a symbolic one. The Little Mermaid as The Fool, Scheherazade as The High Priestess. But then it also works on the references you can’t pinpoint more specifically.
For example, at a glance I thought The Lovers was Beauty and The Beast, which would fit. But reading the booklet turns out it’s the tale of The Boy And The Pearl which fits even more.
I tend to be critical of decks that put the aesthetics over the meaning, but even though Kaguya-hime feels too easy to put in as The Moon, the story DOES fit The Moon.
For today’s reading 6 cards flopped to the side while shuffling. The speak of creative ruts set in a lack of authority plus recklessness, where the lack of authority is born out of an insistence to not depend on others and the recklessness comes in whenever I have no trust in my sense for how others might feel.
This one left me going “Huh…” out loud, not gonna lie.
Day started as usual with me checking emails and such, and then at around… almost 4PM I wanna say? I headed out to meet up with the visiting friends.
We went to the Mandarake in Nipponbashi and we talked about the very curious thing of how BL gets its own section, but GL usually gets mixed in with shonen stuff.
Which reminded me of a conversation I had a while ago with one of them about how if you see two topless girls it’s a coin toss on whether it’s lesbian porn or just something for dudes, but if you see two shirtless dudes in something there’s zero doubt.
We went to Super Potato to check stuff and then had Abura Soba at Kasuga-tei. From there we checked the other smaller games shop whose name always escapes me.
We explored Shinsekai and got to one of the small arcades still in the area and then headed back to rest at Saizeriya for a bit.
It was a nice day all in all, only complaint is that the weather wasn’t the best.
Oh yeah if you’re wondering about today’s title…
Apparently the Osaka Fire Department’s slogan last year was “I told you, if there’s a fire your memories will be gone too”.
Which is grim but damn if it doesn’t drive the point home.