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Celebrity Tarot - Kundalini Rice
A while ago I posted an idea about creating an esoteric system which used celebrities as carriers of secret symbolic messages. Through it, you could communicate information which would basically go unnoticed by anybody not initiated into the esoteric meanings. It would just seem like your average boring mindless chatter. It would simultaneously be a way to sort of underhandedly inject paradoxical mystical connotations onto pop-culture figures who seem energetically “out of balance”. Or something along those lines.
Anyway, Garrett’s been pushing me to get back to this idea, so tonight I cooked up one as sort of an example of how they might work. This one is “Condoleeza Rice” combined with “Kundalini Rising” - if for no other reason than the juicy wordplay that it offered. But once I got going it sort of started to make sense in some weird way.
On her head is a little tiara made out of the White House. Onto her hands I grafted the demon from the hand of the anime character Vampire Hunter D. Ideally, I’d like each of these to contain various seemingly erroneous references like that, in order to pull in new and different ideas subtly. The Rider-Waite Tarot deck does that all the time. You can spend hours puzzling over those babies. Oh, and those obviously are not her legs, but the legs of some dude I found in the lotus position. And in the background is the coiled serpent, which turns into the mushroom cloud of her impending cosmic enlightenment.
The fun part then is to go into news articles and use them as sort of symbolic keys against each other. For example:
Condoleeza Rice’s first trip to Moscow as US secretary of state ended amid disagreement last night when the Kremlin contradicted her claim that Russia was considering letting American inspectors check its nuclear sites.
See? That was an easy one, but you get the idea. The other idea I want to follow up is one Jeremy suggested: a Corporate Tarot. Different cards could have various corporate logos and imagery on them. Each corporation would stand for a different force or whatever. Then you could lay spreads, and do “corporate mergers” and shit like that. Might also be interesting to integrate right into the Celebrity Tarot described above. Anyway, more on this to follow. If anybody else wants to pick up on either of these ideas and make other cards like this, definitely feel free. We could put together a little collection somewhere, and maybe write some scripts which will help us do random readings using the deck.
- Notes: Aldergrove
- Pop Tarot - The Empress (and others)
- Rice and/or beans
- Celebrity Tarot - Lovers (v2)
- Celebrity Tarot - Sawbones
- Prev: The Gnostic X-Men
- Next: Celebrity Tarot Additions
April 28th, 2005 at 12:16 am
Awesome stuff… I really dig the idea being fluent in tarot.
Which brings me to a few thoughts.
Imagine if the poker deck of Iraq leadership was not based on the simple deck of cards but the Tarot? Having Marines in their tents do readings of their future missions in Turkurk over a few beers, shots of heroin and a few laughs?
They said the Nazi’s were bold with their use of runes.
Well if only the Marines used my suggestion above, maybe some of the troops would have picked up on the non existant WMD a little earlier.
April 28th, 2005 at 3:20 am
you could give her a forked (reptilian) tongue…
condi the lizard queen…lays eggs in your spine…
April 28th, 2005 at 4:31 am
funnily enough, kundalini energy goes up the spine…
April 28th, 2005 at 5:41 am
This is a great idea. I decided to do one myself, “Bushomet” - you can get it here http://www.carymccoy.com/image/Bushomet.jpg It’s obviously a play on Bush/Baphomet. The phrase “First in the hearts of his countrymen.” is at the base of a marble statue of George Washington at the Smithsonian that depicts George in a position curiously similar to the classic depiction of Baphomet seen here, bare chest and all. The astrological key floats above his head; Son at the center, apostles, oops, I meant zodiacs, broken up into groups of two, three, and four.
April 28th, 2005 at 5:42 am
vampire hunter d….. i think i mentioned it before in a comment, but please if you havent already, watch the anime series “Serial Experiments Lain”
the occult investigator needs to watch that flick…
one
human?
April 28th, 2005 at 1:06 pm
cary, thats awesome. can you write “bushomet” on it somewhere? id like to stick to that theme
April 28th, 2005 at 1:19 pm
so here’s a question– would it follow typical tarot card structure w/22 major arcana and 56 minor arcana and whatnot?
April 28th, 2005 at 1:22 pm
er, posted too quickly. i was gonna say, if you have the 22/56 structure, you could technically have celebrities be the major arcana and then have the minor arcana be divvied along different pop culture lines. discs could be the corporations, since they traditionally represent ‘money,’ etc. swords (intellect) could be pop psychology. cups (emotion/creativity) could be entertainment/movies, etc. wands (spirituality) could be cults and other rip-off crazies.
this’d also be cool to do as a kind of ’subscription’ tarot service, where the cards themselves could change based on the headlines of the day.
April 28th, 2005 at 1:40 pm
HMMM…. thats an awesome idea, we could set up some kind of news aggregator service which scans for celebrity keywords, and then does automated matches based on it.
for the moment, im not especially concerned with whether or not we follow typical tarot structure. i say we just create and see where it goes naturally. i sort of like the unstructuredness of the vertical oracle deck
http://www.verticalpool.com/oracle.html
but that doesnt mean we need to follow it. anybody with links to other cool decks ought to go ahead and post them here
April 28th, 2005 at 1:56 pm
Tim, glad you like it. Tweaked it per your request, use at will.
April 28th, 2005 at 1:59 pm
cool… hey wait, it looks the same.., maybe my cache is screwed up or something… wait, now its working… hold on, i liked your text in it before. why cant we have both?
April 28th, 2005 at 3:14 pm
here’s my entry, dog:
http://www.snant.com/fp/images/mjtarot.jpg
April 28th, 2005 at 3:19 pm
[…] ebrity Tarot — The Pedafooliac
Tim’s getting some work done on the “Celebrity Tarot” idea! So far he’s got Kundalini Rice a […]
April 28th, 2005 at 3:47 pm
You can have both! http://www.carymccoy.com/Bushomet.htm There are two variations here, pick the one you like. The Pedafooliac is wicked. Did you know that the Surrealist did their own version of the Tarot?
April 28th, 2005 at 3:51 pm
the key is gonna be somehow finding some concepts with positive attributes. so far we’ve got all the monsters, but what about some “good” cards?
garrett just mentioned he wants to do “the lovers” with brad pitt, angelina jolie and jennifer aniston– how excellent would that be?
April 28th, 2005 at 4:14 pm
i sort of like the idea of having like monsters be also positive. like in the tarot each card can be rightside up or upside down: ill-dignified they call it - where it becoms its opposite. i think if we just keep plugging away, we’ll end up with a good mix either way though. i feel like first we just have to develop the sort of lexicon, and then go from there
April 28th, 2005 at 8:36 pm
What to do about the too-obvious? (IE, the Tower?)
April 28th, 2005 at 10:47 pm
i say we just run with it, obvious, off base, whatever. just let it all come out. if we try to edit it too much, we’ll probably cut off a lot of good material.
April 29th, 2005 at 12:26 am
[…] other people have put together entries. Here’s everything we’ve got so far: Kundalini Rice (by me) Bushomet (by Cary McCory) The Pedofooliac ( […]
April 29th, 2005 at 1:15 pm
boy, the tower is an archetype that came to life before our very eyes.
i say do it.
though i can’t say as how i’d like to be the one to do it.
April 29th, 2005 at 1:20 pm
BTW, I have lots of Tarot images (and many more in personal archives) if anyone needs them:
http://altreligion.about.com/od/tarotimages/