[For more info on the celebrity/pop culture tarot and a complete card listing, go here.]

Here are a few more that I put together today. First up is “The Corpsoration.”

He’s basically the corporate zombie. I was thinking in particular about how corporations legally have some of the same rights as individual real live humans, and how that’s sort of fucked up. That got me thinking about how people sometimes “become” sort of zombies when they are working for a corporation. They lose their head, or sort of stumble around trying to “eat your brains”… that kind of thing. The little globes represent the corporate zombie trying to take over the world. I originally had him standing on the globe. But didn’t want to give him that kind of power. Instead, I depicted several alternate worlds, none of which is fully dominated by him. Also, I wanted to include within the card a protection against it, or it’s own undoing. So if you flip the card upside down, you will see the little girl. Innocence, the life-source. Above her is a sign indicating protection from the Corpsoration - invoked in the ill-dignified position of the card.

This card is just called “100 Dollars” or the Hundred Dollar Bill, or something like that. I wanted to leave it slightly ambiguous as far as the wording. This card was inspired by something in a Hakim Bey lecture I listened to yesterday. He said that money was the “sexuality of the dead.” It only begets itself, and it is itself not alive. I also combined that with the idea classically of Pluto or Hades as being the lord of both the underworld and of money. I guess the underworld god was in charge of money since precious metal was mined from the earth, and the earth both presents and preserves all other kinds of treasures - including our dead bodies. There’s also a reference to the Voodoo figure, Baron Samedi. And he has on his hat the classic pentacle of the Tarot deck - sometimes understood as “coins or money.” I thought maybe this would make a good equivalent or alternative to the Ace of Pentacles. Aces often signify the sort of impulse into existence of a force, which develops through particular suit. I also included the disney dog Pluto upside down for the ill-dignified position. It looks like he’s descending from heaven this way. It’s a play on the Roman Pluto, the expression “all dogs go to heaven” and various other mythological dogs of the dead. In the regular Tarot, there are also cards which support one another. I imagine this card would support The Corpsoration, and vice versa. You might be able to say something like this card is the impulse which gives “life” to the Corpsoration. But since it’s an underworld impulse, the best it can do is to create a sort of inauthentic, incomplete version of an entity, thus the corporate zombie.

This is a reworking of an image I made a while ago. It’s called “Surveillance” and the pyramids reference the seal on the back of the dollar bill, with the All-Seeing Masonic Eye. They are also sort of satellites that can see and hear everything - even into your thoughts. It could also be translated maybe as “omnipotence”. Or you could look at the card as meaning something like watching and waiting for the right moment - gathering information before you make your move. It doesn’t necessarily need to be sinister in its connotations. Although it could also indicate something like you feel like you’re under too much scrutiny right now, and you just need a break.

If anybody has alternate or additional interpretations of ideas about these cards and what they could mean, feel free to add them. Oh, and also if anybody has a better name than “Celebrity Tarot” to describe the deck that we’re building, I’m all ears. It originally was going to be all celebrities, but it maybe should have a broader name than that.

UPDATE!

One other point I want to make: people talk about how the purpose of the Tarot partially was to transmit “secret teachings” but do it using the cloak of symbols which were common at the time. Seems like we ought to consider this. Obviously, all of us in the “counter-culture” have pretty strong views about what’s right and what’s not, and these ideas are not usually expressed by mainstream culture. So it’s a nice “Fuck you to the Old Man” if we can take images from what he dishes out, and warp them to meet our own ends. People call this sort of thing “culture-jamming” sometimes, but I find most of that stuff to be pretty masturbatory. Anyway, all I’m trying to say is that don’t feel like you shouldn’t be “pushing an agenda” with your cards and their meanings. It’s obviously already headed pretty strongly in that direction, so let’s run with it and see what we can build out of the “ruins of the dying civilization”.

UPDATE!

Speaking of dying civilizations, I just thought of another one! Check it out: The Wildman!

Here’s your typical Bigfoot character. But if you look carefully, he’s standing amidst the ruins of a vanished civilization, which has been overgrown by forest. He’s your anti-civilization urge. He’s your “You know to survive after the Apocalypse hits” instincts. He’s your “grow your hair long and run through the forest naked” impulse. You’ll also notice that inside his stomach is a beer keg. I added that because I think for most people nowadays, their Wildman archetype is unfortunately mostly unleashed only during kegstands and other drunken frat-house rituals. There’s also a recycling symbol in the trees as the ecological movement in a lot of ways stems from reconnecting with him on a social scale. He also has a little wolf companion and guide, who’s standing deeper into the woods, also playing atop the ruins of civilization. He’s sort of the antithesis of the Corpsoration.

Oh, one more thing: Don’t worry about overlapping or repeating anybody else’s symbolism or imagery when you’re designing your cards. The way I see it is we have the possibility to do hundreds of these cards. And it only makes sense that some of them are gonna be pretty similar, but with slightly different connotations…