I was just reminded of those crazy motivational posters. You know the ones. They feature a thick black border, and a dramatic image. Underneath is a word in white in a box, “Teamwork” or “Perseverance”, etc. They are really weird. Here’s a big treasure trove of them over on AllPosters.com. I was just thinking how if you take them together as a set, these posters sort of act the same way as tarot cards do. Each one stands for an ideal, and sketches the outlines of a story which invokes that ideal. Of course, in these, many of them stand for what I think are pretty questionable (usually corporate) ideals. But ironically, they are sort of “inspiring” to me, since they are pretty closely aligned with what I’m trying to do here.

It’s crazy though how many of these are thinly veiled glorifications of war and the military. Tons of them. Take for example the one I inserted above. It’s called “Bravery” and depicts a sniper. I mean - first of all - how brave do you have to be to shoot somebody from hundreds of feet away who doesn’t even know you’re there? Second, I don’t consider murder, even if it’s state-sanctioned to have anything to do with bravery. Diplomacy and working your problems out with people, rather than just eliminating them - that is truly brave, and splendidly difficult.

The fun part of these posters though when you look at them as tarot images is that you’re going to see in them what you want to. They expose both your projected fantasies and your fears. A reader today commented with dismay that I’d included Masonic imagery in my card titled “The Secret Society“. I admitted that Freemasons aren’t all bad, but that I was drawing from the well of popular imagery. As such, this means that you’re going to come up with some things which are less than savory. Just think of the Death card or the Devil card in traditional tarot. Both of these at first blush seem to depict really scary negative imagery. But they can also be understood as having positive aspects about change and liberation. If you find yourself reacting with fear to a certain tarot card, this may be a sign that there’s something going on underneath the surface with you. Maybe you’re scared to change, or you’re unsure how something will come out. That’s exactly the beauty and purpose of tools like the tarot. They provide us with alternate contexts and containers in which we can pour our own experiences and see how they look from the outside.