Artist: Frenec Pinter

I wish I knew which queen this image portrays. She should be strong, confident, a bit manipulative with her amazing amount of positive energy and charisma, and determined to get what she wants. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t recognize her even if she was currently famous, let alone historically famous. Anyone less clueless than I am?

I did not ask a question today. I hoped the card would inspire me to write. Unfortunately, I don’t think I like the Queen of Wands right now. Not this one. I don’t like how she looks at me as if she’s better than me. I don’t like her clean-ness, her white-ness, her lace and perfect hair-ness. I prefer the New-Age Tarot’s big-foot, multi-breasted, four-armed, three-faced, double-helix-bodied Queen of Wands who dances on an Earth of arms and eyeballs. She makes me feel so normal.

Artist: Frenec Pinter

I have neither Little White Book nor box for this deck. This deck was originally a display copy in a bookstore that went out of business. A number of the cards have holes in them, as does this one. I guess the holes were to keep people from filching the cards. Now I have a deck with holes.

The only easy thing to say about this deck is that the meanings of its cards have nothing in common with the most modern occult tarot’s most common meanings: those of the Rider-Waite-Smith-type decks. If anything, the upright reading of this card seems like a reversal of the RWS-type:

Upright: Celebration, harmony, marriage, home, community
Reversed: Breakdown in communication, transition

The attitude of these people is like the attitude of people waiting for a train. They are together in the same place, but all their thoughts are elsewhere. They are coming and going; none of them are being here. This group is the opposite of a community. They have no intention of communicating with one another.

I am going to NY City this coming week. How am I getting there? How am I getting back? Where am I going to afterward— Quebec or Vermont? Externally, people traveling generally appear to have a purpose and a destination. Internally, travelers generally feel at least slightly out of place— lightly shaken— loosely scattered—

“In a Station of the Metro”

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

—Ezra Pound, 1911

Artist: Frenec Pinter

I have neither Little White Book nor box for this deck. As with all cards, different people interpret the nine of wands in different ways. This reading is my feeble attempt at art interpretation, which is what I am left with when no one tells me what to think.

The man in the foreground is fishing at the edge of a canal. It looks like he is wearing fatigues and a Russian army hat. He is sitting on a poster of Lenin. Is this image during the war years, when Lenin, standing for maximum working-class democracy, lead the workers of the Tsarist Russian Empire to revolution? Or is it afterward, when the Stalinists, calling themselves Leninists, cut away at everything Lenin had worked for and adopted anti-working-class policies? I never paid attention in history class. There were too many wars and dates and dead white men.

Inner strength, stamina, and the will to go on despite impossible odds are at the center of the Nine of Wands. I would like to say, the man is a revolutionary. He sits on the ideals of Lenin, protecting them, making them his own. But the revolution is going on forever. So many people he knows have died. Will the war never end? It is so dark! If only he can follow the light of his inner strength, it will lead to glory.

The twist: there is glory for the Bolshevik Party, but all too soon their ideals are crushed and twisted. The revolution is stolen from the hands of the revolutionaries. The struggle of the working class has never ended. Only in heaven is there a chance for the light of inner strength to close its eyes in sleep, just for a moment.

This card shows that if we search deep inside ourselves, we will find the strength to endure.