Water is the symbol and element of cups. The cups hold water and the cards offer a way to comprehend the Mercurial element but in my depiction the water is free to understand itself, contained perhaps only by surface tension. The subconscious of course can only really be understood through a translation of the most primal communion. Before intent and long before action. Any words or images which may appear are merely shadows cast by the intellect. Turning to look at them eclipses the message with the self… damn that’s ether pretty deep or just complete waffle.. Anyway the shape is a circle or sphere. I decided not to use a downward pointing triangle in order to keep the shapes more visually diverse. I wanted a curved edge for the water element as this is intuitively more receptive and sensual. It’s the shape of a single droplet in a vacuum. A circle has infinite degrees of symmetry and its edge is an irrational number with infinite digits and yet it has only one center and a finite radius which define these infinities. What better shape to contemplate the ever comprehensive but ultimately unknowable depth of the human subconscious?
Stone is the symbol I’ve used for the court cards of the pentacles, the arcane currency, governed by the earth element. Stone is the body of the earth, the mother of us all, the chapel and the tomb, the mountain and the cave. At all stages of life we use it as if it is our own flesh, as if we have complete dominion over it but we are merely a secretion over its eternal surface. Like metal stone appears constant but is really always in transition and exists in many states. The earth element, in the tarot, is often used to depict the practical matters of life, the things we regard as solid and constant but which carry a perceived emotional benefit. These are passed among us as currency, wealth, gifts and possessions. It is the external world which can be regarded or disregarded. I like to see it as an organism we are all part of, we form its internal systems but we can never hope to comprehend its intentions. In that regard could be called God and it is always both alive and dead.
In many traditional tarot decks the Emperor sits on a cube which represents the ordered universe. A solid, comprehensible structure. A cube will always land flat and ready for another cube to be placed on top.
By connecting the center of each face of a cube you can create its dual polyhedron, a regular octahedron which is a 3D representation of the shape I’ve used for the metal court cards. Connecting the vertices of a cube across the diagonals of each face and combining these lines with the edges of the octahedron creates two intersecting tetrahedra, the 3D representation of fire and water elements combined and of the star of David.
In tarot the devil perches on a rectangular solid, the universe halved, incomplete, but in that state dynamic. Circles do not tessellate, they must be overlapped in order to cover a plane but squares do so perfectly without overlapping. In this way our internal worlds cannot be brought together without them merging and losing something of themselves, becoming a new region. But our external worlds are always perfectly connected, whether or not we chose to be aware of it, while remaining entirely separate. We cannot live without affecting those around us and we cannot live without the support of the structure as a whole. If you think this may not be true then you are only including humans in your mental picture! The blocks can stack perfectly.. but then that leaves little room to move. Its human nature to upset the balance sometimes.
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