The Anarchist Cards ...a deck to deal with!

Oracles and divinatory collections, showing the pantheon of knowable mysteries, could be brought up to date with our times by recognition of several fundamental factors. The world has multiplied. The instructive designs of ancient media, like the I Ching, Tarot, Runes, and especially their interpretation, are couched in a conspectus of archetypes from societies that relied on vertical orders, social structures, and power dynamics that the people have now outgrown.   

 We’re not ready to abandon their teachings, but those sets of symbols, picking out points in cycles punctuated by gods as thinly-veiled arbitrary forces or heuretics, no longer help us navigate. There are more players; there are more layers. 

 Now we are set the clear task of dismantling naked power structures of oppression. It will be no less tricky, so we require discretion; contemplation; communication. We are mobilized by cynicism born of experience and by revolutions fought and won, and still being fought, and lost, by those of us who broke from imposed ranks and arbitrary stations once confined by race, breeding, gender, age, wealth, sexuality, and more. We are all creating new societies and they will have new characters, new symbols. Our stories no longer end with a magical creature solving the characters’ problems in a puff of smoke if only they do “the right thing;” nor even are we convinced by the technological deus ex machina: people have to solve the problems that people have created. In this, it is up to each of us to co-create the fabulous new opportunities offered by freedom and justice. We have to start with ourselves.  

 We have already agreed that our experience implies the world could be a better place – because these are the Anarchist Cards! Now, go deal.