Everyday Tarot

artist: Chris Wilkey

It’s Tarot Tuesday again, and the card for the day is Manifestation from a deck in progress by artist Chris Wilkey. Wilkey is currently in search of a publisher, but illustrations for the deck are set to appear in the newest Encyclopedia of Tarot published by U.S. Games System. You can see other Tarot cards by the artist at Chris Wilkey Fine Arts and Graphic Design.

I really like this particular rendition of the Tarot card that is typically depicted by the Magician - a robed figure holding a wand and manipulating the symbols of the four suits. I am not a mathematician, but numbers hold a fascination for me that goes far beyond adding one and one. Numerology and the Tarot have always gone hand in hand, something which should come as no surprise to anyone who understand that numbers are simply symbols of deeper concepts - rather like the cards themselves.

There are so many reasons that this image of Manifestation resonates with me, not the least of which is that numbers are the ultimate shorthand to represent complex relationships between things, both alike and unlike. A gifted mathematician can look at an equation and picture what it represents in his or her mind, hear it with her inner ear, replicate its shape simply by following the numbers.

If you think about it, numbers are an ideal representation of the concept “As above, so below”. Consider how numbers reduce without changing the basic concept of a shape -

 

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This is a very simple example - the three red squares were created completely by numbers using CSS. I could replicate the shape exactly by using numbers in the same proportions to each other to define the parameters of the shape.
You’ll find more complex examples in fractal art and in music - if you use a visualization program when you listen to music on your computer, you can see the music translated into artwork in motion:

And it’s all geometry and numbers, the shapes created by the relationships between numbers. I knew this consciously - it’s one of those amusing factoids that gets stuck in your head- but it didn’t hit home with me till the night my son - the middle one with Asperger’s syndrome - picked up one of those little xylophone pianos from Fisher Price and started playing along with my mp3 player. I switched songs - and within two bars, he was playing along again. He explained to me that it was easy to do - he could tell if the sound was getting “lighter” or “darker” and guess how much the color would change - and then he played the right color key.

It gets better, though. I picked up the phone and called my older son to tell him about my surprising discovery about his younger brother and he responded: “I was wondering when he’d figure it out.” Um… you were? “Sure,” he told me. “It’s all math and Jid is a math whiz. It was only a matter of time before he figured out how to play with it.”

Mind you - this is the son who sat down at a piano for the first time and started composing in perfect chords. Because, y’know, he’s a math whiz, and it’s all about the numbers.

But it goes deeper still - sounds travel in waves that vibrate to specific frequencies, and everything they touch sets up a sympathetic vibration. Sounds do, in some very basic way, alter the things around them. Colors are created by different lengths of light waves - can we truly deny that those waves might also set up some sort of sympathetic vibration? Wouldn’t that explain why most people respond to specific colors with specific emotional responses?

The thread tying all those things together is mathematics - and it would stand to reason that a master of mathematics, someone who knows how to manipulate things by the numbers, would be a master magician - one who makes things manifest in our world.

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