multidenominational witchcraft thread: drake's chart mid may - uranus will be on his MC

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > multidenominational witchcraft thread: drake's chart mid may - uranus will be on his MC

twoday: May 4, 2005; C-SPAM Times best-selling author

I once started making a C-SPAM/Trump themed tarot deck but I didn't get very far. Nevertheless I am posting those here because they seem relevant:

# ¿ Dec 31, 2020 04:41

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 11:13

twoday: May 4, 2005; C-SPAM Times best-selling author

smarxist posted:

haha, these are awesome, i wonder if we brainstormed a full set if snoo would be up to drawing it >_>

well, it's tricky, I was just gonna make up new stuff, but if you make a whole new set you need a whole new mythology for each card

so it's easier to tie it to the existing tarot deck, and then you need four suits, and 9 of each of those, and it gets daunting to imagine how the 3 of hamburgers would be different from the 4 of hamburgers

# ¿ Dec 31, 2020 04:52

twoday: May 4, 2005; C-SPAM Times best-selling author

Crane Fist posted:

drat sorry for my lack of understanding of this completely fake thing, maybe you can recommend me some imaginary reading material on the subject

It is widely known that the first American colonists were murderously superstitious, but fortunetelling, the occult, and western esotericism was no less prominent in later periods of American history. From immigrants living in tenements to African Americans in the post-Civil-War South to traveling carnivals, fortunetellers were often not only working-class people working for working class people, but also often disenfranchised people from the fringes of mainstream society. Some were in it for the grift, sure, but others served a role akin to a therapist for the poor, helping people think about their lives in new ways or to make difficult decisions. In some cases this was a cherished role in the community, and in some places (like New Orleans), this tradition has become so strong as to form a key part of local cultural identity.

There are of course Marxist critiques of the sort that would be more in line with Taintrunner�s posting here, such as Theodor Adorno�s critique of astrology:

quote:

The doctrine of the existence of the Spirit, the ultimate exaltation of bourgeois consciousness, consequently bore teleologically within it the belief in spirits, its ultimate degradation. The shift to existence, always "positive" and justifying the world, implies at the same time the thesis of the positivity of mind, pinning it down, transposing the absolute into appearance. Whether the whole objective world, as "product", is to be spirit, or a particular thing a particular spirit, ceases to matter, and the world-spirit becomes the supreme Spirit, the guardian angel of the established, despiritualized order. On this the occultists live: their mysticism is the enfant terrible of the mystical moment in Hegel.

And then there are critiques of the critiques. From an essay on the economics of fortune telling certification programs:

quote:

Hardly fraudulent, the contemporary psychic practitioner performs an increasingly pervasive form of labor in American society. Part life-coach, part spiritual mentor, their work capitalizes on the conditions of everyday life, particularly as the quest for personal well-being comes to stand in for more structural promises of long-term security. They may, perhaps, be the quintessential affective laborers: those who sell their very capacity to produce in you the feeling that you exist � that you can be recognized, read, interpreted, and advised.

But in any case we find that fortunetelling and the occult can be a rich grounds of discussion, even when commenting on economic systems in the abstract:

quote:

What is perhaps most salient within the history of fortune-telling is the way it both reifies and subverts capitalist economics. Its subversion can be seen when one thinks of the ideological scandal that would ensue if one indeed had the ability to predict the outcome of the lottery, a feature of most capitalist societies. The capitalist ethos of self-mastery is undermined by the possibility of luck leading to success without proportional labor. As a result, games of luck tend to be sidelined in capitalist societies, looked down upon as pastimes of the poor and lazy.

�Patience, and shuffle the cards,� Cervantes wrote in Don Quixote. This notion serves as the foundation for the American myth of self-made success: One must work for success, but at the same time, anyone can achieve it. The American myth of the self-made man therefore creates a double bind: One must work, but one might also get lucky. As a result, those in inferior socioeconomic positions can feel that they still have the possibility of ascending by means of luck, while those in superior socioeconomic positions can feel deserving of their success as a result of their supposed hard work.

Through games of luck comes the notion of the �big break,� an idea that has been fundamental to diffusing socioeconomic frustrations for centuries, first observed by Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America. In the many hundreds of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European stories and fairy tales first told by the lower classes, one finds that the peasants never look to alter the royal system that oppresses them; rather, a happy ending occurs when the peasant himself becomes the king through a series of chance events. That�s to say, the occurrence of �big breaks,� however seldom, is enough to keep the masses contented with an unjust social system; they angle to be at the top of the current society, rather than looking to do away with the society entirely.

What has proven trickier for social elites to justify are the games of chance that are fundamental to their own success, the modern stock market being the quintessential example. How does a capitalist society make playing the stock market look like labor, so that the high earnings that often come from it appear to be derived from proportional work? How do the affluent �cleanse� their earnings, overcoming the taint of chance through the appearance of work, thereby conferring moral legitimacy on their positions of power? The elite solution has been to disguise the stock market as a place of complex probabilities and algorithms rather than what it fundamentally is: luck. It is chance rebranded as morally righteous labor.

And all this without even mentioning the interesting history of things such as the tarot deck itself, the development of particular traditions, and the transmission of these ideas and practices.

twoday has issued a correction as of 20:39 on Jan 3, 2021

# ¿ Jan 3, 2021 20:36

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > multidenominational witchcraft thread: drake's chart mid may - uranus will be on his MC