Prismatic Perception

Tetzcatlipoca, Prudentia, and Divinatory Mirrors

It is a house of mirrors, this suit of swords that concerns the metaphysics of light. Swords establish a basis for investigating symbolic importance. The clarity of sight is dependent on the nature of light, and after a gloriously gleaming excalibur of truth offered in the Ace of Swords, things get very dark, very quickly.

The tarot uniquely teaches the reader about its nature within this dark landscape. The standard Smith-Waite sees judges, litigators, liars and thieves sharing the suit. Truth, justice, virtue have an aesthetics here, and given the tarot’s now widespread and multicultural proliferation, it is an object that has cross-media sensual dimensions. Each card links to landscapes, deities, myths, and daily life. As a diviner, I appropriate the tarot as a type of obsidian mirror, a kind of dark light that allows me to see psychically, the soul, the inner process, the hidden connections between all things. The swords, more specifically the obsidian blade, is a specialized technology as much as it is a representative cultural image. The obsidian mirror is divinatory. Tarot, like or as obsidian, alters our engagement with materiality.

Aesthetics and ideology contextualize matter. The tarot is useful in a world where the aesthetics of white supremacy distort and corrupt our perception of freedom, beauty and truth.

As intersectionality has provided a framework for the analyzing how systems of oppression overlap, or intersect, to specifically position various individuals within a the hegemony of the hierarchical, dominating western world, our perception of struggle became more contextualized, nuanced and complex. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined this term, illustrating that the publics lacking awareness of the level of police violence that black women experience is due to obfuscated patterns of recognition. She offered a simple analogy of an intersection because she was concerned with the overlapping oppression of racism and sexism.

Racism and sexism when framed as an either/or proposition place the oppression Black women experience in the blindspot of collective consciousness and concern. To be able to name, know, and thus humanize, those being dehumanized and destroyed by state violence requires an increase of perception, of awareness. Crenshaw recognized expanded perception would require a new frame. One needs a prism to see the invisible bodies and their plight.

There is no crossroads that looms quite so ominously as the intersections of oppression.

You gotta be like Kendrick with the red-light green-light red-light green-light to not get hit.