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The Metaphysics of Playing Cards (answer)

Dear Mr Purcell

It is with great joy that I read your query- you are one of the very few cogniscenti who have stumbled upon the mystical nature of playing cards. You are thinking along the right track, and I only have to reach the conclusions from the hypotheses you have already posited to demonstrate the glorious nature of actuality.

As you have already realised, there are many aspects of the deck of cards which represent aspects of the world around us. However, to realise their full implications, one must look further, in more detail, to the nature of the individual card itself. As you know, each of these cards is embedded in a system of 52 weeks within a 4 season year, demonstrating the cycle by which we live our lives, with the joker as the deity.

Consider, though, the sides of the card. It has four very thin faces, which represent the days tuesday to friday, on which very little of any import occurs. The two much wider faces represent Saturday and Sunday, days on which the nature of existence can be pondered, and new truths assimilated, due to the lack of the pressure of the working week which stunt our minds. These are the six physical dimensions of the card. The true depth of its implications though are revealed when we consider the seventh dimension in which it exists, that of time. The fact that this dimension has no set limit, and appears to potentially go on for all eternity, is the reason for its symbolic representation of Monday, completing our temporal framework for life. However, it represents so much more than that as well.

The card is not eternal, as we all know, even if it is protected with some kind of lacquer it will degrade, and eventually become unrecognisable as a card at all. One day it will have degenerated so completely as to be reabsorbed with the earth, and become food for trees, which may well subsequently be turned into a new generation of playing cards.

This echoes our own fate, and the cycle of life. The pardox that life begets life, yet life must kill to live. The grass of the great plains of our land must die so that the oxen may grow fat. The oxen must fall to our spears so that we may feast upon their flesh and grow many in number, and when we die as we someday must, we will become food for the grass.

And so, as the great drama plays itself out so many times a day, we must remember that the cards tell us not to fear death as the end of an individual life, but rather that we must celebrate life as it has been, and the re-absorpbtion of the physical vessel of one's consciousness into the great cycle of life, as we must return to the earth from whence we came so that our children may have oxen to feed on themselves. In each mouthful of flesh that may contain some part of our forefathers, we must hope that some of their wisdom may remain and become ours.

We must also be aware of the way that the suits into which the cards are organised impact upon the metaphysics of our society. As you so rightly say, they are representative in a temporal fashion of the seasons of the year, yet they are also themselves symbolic of the nature of humanity. The Club represents the violence and evil which permeates the very recesses of our darkest thoughts. The deeply- ingrained urge towards wanton destruction which is the legacy of our evolutionary heritage, and which we must overcome in order to transcend the base urges of the animal kingdom in order to become beings of pure thought. The Heart draws on familiar imagery- the seat of all emotions, from love and passion to deepest despair, it is the seat of the life-essence. We can feel it pumping, tirelessly, the blood around our tissues, and if it is pierced we die. It is the root of life, literally, and the seat of the things which make us feel alive. It is, in essence, our humanity.

The Diamond is the very essence of beauty and of wealth. It symbolises that towards which we strive, and in its eternal nature it shows us the possibility of existence throughout geological timescales of billions of years in a world where we are conscious for only the briefest blink of Gaia's eye. Yet also the diamond is the coldest and hardest of objects, demonstrating the inhumanity which can result from the pursuit of such things above all else. It is the very antithesis of the life-essence represnted by the Heart. The Spade represents death, and life. It is the tool we use to bury our loved ones, and yet also that which we use to cultivate the land. When seen in the context of the great cycle of life begetting life, it is a reminder that for our children to live and thrive, we must oursleves inevitably die and return to the soil.

Continues

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