Tuesday, December 24, 2024

King in Yellow Tarot - A Second Reading

 
After some discussion with a friend I decided to do another KiY tarot reading. In my first reading I just used the Wikipedia interpretations of the cards, which it seems are strongly biased toward the symbolism used in the Rider Waite set. While Kurt Komoda based the color scheme and linework on the Rider Waite set, the dev team packed the designs with their own symbolism.

This time, I'll try to interpret what's actually on the cards and how it relates to their assigned role in the story, rather than using someone else's opinion of someone else's deck.

 
I chose the Two of Cups as the Signifier because I like this Andre the Giant character. What does it mean? He's surrounded by human bones, suggesting cannibalism. He's guzzling from two goblets at once, gluttony? Two faces... like Janus? God of doors, beginnings and endings, the day/night cycle? The street is half lit, indicating dawn or dusk. The Giant himself isn't affected by the lighting, Komoda said in the Insta post that he did flat lighting on all the characters to make it look more like an old time tarot deck.

Cannibalism, gluttony, insatiable hunger that drives man to madness. That's our subject.


The Mask is The Hanged Man. We've got a horn with decorations abandoned on the ground below him, a horseshoe, a cart wheel stuffed in the bushes... Was he run off the road by highwaymen? A tax collector strung up? He's got three lions on his surcoat, the symbol of England. Is this a Hundred Years War type deal? The rest of the deck seems French. In the background, the sun shines through the clouds, no brighter than a star.

Let's say our Mask (the face the protagonist presents) is a government official of some kind, one who gets punished or humiliated.


The Performance is the Page of Cups. A young guy reading a pile of tomes. An ancient library full of elder secrets? There's a face on the page, a masked man in robes? He's drinking while he works.

Our story is a search for forbidden knowledge.


The Audience is the five of cups. A mysterious five armed spider dude, toasting the sun as it rises (or sets?) over the ocean. This is one of my favorite cards in the deck, although it immediately disproves what I said earlier about the subjects in the illustrations not being affected by lighting. I think this symbolizes a receptive audience. People who are eager to see what happens and excited for the story to begin... or end? 

I should say, like with Gene Wolfe, my null hypothesis for why the designers made any given decision, if I can't think of a better explanation, is "because it was cool."


Our Unconscious is Temperance. We got a crown studded with gems and an illuminated page of text. The ARC DREAM yellow sign is divided in half by the words. I can't read the lorem ipsum on the page. A proclamation from the King, totally illegible.

Our Unconscious is a sense that authority, law, etc is just a lot of contentless babbling. The bosses don't have a fucking clue.


The Actor is the One of Cups. A child balancing a giant goblet on his head... or hiding under it? Is it falling?

Our protagonist perceives themselves as being crushed under an enormous weight, or carrying a burden that's constantly at risk of toppling.


Our Script is the High Priest. We got a lecherous cleric and two nude flagellants. The black sun in the background is a riff on the black stars that hang over lost Carcosa in the King in Yellow mythos. The symbol's use in esoteric Nazism is a present-day innovation and wouldn't have occurred to an artist in the 1930s (when the deck was created in the Delta Green lore).

The current situation was created by a corrupt and lecherous authority figure, who uses their position for mundane hedonism but is puppeted by a greater corruption.
 

The Backdrop is The Chariot. An Egyptian or other Bronze Age looking archer in a one-man chariot, pulled by two Sphinxes. They're wearing bridles and bits but because they have human faces it looks like bondage gear. Are they meant to be male or female? Egyptians generally depicted Sphinxes as male. These ones have long hair but no breasts, which gynosphinxes are typically drawn with, and lots of men have long hair in Bronze Age stories. Achilles, Enkidu, Samson...

The simple interpretation is that our story takes place in a war, but we could also say it's got chained monsters forced to serve some useful purpose but rebelling the first chance they get - or enslaved murderous women.


Our Surprise is the One of Batons. This little devil sitting on a scepter. His genitals are artfully concealed, which is a deliberate decision in a set where other characters go full frontal. You could read the baton as phallic, or as a substitute phallus, but that's the type of lazy folk-Freudian reading I'd endlessly deride if someone else did it, so I'll restrain myself. The curled tongue I'd accept as sensual.

Temptation? An invitation to debauchery from someone creepy and unappealing? A mocking voyeur? It's a surprise.


Our Rising Action is the Knight of Batons. An armored man at arms digging a hole with a scepter. Is he searching for secrets, or digging a grave? The world behind him looks alien, hoodoos silhouetted against a deep red sky.

An authority figure with the power of life and death uncovers something, or makes preparations to kill someone.


Our Fate is the King of Batons. A monarch going out to sea in a rowboat. The oars sit behind him, ignored, as he uses his staff of office to propel himself away from safety. Literally and figuratively getting in too deep. This one gives me a Chronicles of Amber feeling, thanks to the seaside tower in the background. Does the Tower portend the king's doom, given its symbolism in tarot, or is it cheating to incorporate symbology from another card in another deck?

I'm going to read this as the doomed protagonist's tendency to lean on authority (a badge, a gun, the law) for protection when common sense says otherwise. To not realize the danger until return to shore is impossible.

 
The Revelation is the Page of Batons. A yellow robed herald presents a jeweled yellow crook to three people. In the background, a ruined structure and a cliff. A tree stump covered in coins. The guy in blue has a purse and a weapon protruding from his sash. The lady carrying wood fondles a little necklace or bracelet covered in beads. The hooded figure in the rear carries a staff and wears a 3.PF Fighter style golf bag of weapons. 

Are they merchants? Adventurers? The woman carrying wood and sticks suggests the herald has come to them on the way back to their village, but the other two characters look like travelers. Is the herald blocking their path to an unknown realm, with that ruined castle in the background? Why is the back of his right hand scarred?

The crook could make him a shepherd, collecting lost sheep and guiding them back to the path - or to the slaughter. It's also a symbol of the Pharaohs of Egypt. If we apply the theater theme it could even be a vaudeville style curtain hook, used to yank poor performers off the stage.

I'm going to say that our Revelation is a termination of our protagonist's adventure in the guise of a trusted authority figure steering them away from the truth - a betrayal in the guise of helping them or protecting them from the horrible fate that awaits them at the end of the journey.


The Denouement is the Tower. A bright white moon and a tower with a bunch of people falling out of the left side. The top two levels are illuminated, and one window is lit at the bottom. A city of peaked roofs extends to the horizon.

Something terrible happens as a result of our hero being stabbed in the back at the last second. Either to other people, because they couldn't stop something bad from happening, or to them. The light at the bottom of the tower and the people falling could suggest a movement from a higher to a lower level. Imprisonment? Demotion? A new realm with a new perspective? Do the corrupt authority figures get their way, or are they sucked down into the vortex with their victims?

A story about corrupt authority figures who harness supernatural forces to satisfy their insane cravings. Our hero counts on a badge and gun and on the law to protect them, although they should know better. In the end their investigation is kneecapped by their higher ups, preventing them from reaching the center of the maze. This is True Detective Season 1. The season that repeatedly references the King in Yellow and the Chambers mythos, with the specific flavor popularized by Tynes with his mythos fiction and RPG writing in the 1990s. Again, the cards produce stories I already know because I'm the one reading them.

I forgot to preserve the orientation of the cards (upright or reversed) as they came out of the pack, again. A friend suggested that the King in Yellow cards are "pre-reversed" compared to the Rider Waite or Marseilles deck. The ARC DREAM designs are ghoulish extremes and a reversal would restore them to normalcy.

In my last post I was also wrong about the origin of the cards. While it's possible the devs referenced the Tim Powers novel Last Call when writing up the lore, Dan Harms independently came up with the original concept while reading back issues of The Unspeakable Oath on Usenet.
 
This was a lot more fun than the first reading I did. The deck is full of cards I still haven't decoded, and I'm sure I missed details in these ones. I encourage other users of the King in Yellow tarot to ignore conventional tarot interpretations and use their imagination to interpret the cards themselves based on what's in the pictures.

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