Deck: The Charles Dickens Tarot
Card: The Devil XV Poverty (featuring Oliver Twist & Fagin, Ignorance & Want)
Answer: The over-riding theme of this card is Poverty - that which we lack. As Christ said, "the poor you will always have with you" and as Oliver Twist asked, "Please, sir, can I have some more?" This idea is underscored by the orphans of humanity, Ignorance & Want, sheltered by the Spirit Yet To Come from A Christmas Carol. Ignorance & Want signify both Man's incompletion and his yearning to fill the void. If the language we are translating from is poverty, how much more poor is the language of words we translate that language into? Like Oliver - who, as his name suggests, hungers to live and is himself the opposite of evil - the little voice in our head may be thin gruel, but we are starving and want some more.
The language we use to translate the original is an astounding tool. Like the Victorian Era itself, language creates architectural wonders, solves physical riddles, facilitates action and, indeed, entertains an entire empire. Yet it also harbours a corrupt structure and feeds off a misused underclass. Oliver and Fagin are simply two such cogs in the Wheel hell-bent on rolling down its rut. It's interesting, here, that Fagin is Jewish, insofar as Hebrew (along with its fellow Canaanite languages) is the forefather of our written alphabet.
Along with the Hebrew God came its Devil, Satan, the fallen angel, the light bringer, the morning star. An angel is a divine being who brings man's experience to God and God's to man. The greek concept was called daimon - a divider and provider of fortune - from which we get our word demon. Originally, a daimon was a personal tutelary deity, akin to our guardian angel. Socrates talks of his own daemon who whispered into his inner ear, telling him when he was wrong but not telling him how. Christianity divided this original notion - akin to intuition, inspiration, conscience, and second sight - into the cut-and-dried dualism of shoulder angels: one good, one bad. Society similarly categorizes its creations into simplified scapegoats of its own conscience, here personified by innocent Oliver and nefarious Fagin.
Just as one's inner language is mercurial, it is akin to the Roman god Mercury, the keeper of boundaries and bridge between the upper and lower worlds - Man and God. He is the divine incarnation of commerce, communication, facility, fortune, and travel, but at the same time is the god of limitation, trickery, and thieves. At death, he ushers the human soul to the underworld. In this way, the proto-linguistic water bubbling from the divine well-spring can taste both bitter and sweet. Many fear it, proceeding as it does from the unknown, the unseen, the subconscious. Many prefer to defer from this language to a more concrete language, man-made and lit by a sun that never sets. Not only can much be accidentally lost in translation, but much can be intentionally lost - taken from Peter to give to Paul. Using language to convey the nature of our inquiry, the ineffable, is to actively participate in this loss. As with the spiritual significance of Adam giving names to the animals, our subject - the ever-green proto-language - must be deduced and intuited in counter-point to language, the Ego, and Adam's modus, which is to divide and conquer. Here, on The Devil card, the spirit - or daimon in the rough - has her face covered, not ironically by a book. As God told Moses, "No man can see my face and live" yet Moses saw God's face and did not die - what gives? God knows, but it appears to be bound up with the notion that the fulness of the divine must remain unspoken. This thing, then, which I cannot answer let alone answer for, dare i say unifies and liberates.
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