Cult of Tarot Forum

Question: One of the advantages of old age and approaching death is that you no longer need to avoid admitting to yourself and the world what a complete fool you are. Discuss.

Deck: The Charles Dickens Tarot

Card: 7 of Air Uriah Heep

Answer: As with the last few questions I have asked the tarot, this one comes from Dodalisque. Given his recent comments (cf. "Is idealism a crime? II" in which he portrays me as being unexplainably nasty to him whereas, from where I stand, my opinions of him are simply realistic), I'm not surprised I pulled the Uriah Heep card. Since the question is more an assertion with the directive to discuss, I will...

On the face of it, the weasely Machiavelli Uriah Heep might suggest that one of the advantages of old age is it allows you to drop the pretenses of being "ever so 'umble" and simply be the conniving cad you really are. Since growing old affects people in different ways, this may be the case for some; certainly, in my experience, advanced years - especially in men - makes a person less patient if not actually less able to maintain the mask between the outside world and their inner feelings.

More telling is the fact that Uriah is surrounded by elderly people - a point made explicit on this card. On the other side of the chessboard, nodding off, is Mr. Wickfield, while behind Uriah is his addled mother. Plying Mr. Wickfield with drink, Uriah falsifies documents and blackmails the old man. David Copperfield's surrogate father-figure, the inveterate reprobate Wilkins McCawber, is also being manipulated by Heep. This all suggests it's less that the aged no longer need to avoid admitting what complete fools they are as it is the aged are more vulnerable to being fooled.

Uriah Heep is a character in David Copperfield, a pseudo-(or, more accurately: a supra-)autobiography which opens with the famous line "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." Show they do, as David is indeed the hero, and not - try as he may - Uriah. What I'm getting at here is this: while the card pulled is Uriah Heep, the character Heep taught David Copperfield - the novel's hero and the unspoken subject of the card - a valuable lesson. In a framed picture above the mantlepiece, we see Mr. Wickfield's daughter, the angelic Agnes. The impish Uriah attempts to blackmail Agnes into being his lover. So proud of his machinations is Uriah that he brags of his plot to David. David is sickened and outraged by the mere suggestion yet, through a misguided notion of decorum, chooses not to say let alone do anything about it. The subtext here is that David is in love with Agnes - a feeling which is entirely reciprocated, yet Agnes' own notions of decorum prevent her from revealing her feelings. David, meantime, is too busy keeping up appearances to realize not only how Agnes feels but how he himself feels. Here, then, is the true foolishness of youth which advancing age dismantles and the most salient answer to our question: Heep, as a two-faced fink, is a personification of the impediments and self-imposed blinders which prevent us from seeing who others and we ourselves are. As David/Dickens drops his boyish idealism, he comes to see his own foolishness and, in turn, out-grow it.

Post-Script: The beautiful because dutiful Agnes Wickfield is Dickens' loving portrait of his sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth (cf. the CDT's Strength card). Very quickly, and for the rest of his life, Dickens regretted marrying Georgina's sister Catharine and not marrying Georgina. Early on, Georgina moved in with the Dickens family and essentially ran their household. When Charles and Catharine separated, Georgina stayed with Dickens, maintaining his domestic (and non-domestic) affairs and serving as his confidante. Although many found this scenario scandalous, both Dickens and Georgina disdained the foolish assumptions and social prejudices of their critics. In this way, David & Agnes & Dickens & "Georgy" no longer needed to avoid admitting to themselves what complete fools they had been and what a heep of fools the world still was.


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chiscotheque wrote: ↑21 Apr 2020, 17:15 I'm not surprised I pulled the Uriah Heep card.

You never pulled that card. Boo. This is a fix. You know very well that my ex-girlfiend took to calling me Uriah Heep after we split up, and also that I'm old and a complete fool. I refuse to believe the appearance of this particular card is a coincidence.

dodalisque wrote: ↑23 Apr 2020, 03:46 I refuse to believe the appearance of this particular card is a coincidence.

me too. and yet it happened. this is what happens when you feed me questions - they redound on you.


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chiscotheque wrote: ↑23 Apr 2020, 04:29

dodalisque wrote: ↑23 Apr 2020, 03:46 I refuse to believe the appearance of this particular card is a coincidence.

me too. and yet it happened. this is what happens when you feed me questions - the redound on you.

Well, redound on this:

Where is this question coming from?

Let's see you do a reading on that!

dodalisque wrote: ↑23 Apr 2020, 04:59
Where is this question coming from?

Let's see you do a reading on that!

this is obviously a fool's errand, but i'm gonna give it a go anyhow. in the spirit of 3 guesses, i'll pull 3 cards and keep my comments simple.

1st Card: Daughter of Water Esther Summerson

This card, being the Page of Cups, I always associate with myself, so I might say that oddly the question came somehow from me. But because Esther is a young girl, perhaps the question comes from a female - one of your daughters, one of your female friends, a female writer, or perhaps something "feminine" budding in yourself, such as an artistic inclination - something heretofore ignored, since Esther's adeptness is overlooked by most people including herself.

2nd Card: 6 of Water Aaron Riah & Jenny Wren

This card suggests a relationship, hence perhaps your question comes from some relationship in your life - a failed one, or one which was "odd". Riah & Wren are both child-like and parental, intimating that the question may come from thoughts about your parents and/or yourself in relation to your parents, i.e. decisions made given your insular upbringing and/or their years of married life iterated in your own.

3rd Card: The Emperor V Wilkins McCawber/John Dickens

This card, representing a father-figure for David Copperfield and Dickens' actual father, could underscore thoughts concerning your own father alluded to in the last card. but perhaps more accurately - since McCawber (played here by WC Fields) is a good-hearted fool - this card reflects your own feelings about yourself - your skill with words and ability to blarney, your forays into middle-classless without much money, and perhaps most poignantly your feelings surrounding your father (notably his death) and yourself as a father.

Now, knowing you, you probably derived the question from one of those English novels you read, or off a bathroom wall, but my thinking when pulling the cards was more: what in you resonated with the question? Using Diana's trick of adding up the cards, 5 & 6 is 11 - Esther's number and in the CDT, Justice XI Chancery:

This made we wonder if 1) Esther didn't represent your wife, since Esther remains outside of the machinations of Chancery and is seen on the card in her new house, and 2) if Chancery didn't represent your litigation with your condo. Then I realized the Emperor is 4, not 5, and so the Justice card is like a "jumper", and the actual card (4+6) should've been 10, The Weal of Fortune X Barnaby Rudge

Well, as we know, Barnaby Rudge is a book I made you read and a central character with whom you feel some kinship with, to the degree that you used the name to sign your last email to me. Barnaby is indeed a fool who doesn't even have the wherewithal to pretend he isn't. This was a book Dickens was very eager to write, yet it was a total failure. The sassy Dolly Vardon stands like a goading figure. There is much gaiety in the background, but also much unnecessary bloodshed. The Gordon Riots were described by Dickens - who feared the mob - as a moral plague, and given Esther's deforming smallpox, I wonder if our current pandemic isn't influencing your thoughts? Rudge becomes the unexpected leader (or mascot) of a failed rebellion, rather like yourself vis-a-vis Gibraltar Management. Here i was all ready to say 11 + 11 (Esther) added up to 22, The Fool, but Barnaby beat me to it - more fool me - and were I to add up all the cards, they'd total 21, The World

I don't know if this has any significance, except that it represents all of Dickens' creations, therefore all of one's creative potential and all of one's deceits - what in Shakespeare's day were called conceits. As this card represents the worldwide success of Dickens the novelist (its own kind of pandemic), it could suggest again that you got the idea from a novel, but the meaning here concerns the real influence and impact realized potential has. Dickens' eyes are closed, so he may be sleep-walking through life, recovering from ague, or he may simply be soul-searching. As ever, it's undoubtedly some dialectic of all 3.


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chiscotheque wrote: ↑23 Apr 2020, 15:23

dodalisque wrote: ↑23 Apr 2020, 04:59
Where is this question coming from?

Let's see you do a reading on that!

this is obviously a fool's errand,

Dared and done! Clever, picking up on that word "coming from",as in the phrase "I don't know where you're coming from". So you analyse where I am coming from when I ask you that question. That is, what my motives are for asking such a peculiar question.

Wouldn't you know it: I throw you a metaphysical question that I expected you to do the mad scientist routine on, and you do a sweet charming series of readings about my personal motives that I can understand. The question didn't really come from me because I woke up with it in my head the other morning and can't claim authorship. It seems like one of those moebius strips.

I was thinking of it more as a question about the origin of thought or language. Where do ideas or questions come from that pop into our heads? I don't even know who is writing this sentence. It's not like I plan it out beforehand. There's just a space in my head and sentences appear there as they are being spoken. Maybe that does not come as a surprise to you, and you would say that it's obvious I never put thought into anything I say. But does any of us? Maybe afterthoughts, but what about the moment of the thinking of the thought. Should we think before we think? I'm a bit manic at the moment, so please ignore me. Can't quite distinguish that line separating twinkling from tiresome. It's late.

chiscotheque wrote: ↑23 Apr 2020, 04:29

me too. and yet it happened. this is what happens when you feed me questions - they redound on you.

Redounding is indeed a very strange thing.

dodalisque wrote: ↑24 Apr 2020, 04:32 The question didn't really come from me because I woke up with it in my head the other morning and can't claim authorship. It seems like one of those moebius strips.

I was thinking of it more as a question about the origin of thought or language. Where do ideas or questions come from that pop into our heads? I don't even know who is writing this sentence. It's not like I plan it out beforehand. There's just a space in my head and sentences appear there as they are being spoken.

i woke up yesterday after a dream in which my hair fell out. i was in that twilight state i cherish, between waking asleep. If sleep is being underwater, this is being on the shore in 2 feet of water, able to stand up and get out or float just under the surface. What i cherish about it is thoughts there come unheeded and unfiltered, and memories, if pursued, are a little like reliving them. On my mind was getting old, how i mentally fight it, how everything gets old, how age changes perspectives, and it compelled me to do a reading to "discuss" where the reading on old age and tom foolery came from.

Curiously, my first comment was that the first card always reminds me of me, and i wonder if the reading didn't have as much to do with me as you. The question of the origin of thought is one I've always asked - people as subjective beings are naturally selfish yet we rarely stop to wonder where that "self" comes from, arrogantly assuming each of us is simply at the wheel and the buck stops there. In the tradition of Cui Bono, this is a very convenient equation for assigning blame and taking credit, the bread and butter of institutions such as Law and organized religion. by contrast, the Gnostics suggest in order to understand the universe and one's origin, one must look inside, see the self and where it derives. talk about redounding!

thoughts about the origin of thoughts are ones i often think, and i can remember actually thinking them out loud in your presence. indeed, i recalled doing so in an email not so long ago so i had a quick perusal and sure enough i found this, the first sentence of an email i sent you on April 5:

"geesh, of course reading involves translation - even thinking does!"

So, as the Page of Cups intimated, maybe the question came from me. except that this isn't the question asked here - that was the question you asked and i attempted to answer in the post "what is the sound of one hand laughing?", namely: If thinking is a form of translation, what can we call the language we are translating from? (it's also connected theologically to the questions in "gist for the mill" and "mind the gap" - the latter featuring Esther again). The question here is about getting old and misplacing one's pretenses. of course, as our discourse proves, along with old age comes senility.

I was reminded, looking back at our emails, of the poem by Pinsky you were looking at. In it, he talks about Uriah Heep, which i'd forgotten about (along with senility comes memory loss) but whose card showed up to answer the age-old fool question. In response to the poem's orchid metaphor, i mentioned Perdita's discussion of gillyflowers; in the ST, her card is the 6 of Cups - the 6 of Water which showed up in my subsequent reading here (Esther, too, holds flowers). where am i going with this? nowhere, just rambling. have you noticed, behind Esther, there seems to be a man holding one of the many doors open to conceal himself? I wonder if the fish in the RWS Page of Cups cup is a poisson d'Avril - an April Fools? you know, redounds can mean contribute greatly to a person's honour or simply rebound in a detrimental way. talk about selfish! looked at closely, the brain is made up of little cells. In Copperfield, Uriah Heep becomes a model inmate in jail - prisoner 27. the British band Uriah Heep was formed in 1969, the year I was born, and had 27 singles. The band's bass (not to be confused with the fish) player died at age 27.

Near the end Uriah Heep says, David Copperfield,
I've always hated you, you've always been against me.
Copperfield retorts, As I've told you before, it's you,
Heep, who have been against the whole world.


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chiscotheque wrote: ↑24 Apr 2020, 17:00 thoughts about the origin of thoughts are ones i often think, and i can remember actually thinking them out loud in your presence. indeed, i recalled doing so in an email not so long ago so i had a quick perusal and sure enough i found this, the first sentence of an email i sent you on April 5:

"geesh, of course reading involves translation - even thinking does!"

I am glad you remembered that. I had been thinking about your comment for a few days, and I think that was what inspired my question. I was so proud of myself for coming up with the thought that reading was a form of translation and then you added another meta-level of abstraction to it.

chiscotheque wrote: ↑24 Apr 2020, 17:00 The question here is about getting old and misplacing one's pretenses. of course, as our discourse proves, along with old age comes senility.

I wonder, as we get older and more forgetful, if we are preparing to move permanently into that vacuum from which thoughts arise. Is death the source of thought? "The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns"? Except of course we do return. The ecstatic reclamation (cf. clamare - Latin for "to cry out") of that illusive fact we were searching for, or the noises that come out of our mouths as speech, or the ink that flows from our pen are all proofs of our return. Like Orpheus, do we all make a descent into the underworld for every sentence? Does all language and consciousness of self (i.e. the ego) require a descent into the underworld of the unconscious?

chiscotheque wrote: ↑24 Apr 2020, 17:00 looked at closely, the brain is made up of little cells. In Copperfield, Uriah Heep becomes a model inmate in jail - prisoner 27. the British band Uriah Heep was formed in 1969, the year I was born, and had 27 singles. The band's bass (not to be confused with the fish) player died at age 27.

I live for that stuff. I confidently predict, from my deepest sources of intuition, that one day coincidence will grant the human race a means of conquering space and time, of traveling through galaxies and parallel dimensions. It deserves to be a science of its own. If only we could find a way to make money from it. There's always lottery tickets I suppose. But you would need to buy a Heep of lottery tickets to obtain a representative sample.