LEN: Joan reads for Merrick

[Joan Marie]

Hello Merrick my friend.
What kind of fanciful drama may I ply my Lenormand skills at, questionable as they may be?

[Merrick]

Joan I’m sure your skills are far more formidable than mine!

I will get back to you soon with a question. Likely something from the Dune universe...

[Joan Marie]

Joan I’m sure your skills are far more formidable than mine!

I assure you I am the least formidable person on this forum.

[Merrick]

Hello Joan, thank you for responding to my summons so quickly. Of course I realize the entourage of armed Sardaukar I sent to retrieve you left you with little choice in the matter, but I appreciate your time nonetheless. And let me tell you that secreting you aboard a Guild freighter involved quite a hefty sum in spice bribes, both to keep your presence hidden from spies but also because those inhuman Guild Navigators loathe oracles of any kind, although they refuse to explain why.

And right now it’s an oracle I need. You see, being the Emperor of a thousand systems isn’t easy at the best of times, and right now things are balanced on the edge of a knife. As you know, my Imperial authority and position are maintained through the support of the Houses Major and Minor, and should they get wind of what I have done to secure my family’s claim to the throne, they would surely oust me and exile me to a prison planet.

This all began with Duke Leto Atreides, a distant cousin of mine but a burgeoning rival nonetheless. While he claimed to have no aspirations to the Imperial throne, his popularity within the Landsraad was unmistakable and growing steadily. And unlike my damned beloved Bene Gesserit wife, who has borne me only daughters at the insistence of the Order that delivered her to me, his Bene Gesserit concubine saw fit to defy the Order and bear Duke Leto a son. Between his popularity and a ready male heir, I knew I had to take drastic action lest he lead a coup against me one day.

To that end I cleverly exploited a millennia old feud between the House of Atreides and the House Harkonnen. I had granted the Harkonnens control of Arrakis, the only planet where the spice melange is found that allows Guild Navigators to chart safe paths across the stars and the singular product upon which our entire civilization depends. The Harkonnens are brutal but effective and always deliver their spice quota in full every rotation. Working in concert with the loathsome but useful Baron Harkonnen, I hatched a plan to rid myself of the Atreides once and for all.

I declared a changeover in the stewardship of Arrakis from the Harkonnens to the Atreides. On the surface this looks like a great honor and a major leap in Duke Leto’s standing, but in truth it was the staging ground for my trap. Once the Duke and his family were uprooted from their ancestral home and placed on the unfamiliar, unforgiving desert ground of Arrakis, I would allow the Baron to attack and wipe the whole House out. To ensure success, I supplemented the Baron’s forces with several legions of my own elite fighting force, the same Sardaukar that brought you here to me today.

The plan went off, at first I thought without a hitch, but several things have bothered me. To start, the Baron assures me that the entire Duchal family were killed, but he could only produce Duke Leto’s body. He claims that Leto’s concubine, the Lady Jessica, and their son Paul were killed in a sandstorm as they attempted to evade the Harkonnen forces, and that such sandstorms leave no trace of bodies, but that seems to convenient a cover for a man as vicious and cruel as the Baron, who would never have allowed Jessica and Paul to escape unharmed.

Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that a full legion of Sardaukar never returned from a skirmish with the Fremen, natives of Arrakis who the Baron assures me are nothing more than desert rats, and yet when a scouting party went looking for my men after the battle, they found nothing but a few scattered pieces of their uniforms, and no bodies of either Sardaukar or Fremen.

Things have devolved since this plan unfolded two years ago. While the Harkonnens have taken back Arrakis, they have not met their spice quota since the first quarter rotation after their return. The Baron tells me this is a natural consequence of the infrastructural upheaval caused by my plan, but my spies tell me that the Fremen have been actively sabotaging and attacking Harkonnen equipment and that they are now following a new religious and military leader known only as “Muad’Dib”, who strikes with unerring accuracy and disappears into the desert the moment the attack is concluded. The Baron’s excuses are wearing thin and as production is trickling to a halt, I may have to step in personally to get things back on track.

The situation has become so complex, filled with so many variables, that my best Mentats can no longer make predictions with any degree of accuracy. The Guild Navigators have told me that their limited prescient sight is wholly blocked when they turn their attention to Arrakis, which is disturbing in the extreme, especially as they tell me this blockage began shortly after the attack on the Atreides and has grown in the time that this Muad’Dib has risen to prominence. I dare not go to the Bene Gesserit for advice, as they already have their hooks in me enough with my wife teaching our daughters her witch’s ways, and should the Bene Gesserit learn of my plans they would blackmail me to the point where they controlled the throne, not I.

So now you see why I have need of your services. You are not connected to this situation in any way, so you can be impartial. Your oracle is not dependent on the spice, and therefore may be able to pierce the blockage that has stymied the Guild Navigators. I must emerge victorious from this situation. I will not allow a desert rat like this Muad’Dib upend an Imperial dynasty that has stood for centuries and I must ensure my heirs rule the Imperium for millennia to come.

If I go to Arrakis, what will happen? Will this Muad’Dib face me as a man, or will he hide behind his Fremen? And what has truly become of the Lady Jessica and the Duke’s son Paul? What can I do to retain my power?

I realize this is a lot to ask of you. Please do your best, and in return for your honest services I will ensure that your death be pleasant, delivered via Soma overdose which will send you off on the dreams of clouds. Unlike the Baron Harkonnen, I am only cruel when it is to my political benefit. Of course you understand that you cannot leave this room alive now that you know secrets that could destroy my entire dynasty, but consider that your last act in this life will be in the direct service of your Emperor and let that be of great comfort.

Thank you Joan and I look forward to your reading.

[Joan Marie]

OMG!

I shall do my best. But a request of this magnitude will require some time. Please do not think I am stalling to put off my inevitable, albeit sweet, demise. No that isn't it at all!!! Seriously. I am ready to die for my Emperor. No problem! I just don't want to be too hasty now...with the reading, you know?

I must first prepare myself for this grave and ponderous task.

[Joan Marie]

My Dear Emperor,
Allow me please to begin by taking issue with your assertion that I have no dog in this fight. I think the moment your goons snatched me away from my cozy abode with only half a season of Breaking Bad left on my binge-watching marathon, and with a succulent lasagne baking away in my oven in anticipation of a perfect evening, is the moment I got some skin in this game.

Forgive my impertinence, but what have I to lose at this point?

Also, I think you should know that you have clearly mistaken me for the Oracle Jean Marie who is really into these kind of multi-character scenarios. My Lord, I fear you will be disappointed for I cannot answer your multiple questions in detail as I lack the capacity to follow such complex plot points. It's all I can do to keep up with the antics of Jesse Pinkman and Walter White.

But as long as this is happening, I shall throw down some cards for you but lower your expectations by a LOT.

I have combined all your many queries onto one single one that I could wrap my pea-brain around. And it is this:

Can I trust my own plans?

I understand this is woefully inadequate, but keep an open mind. here we go:

In the very center of this spread we have The Child. That's gotta be you, dog. But what does it mean? Does it point to you being very naive? Maybe overconfident that the dominoes you think you are setting up are going to fall just as you imagine they will?

The surrounding cards are frankly not good.

The combination of Birds-Mountain on either side of the Child say something to me about others plotting against you, creating obstacles that, in your naivete, you will not foresee nor be prepared for.

Going the other direction, the Snake and Rider on either side of the child tell me there is treachery afoot that will reach you from afar. Possibly in the form of a poisoned letter, or one full of misinformation? And because of your essential childlike innocence/naivete, you are going to fall for it like a ton of bricks.

I think, and here is my counsel, you need to get out of your own head here and approach this whole matter much more straightforwardly as it is clear that your skills at planning elaborate schemes is lacking and will be your downfall.

That's all I got M'lord. But just maybe it is the best advice.

Since it is abundantly clear that I have no idea what any of this is about despite reviewing your request several times now, I would ask you dear Emperor to release me from my doom as I am, I assure you, no threat whatsoever to your dynasty. I could no more explain to anyone the secrets you have shared with me than I could launch a space shuttle with a pocket calculator. Your plans are not only safe with me, telling them to me was like sending them into a black hole.

I wish you luck with your family and humbly ask to be returned to my home where I have waiting for me a luscious bottle of Sicilian red wine so dark it is nearly black and a lasagne that must be done by now.

[Merrick]

Very well Joan Marie, as I see you have both given this reading considerable thought and no one would believe you had an audience with the emperor, I will return you back to your home. Of course you do realize should you speak of this to anyone, even your own family, my forces will descend on you like a swarm of hornets and leave nothing behind. Go now, I release you! I apologize that you will have to be sent home the way you came, stuck in the cargo hold of a Navigation Guild freighter, but that is the price we must pay for secrecy.
——- Well that was good fun! Thank you for playing. As you might have guessed based on my first post in the thread, I took on the role of the Padishah Emperor Shadaam IV from the Frank Herbert novel Dune. What follows will definitely constitute spoilers for that book and presumably the upcoming movie.

The post with the elaborate question was a summary of the book’s events from the Emperor’s perspective up through the second act. In the book, Paul and Jessica do escape and Paul ends up becoming a messiah figure to the local Fremen people. This happens because the maternal order to which Jessica belongs, the Bene Gesserit, long ago planted myths of a messiah among cultures throughout the imperium and Paul, trained in the Bene Gesserit ways, fulfills those myths. It also helps that he is the product of a millennia long breeding program by the Bene Gesserit, resulting in his ability to see the future when he consumes the spice of Arrakis.

The book culminates with Paul and the Fremen holding Arrakis hostage until the Emperor himself comes to deal with the situation, at which point Paul is goaded into hand to hand combat with the Baron Harkonnen’s nephew and heir. Unbeknownst to Paul, despite his powers, the nephew has been outfitted with a poison dart that almost takes Paul out, but Paul emerges victorious and ends up ousting the Emperor from the throne.

The cards accurately saw the Emperor’s concerns (the birds), and the unforeseen obstacles that he couldn’t possibly have factored into his plans (the mountain), and I love that your reading of the Child was the Emperor’s naïveté. Spot on with that! And I find it amazing that you pulled poison out of the reading given the prominence of the poison dart in the book’s finale.

All in all a lovely reading a lovely Lenormand deck. Thanks for playing along with me!

[Joan Marie]

The cards accurately saw the Emperor’s concerns (the birds), and the unforeseen obstacles that he couldn’t possibly have factored into his plans (the mountain), and I love that your reading of the Child was the Emperor’s naïveté. Spot on with that! And I find it amazing that you pulled poison out of the reading given the prominence of the poison dart in the book’s finale.

Thanks! I have no clue about Dune. I never even saw the David Lynch one and I love him. So I too am pretty impressed with myself for getting "poison" in the mix!

That was fun! I'm glad you didn't mind my straying from your actual questions, but I wasn't joking when I said I couldn't wrap my head around them. I just riffed and seems like it kind of worked out. i get to live another day anyway!!

[dodalisque]

I just riffed and seems like it kind of worked out. i get to live another day anyway!!

Genius, JM. Even when you're wrong, you're right. Even when you don't sit the exam you get a passing grade. Even when you complain about how hard the questions were you get praise and reward. Not even James Bond or Bruce Willis charmed their way out of a tighter spot than that.

I saw David Lynch's Dune and barely recognised it from Merrick's description of the tortuous plot of the book. Such works have a mood and narrative sweep that is impossible to convey in precis form. Stripped of that magic the plots read like genealogical lists in the Old Testament.

I guess I'm showing my bias against sci-fi fantasy. I don't have that literary gene in my make-up. Some read for plot - mostly historians and philosophers, I find, and those with a compendious mind - and others for verbal texture. I'm sure there are lots of authors that tick both boxes.

Our tarot friend, the great movie director Alejandro Jodorowsky was originally engaged to direct Dune by Dino di Laurentis, but he lost control of the massive and massively expensive project - he was doing a lot of acid at the time - and it was given to Lynch, a relatively untried director. Jodo went to the first screening of Lynch's Dune ready to be jealous and resentful, but after two minutes he realised he had nothing to worry about, Lynch's Dune was bad, and he left the theatre with a smile on his face.

Jodo is known to us as the greatest reader of tarot cards in the world, and also the creator of the ground-breaking Camoin-Jodorowsky TdM deck. Enrique Enriquez said that Jodo, who essentially introduced the TdM to the RWS-dominated English-speaking tarot world, was responsible for "blowing the dust off the cards."

Thanks, both of you, this was a lot of fun to watch. Very unusual and funny, and all the better for that. But the interpretation of the 5 Len cards was persuasive and instructive too.

[Joan Marie]

Genius, JM. Even when you're wrong, you're right. Even when you don't sit the exam you get a passing grade. Even when you complain about how hard the questions were you get praise and reward. Not even James Bond or Bruce Willis charmed their way out of a tighter spot than that.

Thank you! You can't believe how encouraging that is!