Day 1 - Saturday, ruled by Saturn: Obstacles and Blockades
Card: 5 of Batons - The Invisible Man
This is a card about struggle, the question of identity, and what in modern parlance is called transparency. When the invisible man discovers a potion to make him disappear, it goes to his head - he becomes a murderous lunatic who wants to take over the world. The fact that no one can see him causes a crisis of identity and he starts thinking he's better than everyone else, even though they could as easily drink the potion. Like most horror films, it goes badly for the scientist.
The Invisible Man was Claude Rains' first film. Rains was born with a speech impediment and had a thick cockney accent. He worked tirelessly to develop his voice into one suitable for a stage actor, eventually giving voice lessons to other actors. He was given the role in
The Invisible Man based on the quality of his voice alone - a clear example of overcoming
obstacles.
The image on the card suggests a man being torn apart, and yet it certainly seems at least that there's nobody there. Even though there are too many, the gloved hands grasping at him seem to be his own. The invisible man got himself out of the way as it were, but in doing so he became his own impediment. This could be a metaphor about wanting too much, the ego tricking itself into thinking its every move isn't egocentric, and being careful about what you wish for. We may indeed be made of this too too solid flesh, yet for all its failings it's the fundament and root of what we have to work with. Without it, we cease to be. A symbol, then, of our struggles - they are part and parcel of what keeps us alive and compels us to grow.
Day 2 - Sunday, ruled by the Sun: Inspiration and Goals
Card: 6 of Batons - Show Boat
This is a complex card. It suggests celebration, a good time had by all, and showboating. The ever-struggling studio Universal put all its eggs in
Show Boat's basket; the consequence was the studio went bankrupt due to budget over-runs, slipped into receivership, and had its head honchos - founder Carl Laemmle and son Carl Laemmle Jr. - unceremoniously removed from the studio and replaced by a financial board of directors in New York.
The film itself presents a sentimental view of the antebellum Old South, replete with paddle-wheel steamships, southern belles, riverboat gamblers, half-castes and slaves, and a costumed cast of thousands singing and dancing.
Show Boat had been a successful stage musical, starring Irene Dunn, the real-life daughter of a steamboat captain; this was the film that announced her arrival in Hollywood. Besides his ambitions as an actor and his striking deep baritone, Paul Robeson was a civil rights activist and champion of black pride. Robeson and his co-star Hattie McDaniel set the stage for Lena Horne and Sidney Poitier. Where Dunne was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, Knight of Malta, and co-founder of The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, Robeson was an outspoken trade unionist, anti-racist, and pacifist. Dunne became a CEO of Technicolor, living in a plantation-style manor south of Hollywood, while Robeson - an American citizen - was refused re-entry into the United States, surveilled by the FBI who undertook an international defamation campaign against him, and blacklisted during McCarthyism.
Show Boat, then, with its romantic view of gambling, allegorizes the American Dream - a nation built on disparity and the backs of black slaves, dressed up in pretty clothes and plastered-on smiles, singing the praises of a mighty ship of state which purports equal opportunity while in reality the House always wins.
In the RWS deck, the 6 of Wands depicts a hero on horseback, being championed by the populace. The people may be genuinely impressed, or simply waiting to fight their oppressor another day. The horse, meantime, may be a pantomime horse, and the hero but an actor in a pageant. He may even be what Frazer described as the sacred Sacrificial King - the earthly incarnation of the solar diety, ruling for a time and then sacrificed so that the new king can be crowned, symbolically enacting the agricultural regeneration of the solar year. This is the
Goal - the cyclical rejuvenation of that which inspires and breathes life. For Universal, attempted showmanship was replaced by money-grubbing; for America, the racial, social, and economic inequality of the plantation South was replaced with cotton blossoms, black face, and whitewash; for Hollywood, the progressive endeavor for equal rights and justice was replaced by the old-line suppression of a rigged system and the blacklist. These are not revitalizing replacements, they are regressive, and as such suggest renewed inspiration for a revitalized set of goals.
Day 3 - Monday, ruled by the Moon: Dreams and Fears
Card: The Reel of Fortune X
I pulled this card with its back to me and thought "The Wheel of Fortune". Of course, I didn't think that exactly - the mind isn't so formal - I just pictured the card in my head. Which isn't nearly as clairvoyant as it sounds since there are only a few cards left for me to pull from the GAHT deck, putting the cards pulled aside as I've been doing since I began these daily readings. And anyway, I've been half dreading the day I pull The Reel of Fortune - it's my least favourite card in the deck. Curiously, just the night before last, a close friend mentioned that The Wheel of Fortune was "his card". Well, he can have it. It's always struck me as a nonce card, one that is little more than an advertisement for the Tarot. If the deck were one of those wheel of fortunes spun at carnivals, the segment for The Wheel of Fortune card would be the one that reads: Spin Again.
Here in the GAHT, the Reel of Fortune is, as the companion key has it, "the furtive reflection of the self-congratulatory Judgment card." It represents everything unseen that transpires to make something a success and to make something else a failure. Talent and gumption are factors, but not nearly so important as mere chance. Humans invest in the concept of willpower and self-worth and, making themselves the hero of their own life story, tend to hero-ify those they admire because they see a bit of themselves in these heroes. Similarly, people vilify those they fear, because those they fear threaten to overturn one's own version of oneself. The reel then, the GAHT's wheel, is not only a circular container for reams of film made up of thousands of individual images, it is a kind of dance, a projection of what one would wish themselves to be. In this sense, then, the reel is also the role, and before you know it, which is which? or: what is
more real - the real, or the reel?
As I suggested earlier, part of my dislike of this card is because it's a placeholder, an expletive, a dummy. But on a deeper level, what unnerves me a little about it is its seemingly airtight cleavage between what we would make of ourselves and what is made of us, our meanings and our means, the dreams that emancipate our nights and the nightmares that haunt our days. The card's apparent impartiality is symbolized both in its Roman numeral X - a cross-road, a cross purpose, an ex-ing out, and where you sign your name - and our denary 10 - on & off, one & none, the template for infinite computation. At times, the awareness that everything in the universe is random is terrifying; at other times it's a solace. Meantime, the conceit that I am the master of my own destiny impels me forward, while tormented by the apprehension I am the sole architect of my perdition.
In the end - which is to say at this very moment - nothing is totally random, just as nothing is entirely ordained. The unaccountable minutiae that makes up the whole shows itself momentarily, like light flickering on a screen, and scatters back again into its constituent parts until the next showing.
Day 4 - Tuesday, ruled by Mars: Conflicts and Challenges
Card: 5 of Coin - The Grapes of Wrath
Recently released jailbird Tom Joad returns to his family's Oklahoma farm during The Great Depression, only to find the effects of the Dust Bowl have turned it into another kind of jail. The family packs up their meager belongings and head to California where there's promise of work. Along the way and upon their arrival they face discrimination, exploitation, and hardships that result in death. Tom, played by Henry Fonda, joins forces with a group of disenfranchised activists on the run from the law and other henchmen bankrolled by business interests. His family, meantime, settles into a clean new home provided by one of FDR's many New Deal departments, the Works Progress Administration.
At the top of the card, the figures on either side of Fonda are his grandfather and a preacher who abandons the cloth to fight the good fight; the former dies before reaching the promised land of California while the latter is murdered by thugs in the employ of wealthy agricultural interests. Fonda's fate by film's end remains uncertain. In silhouette we see 2 Joad children, a boy and a girl, being escorted to their new home, either by a Department of Agriculture worker or Joad himself before he takes it on the lam. This figure is crowned by what almost looks like a halo, and is in fact the partial insignia of the Suit of Coin's studio, MGM. Instead of Leo the lion we see the Hollywood Hills by starlight encircled by its motto,
Ars Gratia Artis - Art for Art's Sake - highly ironic for a film dedicated to a political message and a realism otherwise eschewed by Hollywood during the Depression.
Symbolically, this card has echoes of The Moon card about it - an older figure, emerged from the depths, leads 2 younger figures on either side upwards, past obstacles, towards a shining object in the distance. This is a card of struggle, poverty, and neglect, yet it is buried in the midst of the Coin suit, the suit of bounty and earthly wealth. A change is afoot - the old guard has succumbed to their hardships, while the up-and-coming kids indicate not only hope and promise, but a bountiful destiny rightfully theirs for the taking. Fonda's Joad is the hinge, the center point of a quincunx, between the dusty panhandle of the past and the forward-looking glow of a golden state.
I didn't mention it yesterday with The Reel of Fortune card, but my significant other arrives today for the holiday season; a furlough of sorts before she relocates here permanently in the spring. This relocation is reflected of course in the
Grapes of Wrath card, but more to the point I see in it the move away from a way of life grown impoverished and run its course toward one of renewed hope and prosperity. That is, if poor Tom Joad can make the transition.
Day 5 - Wednesday, ruled by Mercury: Interactions and Change
Card: 9 of Cups - Citizen Kane
As with the Reel of Fortune card, the
Citizen Kane card was what came to my mind as I pulled it. The 9 of Cups is sometimes called the "wish card" in the RWS, and in
Citizen Kane, Charles Foster Kane inherits so much money he can seemingly have anything he wishes. Correspondingly, after the great notoriety of his Halloween
War of the Worlds broadcast, the 25-year-old Orson Welles was given
carte blanche by RKO to make any film with anybody in any way he wished.
On the card itself, the young Kane stands on a mound of papers hot off the presses of the news outlet he just purchased. These bundles dissolve into the jigsaw puzzle pieces his future mistress, Susan Alexander, will use to while away the hours spent alone with Kane in their so-called Xanadu. This sheer surfeit of things suggests the end of the film, where after Kane's death what's left is an enormous warehouse of mindlessly fulfilled wishes - a materialist graveyard. Beneath it all is the red Rosebud and the snowglobe Kane held on his deathbed, representing as they do home, innocence, and a trouble-free emotional inner-life - a wish that money not only can't buy but actively vitiates.
Citizen Kane as a film redefined what a movie could be, and for many - especially for American New Wave directors of the 60s & 70s - it redefined what a movie
should be. For Welles, in Hollywood, the creative originality and capitalist critique of
Kane meant ostracization. Today, with my partner newly arrived to spend the holidays with me as prelude to her moving here permanently, the 9 of Cups indicates joyousness, festivity, emotional agency, and my cup running over with a willingness to share. On the dark side, one has to be careful about what one wishes for. Abundance can lead to apathy and spiritual atrophy. With capacity and endowment comes responsibility, and the imperative to change along with the changes rather than control and contain them.
As with anything new, it is also an endpoint. Tomorrow marks the start of CoT's 12-day
Sacred Days of Yule Seasonal Reading in which I plan to participate, meaning the completion of my Golden Age of Hollywood
Weekly Planetary Readings will be postponed until the New Year. So, Tinseltown and I will reconvene on the other side of the tinsel - until then then...
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And what about those who just want to have a Deck of the Week, Card of the Day reading? They can just jump in and leave the planetary lore away. 
but necessary to know. 