Tarot card XV-The Devil
I tend to use a lot of Public Domain imagery in my cards, and am going to try to do better in this new year to give more credit where credit is due - Library of Congress /LOC and the New York Public Library /NYPL here!
I’ve downloaded a huge amount of imagery and put them in various folders for future use……
Having an idea already in my head for The Devil card, I pretty well knew what folders to access for imagery and initially - after first choosing what I thought of as an appropriately dramatic back-ground for them - narrowed down to about 21 to possibly use… I put them in a new folder so I could visually see the mix together to try and pick out the best matches for the back-ground…..and then chose my three main ones
Went for shades of grey, as I think that’s my overall feeling on this subject card…..
I think, really, we are our own agents - bar a catastrophe-like being in a War ,or having some kind of illness- things not of our doing- we more or less make our own personal ‘hells’ just as we go about our daily lives…
So I was quite surprised when I came up with an “Eve” image for the woman, and an unaware “Adam”-type …the wonderful operatic Mephistophicles figure was just too fitting for the background NOT to have him there overseeing it all!
A diagram of the Golden Mean -what we want to achieve/have,and mostly beyond our grasp- kind of finished off the symbolism from being somewhat quasi- religious to more simply just speculative……I hope!
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Back-ground: Stage design of 1896 by one Adolphe Appia
Man: LOC image from 1860 by one Marconi
Woman: NYPL image from their theatre database
Devil: from a turn-of-the-last Century Russian operatic production of Faust
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