The Emperor's a ....

Intuitive Tarot by Cilla Conway

What's the deal with Aleister Crowley and cocks. It's like you can't have one without the other.

Here we have the Emperor from Cilla Conway's Intuitive Tarot, which is rather heavily influenced by Crowley's Thoth Tarot. There are a lot of phallic symbols in the deck, but only one actual penis, and mercifully only one knob with feet and wings and tiny little bollocks. And a tail.

Some people do think the Emperor is kind of a dick, though.

So here we have him, a griffin with a penis head walking on the sun, and a man holding a sceptre topped by a globe having the continent of Africa facing us. Could this be because civilization started there? The Emperor does represent all the civilizing, organizing aspects of the human animal. You can see this in the tiny images surrounding him. Starting in the upper left corner: skyscrapers, a tank, a mushroom cloud, musical staff, a lightbulb, an astronaut in space, the space shuttle, scientists at a computer, and a line of human figures fitted together spoon fashion. Are they queuing in a soup line? Marching into a factory? Packed onto a slave ship? Waiting to vote? Heading into the gas chamber? Going in to see a film? Sitting in a music hall? Waiting to get their pay packet? All of those would fit!

The Emperor represents our capacity to manipulate and control our environment, to wring what we want out of each other and the earth. Some of this has resulted in good, some in bad. For better or worse, this is the way we are. We don't blend in as one with our environment. We practically never have. We manipulate it, change it, turn it into something else. The Emperor contains all of that within his remit.

So what the sam hill could this mean as my daily draw today? Perhaps a bit of Emperor style bureaucracy and hierarchical BS will rear its head today. And we can see plainly what its head is made of.

Great.