Science comes from the Latin scire, “to know something”. Allow me the luxury of not being misread: I am, by no means, against knowing things. What I refuse is the monocropping of wisdom, this sickening notion that there must only be one way of knowing, and only a limited category of things worth knowing - indeed to me, that is no scientia at all. What I am against is the foul idea that anything done in the name of this upper-case Science must be a good thing, and that all things created through Science, must be god given. Especially when this modality of thought and practice (characterized by staleness, boredom and a thirst for destruction), generally serves the political projects accumulating wealth by dispossessing Peoples, and exploiting Lands.
Our ways of knowing reflect our political values, that is, how we distribute power within a society. This is a moral question: what beings are considered People, and by what metric, and who of those People are allowed to form part of a society, and in what capacity? The answers are never far from the metaphysical, for the political has always been a matter of the spirit. Modernity’s “objective nihilism” is not an accidental “evolution”, but a political social construct where we pretend “feelings” are not a part of reality, that bodies with wombs are unworthy of knowing, that trees think of themselves as individual units, and that being able to explain how something happens is the same as knowing for a fact why it does. Read this again.
In offering you a collective tarot reading today, I am inviting you into a different way of knowing - one that is not claiming to compete with Science, but simply to shed some light onto what might be unseen, as of yet. The tarot is a way of accessing wisdom and insight through a game of symbols, probability and chance. As a system of divination, it allows us to feel which way energy is flowing and what outcomes are most likely right now. Thus, it can be used to tap into the collective unconscious and even offer some additional insights into our political hesitations. But in the tarot, no answer is definitive. As the present moment changes, so does the future, and so will the tarot. Herein lies its beauty: each time we shuffle the cards we are reminded that nothing is set in stone, and that we - as a collective - are responsible for transforming all energy into matter, depending on what matters to us.
The tarot reading
On behalf of the Degrowth Festival, I asked the following questions:
How can we sustain social movements without depleting our energies?
Where does change come from?
Where is hope, and how do we hold on to it?
I drew an 8 of Pentacles to the first question. This card speaks to putting in the work, remaining consistent day after day, focusing on perfecting small gestures, on honing a craft, but also to the inherent balancing act all improvement requires. The message is clear: slow and steady wins the race. I read somewhere the other day that “when we fight for the big things, we are really fighting for the small things”. The 8 of Pentacles attunes us to the painstaking, even boring, practice of co-creating reality each and every day by imprinting our best Selves into each gesture - no matter how small. This, in itself, is a form of rest - resting from the grinding, horrifying, atomized, alienated gestures of capitalism realism and its fascist acolytes. The 8 of Pentacles is a Saturnian card that reminds us that by showing up every day, by being disciplined, we will reap rewards - and that in the middle of a hurricane, the only way to rest is if you first create a structure that won’t be vacuumed by the wind.
To the second question, I drew the Queen of Swords. This strange figure urges to be logical, sharp, incisive: change happens when we attack where it hurts, retreat when we must. Perhaps in answer to the previous question, the Queen advises us against wasting our efforts in playing on the terms of the adversary. Instead, she urges us to talk about strategy and to keep our cool - anger may point the way, but should never determine the action. I am reminded here of James Baldwin, of the organizing tactics of the Black Panthers, and of all groups who succeeded in making the ruling classes recede: they did so not by asking for rights, but by organizing themselves into movements capable of seizing power.
For the final question I drew the 4 of Pentacles and the 5 of Cups - two less than positive cards. What do these cards tell us about hope? I found these cards extremely validating: we have all the right to be angry, disappointed, grieving - how could we not? How could we feel hopeful when “democracy” has become another synonym for genocide? When (to paraphrase the meme) the end of the world as we know it is more imaginable than the end of the systems of oppression provoking such destruction? When the most privileged populations on the planet are voting to perpetuate this state of insanity we call late stage racial capitalism? These cards ask us to reckon with the collective grief and doom taking over our collective subconscious - we can’t just wish them away, we must integrate these shadows (to use psychoanalytical-speak). Perhaps before we can speak of hope, we must speak of the unspeakable things we are witnessing and what they are doing to us all.
I felt compelled to ask a follow-up question, something like “so then where can we look towards? what can we do?” to which I pulled a 2 of Pentacles - the card of doing a lot with very little, of living a simple life, of treading this earth bearfeet and playfully. This felt like a clear message to the degrowth movement - When we fight for the big things, we are fighting for the small things. It might seem ridiculous, even macabre, to think about play and joy when the genocide is being televized - but where else could hope be if not in everything that capitalism is not? For what is play if not magical refusal of the inevitable? How else could we believe change is possible, if not by living out this change, by proving with our very existence that there is an alternative - there has always been an alternative?
I will leave you with a final word of caution. As I shuffled the cards, the 3 of Torches and The Chariot, both in reverse, fell out. I felt these were meant to be read as possible pitfalls, where we might currently be leading ourselves astray. Together, these cards speak to the weight of unrealistic expectations - when all we do is daydream, despair is just around the corner. They also warn us against playing it too safe - if we expect change to come from where the ruling class told us it would come, we won’t take the risks necessary for real change to happen (remember the Queen of Swords). The Chariot in reverse adds severity to this theme, as it suggests we lack foresight, willpower and direction - that we are so obsessed with a lofty ideal that we are unable to move at all. We might need to start moving to break free from stagnation, and this will come with errors. And yet it seems that the biggest mistake of all would be to remain tethered to the safety of discourse.
The Degrowth Festival will be a special opportunity to see how these challenges and advice play out as we collectively imagine what alliances and coalitions needed to face the challenges ahead. But don’t fool yourselves, the cards were clear: more important than being right on the theoretical sphere, is to practice what we preach, to align each gesture (big and small) with our values. Hope is not to be found in an external object, but is yet to be created - in fighting for the big things, we must become beacons of hope unto ourselves. Might learning how to do this be our divine mission for the summer?
See you all in Austria soon! In the meantime, take good care of yourselves and those around you (living, human, and/or otherwise).
In solidarity,
ines - jester-hierophant apprentice