Tarot: The Devil

[pyraxis]

Photoshop and MotionComputing tablet

This one is hard to write about because I think the meaning is so unique to each person, even more so than most of the cards. (Aeclectic.net's long writeup on their interpretation.)

For me it's about obsession. I see obsession as a need which can't be filled - and by need I mean something critical enough to a person's well-being that it festers instead of fading. There's a lot of personal history here, from when I was a teenager and I had my own obsession. It's tangled up with autistic sensory integration problems, the sudden increase in social expecations, and the usual teenage struggle with awakening sexuality and isolation.

It's personified in the crystal in the picture, which on Karn is a physical manifestation of that compressed and explosive energy. I've heard it called a knot in the fabric of reality, or a black hole. It's both alluring and destructive, and the restless ghosts that are drawn to it find themselves caught in an addictive cycle. They crave the energy they sense in it, and they seize any trickle of it that they can reach, but it leaves them empty. So they come back for more and more, forgetting anything else they might have cared about, that might have anchored them to reality. It's sexual in intensity, like a drug, giving a burst of power and then abandoning you to fall and crash.

And it's different for everyone, what siren song calls you, and how its false promise manifests in your life. It might be the promise of happiness if you buy enough things, the promise of love if your body looks the right way, the promise of safety if you do and say the right things. There are as many variations as there are people.

Comments

[nevertheopal]

No, no, there's no hurt been caused! It's more that this broadcast a warning that I tend to run away from in a way that I really heard. Much more sobering than painful... actually seeing that kind of obsession, rather, seeing it given form, that's extremely shocking. It's especially shocking when it's for the first time, you're right.

...it's a placebo effect even with the real thing?
That was in reference to how medications (supposedly, I can't find the study now that I need it to back myself up) have been documented to work even better if they taste terrible. The expectation that powerful drugs that can heal almost anything taste awful is such a meme that people's bodies will work to match that expectation, above and beyond the medicine's effects.

Thank you so much!

[pyraxis]

Ah, don't mind the kid. I don't know why she's so surprised that someone might find meaning in her work.

The placebo effect is a powerful thing, and you're right it does work above and beyond other documented effects. I can tell you from working with cristal that one of the critical tools to manage the siren call is the understanding that you can choose which... shades of energy... to take in and which ones not to. So if you need to work very efficiently, you can block placebo, but if it's useful to you then there's fair reason to take it on.

- Lin