Prime

Another Tarot System

By Anders Sandberg
Nov. 1994

From a hermetic point of view, it's easy to number the Traditions and thus link them to different cards. Just use the correspondences of the Tree of Life in Kabbalah, and you get the following.

  1. Celestial Chorus (Prime, Keter, Unity)
  2. Akashic Brothehood (Mind, Chochma, Wisdom)
  3. Euthanatos (Entropy, Binah, Understanding (of death))
  4. Sons of Ether (Matter, Cheshed, Wealth (as in labor-saving inventions))
  5. Order of Hermes (Forces, Geburah, Strictness)
  6. Verbena (Life, Tiphareth, Beauty (of life))
  7. Cult of Ecstasy (Time, Netzach, Emotion)
  8. Virtual Adepts (Correspondence, Hod, Information)
  9. Dreamspeakers (Spirit, Yesod, Foundation (of reality, the Umbra))
  10. The Technocracy (the Physical World, Malkuth, the Kingdom)

Note that the Conventions could correspond to the 10's (the Syndicate), the Pages (Void Engineers), Knights (Iteration X), Queens (Progenitors) and Kings (NWO). Orphans refuse to be ordered, and are wild cards.

Each suit would represent one of the essences: Pentacles pattern, Swords Dynamic, Staffs Questing and Water Primordial. The Major Arcana might represent the Infinite Essence, the archetypes underlying the other arcana.

This is, by the way, a good idea to create NPCs. Draw a card to represent him and then draw others to give more background (eg. 4 of Pentacles, Power: A Pattern Son of Ether, probably dealing in lots of electricity, 10 of Swords, Ruin: A Dynamic Syndicate mage, probably fond of ruining his enemies).