shatterstripes

This, obviously, is what I was referencing 2001 for. Three more left!

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A spacesuit floats in the void beside a Gemini capsule. It's empty, the body gone missing - if ever one was there - and one last breath of air dissipates into the void. A chariot, at last, without a King to ride it.

The mirror of the King of (VOID) on the other side of too much plenty is the 99 of Wands. Transmuted through some super-science process into an ethereal thing we can dimly conceive of as a "star-baby", the happy ending to this story of a lost astronaut is that he's transcended, gone on to the beginning of a new life as incomprehensible to us as we are to a single cell of our bodies. Do you think he'll write back?

But of course another story, the sad ending, is that he's just vaporized. That he's dead and gone and left only this floppy, empty parody of what's inside him hanging in the blackness of space. A sad and lonely way to go. Isn't that how we all ride through life, though? Ask his queen in the desert how much he talked to her. Or how much she talked to him.

The Gemini capsule brings in duality. Mind and body, the eternal twins. This is a card of a departed soul, this is the card of less-than-a-ghost (for a ghost would be something there to interact with). Seen in some lights this is the card of absolute death, more bitter and lonely and empty than any of the other cards in the crueller side of this deck; Major Tom thinks he's going home but he's really just gone. Do you believe in an afterlife? Of heaven, of transcendence, of there being something more to you than just a complicated pattern of electrical activity hosted on a pile of twitching protein? Pick a path, and read this card with that in mind.

This card is a departed father. It is the wisdom you cannot pass on.