A Fresh Symbol of Adjustment

Could a tarot card change your life? ;)

It is 4:20 pm in Tucson, Arizona, I just found out about a new tarot card. Not only that, it’s a major arcana. Are you gasping?

If you are not, in fact, gasping, I may need to explain what a big deal this is. For context, I am obsessed with tarot. I’ve been collecting tarot cards for years — I even have a giant book with my favorite cards of all time. Me discovering a new tarot card that is brand new to me is like a lifelong baseball fan finding out about Ricky Henderson. I’m not talking only talking about a new deck, but a symbol out of the major arcana that shocked me by being something new entirely, a card called Adjustment.

Here it is:

Quite a lot going on there, but the central event would probably be the arrow shot right through the heart — piercing through chest center, forging a new point of connection between the Sun and the Moon, and, by the way, take a look at those thigh-high boots. Behold the mystical glam punk of The Autonomic Tarot, which I found in the book shop of LA MOCA (where I was being a tourist while on a trip to perform my strange comedy show How Embarrassing Is Jesus? at the Lyric Hyperion).

After basking in the calming colors of Takako Yamaguchi’s incandescent symbology, I saw these two green asterisks eyes glaring out at me from the black box and gasped so loud, my friend touched my arm, and whispered, “Okay, I think you need to buy that.”

And he was correct. I mean, look at this thing:

If you’re into tarot, you’ll clock this card as the Queen of Swords. The art is entirely new to me, though I can usually pair the card to its equivalent in the classic deck. You’ll see that the Adjustment card is number eight, but before I looked at the Roman numeral, I assumed that the concept of adjustment would translate to the Justice card. This became further confused, when I saw that car number eight, which is classically the Strength card, but can also be the Justice card, depending on the deck. Despite much consistency throughout the numbering of the symbols in The Fool’s journey, there’s some confusion between eight and eleven.

Let’s start with Strength, number eight in the classic Rider Waite deck (upper left corner with an angel brushing a lion’s teeth). You don’t even need to see this angelic lady to know what strength is. You know what strength is deep in your bones. Simply thinking of strength makes you feel something… and that thing is called strength. The major arcana can be much more esoteric than that, when it comes to other symbols, like The High Priestess or Wheel of Fortune, but you don’t need to read any interpretation to figure out what the images mean. At its best, working with a new deck of tarot is a lot like going to the a museum; you don’t need tiny font to tell you how art makes you feel.

Here’s my collection of Strength cards. You’ll see some are numbered eight, some are numbered eleven, and at least one has a lady fucking a lion-seahorse:

The upper lefthand corner is the classic Rider-Waite card, numbered VIII. The green lion — in which the heart chakra unlocks new balance between The Sun and The Moon as in the Autonomic Adjustment — is from The Alchemical Tarot is numbered XI, as is the swirl of fire in heeling the ancient beast. That’s Margarete Petersen’s Tarot, one of my favorites, along with the two cards at the top of the green lion page, The Fountain and The Wild Unknown, also both numbering Strength eleven.

There is Strength and then there is Justice, depending on which deck you’re talking to. Justice clocks in as number eight in Salvador’s Dali’s deck, where the surrealist has collaged a renaissance OnlyFans with a sword and scale, and the vivid blue of the Austrian Deva Tarot is eight as well, but it’s XI in the Rider-Waite, where a red-robed judge raises the sword and scale.

To be honest, I know more about baseball than I do about math, and all I really know about baseball is Derek Jeter. All of this fussing over the Roman numerals eight and eleven is to say, if only for a moment, Adjustment was something new entirely. Unsure if the corollary was Strength or Justice, I was met the pure, unadulterated symbol of Adjustment, and that literally piercing image of an arrow through the heart. There was this miraculous experience of using tarot as it is meant to be used, as I’ve suggested you use it, as I thought I had been using it before I was fact faced with only the feeling the symbol had to show me. I thought perhaps, I might sit with Adjustment that way for a long while, learning only from the art how to live through this moment in my human dilemma… and then I cracked, and read the small font.

VII Adjustment: Adjustment is speared through the heart, like a lover, and demands the same thing from us, which is nothing. Life is forward, to and out. Time, too, is running out. Something that will be burnt is already burnt. Make your choice, dead man.