King of Wands

"The Conduit" oil on wood in broken out frame - original available for sale

My first King! Who is this creative leader? First , a quick reminder that you have heard a thousand times from the tarot community and at least twice from me: Gender in the Tarot is, well, not gender specific. We are all conglomerates of male, female, non-binary, etc... You may know this king as a person or you may be this king, be you a woman or a man or both or neither. There are plenty of tarot decks that only portray women if you need that, or have two of each king suit, one of each gender. I would like to teach to the top of the class here, try to let everyone rise up to the understanding about gender, instead of dumbing down to limited knowledge. There needs to be male images in a deck because we need a way to access that side of us, be us men or women, trans or non-binary. Maybe your tarot question needs to see this male king. If it's triggering you, that is something to look at, don't you think?

So I'll tell you that it is inconsequential for my personal reading that this is a dude. It IS important that he is a king. And now that I've written the word 'personal', I have to tell you, that was my struggle. I'm being as vulnerable with you as possible Kind Reader, but  I don't want this deck to be about my personal journey, even if it is that as well, since here I am writting about this/my Artists Journey Tarot. I don't want to be a king but I want to be this king, this conduit. I want to pull the lightning down from the wild crackle of the universe and pass it through myself, grounding myself, and channeling it so all that creative energy can light my community. I AM trying to do just that. I am fire and fire like this king, and have to be careful I don't burn myself out. But I am also turned off by all our online obsessions with our own psyches and psychological talk (did I not just use the term "trigger"? yeash). Having the vocabulary to discuss our feelings is so important, and sharing ourt stories is essential! But somewhere along the way it became all about our own 'trauma' and 'individuation' all the time. We are so caught up in ourselves we forget we really aren't all that important.

While painting the tiny details of the reappearing symbol of the fire lizard, I speed scrolled through the episodes of one of my favorite podcasts, The Emerald, by Joshua Schrei, and stopped the list randomly, downloading the episode before reading about it. You know how it is, we are attracted to certain book covers and titles and miss out on good material that is out of our bubble because of our interests. The podcast speed scroll is the equivalent of bibliomancy- flipping through a sacred book to a random page to answer a question. Oh, or tarot for that matter! At any rate this quote found its way to me and it explained this card to me perfectly. "So difficult to covey in this psychologized day and age that it doesn't all have to come back somehow to the individual process... And that not having it be about the individual process, there may actually be more room for individual alchemy to occur. Ritual puts the individual, the ecological, the communal, and the cosmic in humming relation then enacts alchemic change.  But that change only works when the individual turns it over In some way to the communal and ecological and universal. It is the safety of having it NOT be about us at all....it is a safety that is beyond safety in modern psychology terms... to be perpetually dissolving like offering sugar on the tongue of this lion universe, and all that matters is that the lion was fed and that the feeding was sweet." (The Emerald- episode 75 - The Revolution will not be Phsychologized by Joshua Schrei )

OMG yes. thats what i was trying to say. thanks Joshua.

I wandered down many a symbolic tangent piecing this king together. the classic fire salamander - lizard symbol of course (see my knight of wands), but this time completed as the oriborous. He is a continuous loop of perpetual energy as it cycles from tail to head to stomach and out again. I dug back through time looking for ancient Persian kings and found a startling lack of portrayals of them. In the end I had to use the same Persian king image used and reused by so many artists, and I hope, not stolen from the original artist (I couldn't find an origin or date for it). He is a Leo and rife with Lion energy, like his queen. Conveniently the Persian kings symbol was a manticore, or a lion with the kings head. The winged lion head flew into my mind with a strike of electricity, so strange and marvelous, the synchronicity.

The king of wands, the "lion universe" like my queen of wands, dragged me along for the ride. that is to say, he had definite ideas about how he would be created that I didn't foresee in my carefully constructed process. The grain of his wood was so gorgeous I had to give up the thick abstract storm clouds I wanted to paint and instead channel the lightning through the already prescribed lines. His robe as well was meant to be loose, but the wood grain lines bent perfectly to the curve of the fabric, drawn ahead of time. I wanted him to be more loose and painterly, but he chose to wear this cloak of illustrative narrative. So I was the only the willing conduit of this king after all.

You want to pull the lightning down
from the wild crackle of the universe
and pass it through yourself,
grounding yourself,
channeling it so all that energy
can light your community.
This is not about your individuation.
This is not about your trauma,
Or your psyche.
This is not about you!
You are only the leader.
You are the conduit.

oil on wood in upcycled frame