"The Medium Is The Message..."

I thumbed through this deck of cards designed by Marshall McLuhan with great interest. Published in 1969, the deck was called "Distant Early Warning", and was meant to provide a random matrix of McLuhan-esque wisdom. You know, handy little sayings like "When you're flat on your back, don't raise your head or your friends will kick your teeth in."

While it's not unlike a Tarot deck in certain ways, the images and messages on the DEW cards rarely echo the meaning of their corresponding Tarot cards. For example, his Two of Spades says "I Drew The Coffin,." It would require Nixon-esque contortions of logic to see any meaningful parallels to the Tarot's Two of Swords.

Some, however, are tantalizingly close calls. And then I saw this, the Queen of Hearts, and I felt a tingle of recognition. The Queen of Cups is a dreamer and gazer. She's often seen as something of a sibyl -- her focus is ultimately inward, and while she often communicates her feelings and visions with startling clarity, she can obscure herself safely behind the veil of her dreams at will. The nonsense sentence "She shell ebb music wayriver she flows," with its beautifully watery and opaque phrasing, seemed like a pure utterance from the Queen of Cups -- in fact, I couldn't even imagine what else it referred to. It didn't seem anything at all like the deck's other wry and rather obvious sayings.

Perhaps you're already miles ahead of me here, but I wrote to my friend Colin and asked him if there was something I wasn't seeing. Right away he wrote back: "She shall have music wherever she goes." Of course!! That nursery rhyme:

Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross
To see a fine lady upon a white horse
With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes
She shall have music wherever she goes

So the tingle of familiarity I felt when I saw the card was twofold, it seems. But what was McLuhan's card actually intended to convey? That there are clear and familiar meanings hidden in plain sight behind our language? That we must listen more deeply, to how things sound or feel, instead of accepting them at face value? I doubt he cared much for the Tarot, but I think he'd appreciate the extra layers of meaning that my brain painted onto his Queen. (I admit, he seems to have gotten the Queen of Wands' number as well.) And in any case, his famous saying "The message is the medium" applies to the Tarot quite wonderfully. But I think I'll leave it up to you, dear reader, to inuit exactly how... [Via]

Previously On Arcanalogue: The Queen of Cups