"...The Key That Unlocks A Heavy Door."

According to the Rosetta Project, globalization may eliminate up to 90% of the world’s linguistic diversity within the next century. Rosetta's academics, linguists, and anthropologists have taken on the challenge of creating a low-tech, physical artifact that documents as many of mankind's languages as possible. The result? The Rosetta Disk, a three-inch coin etched with over 13,000 microscopic pages containing the keys to at least 1,500 languages. It's designed to last for 10,000 years, in hopes that our descendants will find it useful. Since the only technology required to use it is simple magnification, it's hard to imagine a civilization incapable of learning to use it. It's easy to imagine that such a record will one day seem to future generations as a sort of magical gift from the aether, which is how the Ace of Coins is commonly depicted. Like any translation device, it is the key that unlocks a heavy door.

Whether you call them Coins, Disks, or Pentacles, the cards in this suit describe creative energy in its ultimate form, in which it finally manifests as physical matter. I guess you could say that the entire suit is a little obsessed with obtaining results -- there is none of the wanderlust or dreaminess that pops up in the other suits. The realms of the mind, heart, and spirit are incredibly subtle and sensitive, and unless matters are tended to in the real world, access to these less tangible areas of ourselves becomes incredibly limited. The Ace promises that certain burdens will be eased and obstacles overturned, allowing you to actually explore and enjoy the garden you've been tending. It portends fortuitous opportunities and nudges one toward an awakening of senses that have long laid dormant.

I find it fascinating that Rosetta Project has resulted in the creation of a sort of Ur-coin. Language itself is considered divine by many cultures (remember how the Old Testament God spoke the world into being?) and now it is manifest in matter. In fact, many of the disk's language samples are passages from the Book of Genesis, which may be attributed to it being one of the most frequently-translated documents in human history. The choice bears additional symbolic weight, however, when you consider the journey that ideas take from conception to execution, from aether to tablet. [Via]

Previously On Arcanalogue: The Ace of Coins