ARCANALOGUE: "Before The Lights Go Out, Before The Flames Can Claim You..."

No one will ever know you as well as you know yourself. Even so, there are curtains drawn around certain truths that shelter you from your own true nature -- they keep you from confronting what you really are and the true meaning of your life. Every now and then, that curtain is torn aside just long enough for us to glimpse ourselves; accepting what we see there can be painful, but the process is an enlightening and inescapable part of life. The greater your capacity for truth, the more of it you will find. The distance your eyes and mind can see outward is equivalent to the distance that they can look inward.

This ultimately defines mankind's concept of "destiny": what we see coming, based on what we know about ourselves -- or what we don't see coming, because of what we refuse to confront. A well-told story entreats its audience to judge characters in ways that neither the characters or audience can judge themselves; it's a symbolic rehearsal for the great cosmic judgment foretold by so many of the world's religions, except we cast ourselves as the gods and our fictional characters stand in for humanity. We play at being Anubis, weighing the hearts of "people" like Atticus Finch against a feather, deciding who is redeemable and who is lost. The more complex a character is, the harder it is to judge -- the challenge this presents is delicious to us.

In the comic Backstage by Molly Crabapple and John Leavitt, we're briefly introduced to an aging burlesque performer named Scarlett O'Herring, a bawdy fire-eater who has clawed and fornicated her way into the spotlight. However, Scarlett's act goes tragically awry before the details of her life and times can be fully explored -- hence the glory of Scarlett Takes Manhattan, a new graphic novel which recounts her backstory in lascivious detail. As the lowly charwoman Shifra Helfgott reinvents herself as a Gilded Age sex symbol, we observe her make all of the decisions that seal her fate, including the moment when she first entertains the notion of fire as an artistic medium.

Self-reflection isn't Scarlett's strong suit, but death tends to arrive on wings of awareness -- at least, that's what we can determine from accounts of near-death experiences -- so who knows what state her soul was in when she met her fate... Death also transforms the lives of those left behind, briefly parting those curtains I mentioned above and dishing out powerful, essential truths. However, one needn't wait for an experience with death; we blunder into powerful revelations unexpectedly on our own from time to time, or grow into them slowly; they can even be summoned or induced when the need is great. Regardless of how you approach it, the ultimate truth is waiting to be known.

As you can imagine, this card wields great power in a reading. It's a riddle, and solving it means finally being able to proceed to the next phase of life with all of your elements neatly arranged and within reach -- nothing hidden or shoved under the bed. Consider this a sort of fire drill for when your own story ends: if there's anything that you know you're ultimately going to have to face up to, you may as well begin working on it before the lights go out, before the flames can claim you.

(Oh, and while working on this post, I found that this Scarlett illustration bears an uncanny resemblance to the Thoth deck's Judgment card. Wild!)