A Series of Trumps At Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade...

"It seems that the illustrations are informed by the popular symbolism of the day, possibly from the depiction of these characters in actual parades. In the same way, in modern American culture, one only has to hear the name Santa Claus to see in the mind's eye a fat, bearded man in a red suit riding in a sleigh pulled by reindeer. All of the images found in the Tarot were popular images at the time of its creation and would be as easily recognized then as an image of Santa Claus is now..."

In Robert M. Place's excellent book Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, he explains how the Tarot's suit of Trumps can be read as a parade, in which each new figure symbolically triumphs ("trumps") the one that came before it, a la Petrarch's I Trionfi.

All of this leapt into my mind again when I took my mother to see the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in person early (so early!) yesterday morning and watched the floats and balloons gliding by. I caught myself wondering -- in what way does each triumph over the one before it? How does the introduction of new balloons comment on our ever-changing cultural lexicon? I started snapping (terrible, gray, hazy) pictures so I could record the order of balloons and pick the question apart later on.

Since the Tarot's trumps seem to be organized in groups of seven, here are the first seven major balloons that came down Central Park West. (As the slack-jawed spectator, I represented the Fool, of course.)

Spiderman was first. Like the classical Magician (or juggler, or acrobat, or whatever), Spiderman is basically just an average citizen who has risen above his lowly "everyman", managing to stay in the spotlight on the merits of his miraculous feats. He is the half-step between the world of the human and the superhuman, a nice introduction to the more fantastical figures we're about to meet. He's a protective and re-assuring figure, and his presence at the head of the pack indicates that we have nothing to fear from any of the characters who follow him.


How does Kermit trump Spiderman? Like Spidey he's a dualistic heroic protagonist, but he's overcome his puppet/puppeteer duality and transcended his need for a "secret identity" -- in our imaginations, Kermit isn't reliant on any human component to emote or locomote; none of that is part of his character. He has a human's tenderness, a puppet's fragility, a frog's defenselessness (unless he has any venom glands we don't know about...). He is less of a man than Spiderman/Peter Parker, but he is a more complete human. We will say that he represents the amphibious nature of a soul's journey into less substantial, less human realms. He takes us further down the path into a world of strangely human fantasy creatures.



Next we have Abby Cadabby, a muppet who is also a fairy. She's the next stepping stone into the world of the unreal. She is fully fantastical and also fully childlike -- she doesn't share Kermit's self-awareness about being a puppet, and this departure from reality is what confers her the magical powers that she's learning how to use. She only exists because of Kermit, but she's able to occupy his world more innocently and curiously than the world-weary frog ever could.


Pikachu is the Emperor to Abby's Empress. He too has magical powers, but while hers are gentle and used for exploration and self-expression, his are violent and used for conquest. At the very center of our set of seven, Pikachu represents the middle phase of evolution -- his lesser form is Pichu and he may still yet evolve into Raichu. Though he's the first figure we've seen who is wholly unreal, he embodies a spirit of equilibrium: he is both loving and beloved, powerful and tender.


Ronald's triumph over Pikachu is the power of the immaterial to conquer the material world. The first full-on corporate icon we've seen so far, Ronald is the high priest of mass-market consumerism, and as a magical demi-human he is more of a mover and shaker in his own fictions than Pikachu is in his -- the lightning mouse can't even say anything except his own name. For the first time so far, the "human" qualities of a character, however secondary, turn out to be damning weaknesses rather than redeeming ones. Ronald is more of a puppet than Kermit, less of a man than Peter Parker. This is the instability that results from stepping out of that strong central position.


Like the sun breaking through the clouds after a rainstorm, we see a return to innocence in the emergence of Spongebob. He's not as cuddly as Pikachu or Abby Cadabby; he's shrill, jejune, chaotic, mostly powerless. But Spongebob represents an important counterbalance to Ronald McDonald, a complete retreat from the complex human world and its politics. He lives in a simple world almost entirely devoid of human contact -- at the bottom of the sea no less, about as far from mankind as one can get. He is the petulant prince rejecting the world he has inherited from his parents and predecessors, living for the sake of living. He is blissfully unaware of the merchandising of his own image.


Mickey is sort of the product of Spongebob's awkward adolescent phase. He occupies a world occupied almost exclusively by non-humans, but is way more comfortable embodying recognizable human qualities. He's more emotionally mature than Spongebob, more virtuous, more intelligent. That's probably why he's also more iconic than the two-dimensional Ronald McDonald. He seems to have found a way to weild the power of his corporate identity without sacrificing his sense of wonder. In a way, he epitomizes all of the qualities we've seen so far, blended seamlessly and polished to an immaculate (and rather bland) shine.

You get the idea. Check out Place's book for a thorough examination of the Tarot-as-parade. I'm out of steam or else I'd look at the original old-school Macy's balloons in the same light. And besides, I have Mom and leftovers to deal with.

Happy Thanksgiving!