(Originally posted on Kickstarter as a campaign update for Other Worlds Tarot)
Hello, welcome, and thank you to my recent backers!
Today I pulled the Decider of Rods.
In my attempt to make a deck free of imperial references, I had to reconceive the court cards of each suit. In Other Worlds Tarot, Kings have been transmuted into Deciders. I’ll refer to the sixteen “court” cards collectively as quad cards from here on out.
On this card, a person sits in a posture of confrontation. Behind them is an elevated view of the city, through or reflected in glass. The forest peeks around the edge of the card and plants grow up from the floor. While the environments of the four suits are fantastical, indicating that we are in Other Worlds, I wanted the quad cards to be more situated in this—our—world. The figures are in more rationalized spaces and the environments associated with the suits peek through the reality.
I hoped to do more than just change the name of the cards. Deciders are not rulers or persons of authority, they are people who act decisively and with intention.
In The Four Elements of the Wise, author Ivo Dominguez, Jr. provides an interpretive framework I found helpful to understand these characters without having to even imaginatively rely on the habit of associating them with kings and courts.
Dominguez notes that each court character, even when their names vary across decks and traditions, has their own elemental association. Kings are associated with Fire, Queens with Water, Knights with Air, and Pages with Earth.
Because there is a four-person court for each suit, each character aligns with their individual element as well as the suit element creating 16 elemental associations. The Decider of Rods is the Fire-aligned character in the Fire-aligned suit. A spicy meatball indeed!
The Decider of Rods can be a person one knows or a persona one channels. Positive traits of this Fire of Fire combination are blunt honesty, fearlessness, ambition, and boldness. Negative traits are impulsivity, recklessness, and volatility.
Does this card resonate with you today? It does with me—it’s the push I needed to finish writing this tonight instead of putting it off until tomorrow. It’s also the determination and drive to stay bold and visible so the deck reaches who it needs to.
