Decan Walk in UE5: Taurus I, II and III Post-Mortem
60 days into my 365-day-long esoteric game jam.
In Decan Walk — Aries I, I broke down my plan: perform a Decan Walk (following along with Susan T. Chang’s 36 Secrets) as a 365-day-long game jam, creating a new “platform” for each Decan every ten days. In Aries II and III I continued my technical, conceptual, and magical, post-mortems. And here I present the practical time crunch of Taurus I–III, plagued by grading and other earthly matters.
Taurus I
Mid-April is always a crunch at school. Committees are in their final push, classes are gearing up for final exams, and with nice weather comes more socializing. And allergies. It’s all great (well, not allergies). But it’s also intense. I ended up swamped with travel and events over Taurus 1. The East Coast Games Conference and public readings for the BOOM Fringe Festival happened back to back. The Festival was amazing and lasted all weekend, which made the next school week denser than usual. And then my son’s 15th birthday happened. The ten days flew by, but I knew it would, so I was a little better prepared this time.
In this tableau, I couldn’t seem to escape the imagery of the Wall Street Bull and resigned myself to its allure. But rather than charging, the bull is yoked to its plow. This decan isn’t particularly energetic to me. Rather, that tension between promised charity and devastating poverty ran a current under the iconography of the bull pulling the plow. The keys of the Hierophant cast their shadows over the scene, which will cross it even as we move forward in time, eventually fertilizing this soil with warmth and light.
Taurus II
There’s usually a bit of a slowdown at the beginning of May. Students furiously work on their final projects, and committees have mostly decided which incomplete items will fall into the “do next year” category and which will into “scrap it”. The last days of this decan saw my final exams, but I actually wrapped up this build a little early.
I certainly had more time to devote to this tableau than the previous one. I also spent more time with the textual sources and more time sketching out my thoughts on the iconography. Despite having more time, it’s fair to say this tableau is pretty far from the typical imagery of this decan.
In Taurus II, the 6 of Pentacles sits between the High Priestess and Hierophant, and T. Susan Chang makes some beautiful observations about the nature of charity being the manifestation of that which is occulted.
I took this idea and ran with it (maybe a little far). Rather than recreate the imagery of the Picatrix, I found myself focusing on a vast, cosmic goddess. Her uncomplicated and unconditional love is both Marian and Aphroditic. There’s not really a paradox here (as I experience it) but the suggestion of paradox is emblematic of the tension between exoteric and esoteric knowledge.
In my depiction of Isis-Half-Veiled, this celestial goddess holds a pomegranate, alluding to the pomegranates on the veil behind the High Priestess and her intimate knowledge of death and rebirth. In her other hand, she holds the scales of the merchant in the 6 of Pentacles. The connection between justice and charity reminds me of recent conversations around equality and equity. There’s a close connection between the two, and justice and charity ask us to be both deeply within ourselves and aware of ourselves in relation to others. There may also be a negation of the self in order to actualize a vastness that is all loving and unconditionally loving.
Taurus III
This last one was a bit of a poopshow.
I normally have a lot of time at the end of the semester once my grading is done. But somehow the week got extra busy with a wedding, tons of meetings, another project, and a symposium. Suddenly, it was May 20th and I had nothing to show for it.
This tableau is very ‘bare minimum’ and looks it. The great elephant model by exegetpro provides an adequate focus for my read on this decan, but there’s just not a lot of depth here.
T. Susan Chang’s “fail harder” description of Taurus III is fantastic and really gave me a lot to think about. I’ve generally read the 7 of Pentacles as a farmer appreciating the growth of his garden, and I’ve read it as satisfaction on work well done. But Chang emphasizes the appraisal of work completed and the assessment of work yet to be done. This blew my mind a little. Now I also see this card as the process of looking for where things went wrong, even when they mostly went right, in order to be better in the future.
I still think there are depths to this decan I’ve missed, and that could come out in the tableau better. But, yeah, this was an exercise in failing harder, for sure.
