Episode 153: Celestial Machine: On the Temperance Card in the Tarot

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 13 September 2023

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Even learned commentators on the tarot are likely to point out at the fourteenth major arcana, Temperance, is a bit of a boring card. At least, it comes off as dull until you look at it closely, as JF and Phil do in this episode. What they find is that the Temperance card is actually a diagram, a kind of blueprint for a celestial machine that underlies human technology, beckoning us to restore even the most mechanical contraption to the raw weirdness at the source of everything. Header image by Rolf Dietrich Brecher via Wikimedia Commons It's not too late to join JF's Nura Learning course, ["Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence."](www.nuralearning.com) Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's podcast on Wagner's Ring Cycle. Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia. Download Pierre-Yves Martel's new album, Mer Bleue. Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop Find us on Discord Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau! SHOW NOTES Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth Adrien Lyne, Jacob’s Ladder Weeping Angels, Dr. Who creatures Joel Schumacher, Flatliners Lawrence Halprin, The RSVP Cycles Gregory Bateson, Steps To an Ecology of Mind Hesychasm, monastic practice Yoav Ben-Dov, Tarot: the Open Reading The Gnostic Tarot Jeffrey Kripal, Authors of the Impossible Nagarjuna, Verses of the Middle Way Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:02.0	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:20.0	For more episodes or to support the podcast,
0:23.4	go to weirdstud J.F. and I are back,
0:57.5	added again, mad at the pen. Glad that we win a tad fat and a bad hat for men. It's a new academic year,
1:05.4	fall 2023, and in the first week of this semester's syllabus, we're covering the temperance card of the taro.
1:13.0	This is the ninth installment of our irregular series on the 22 Major Arcana,
1:18.3	and if you are new to the taro, I encourage you to check out the overview presented in the introduction to our first installment in this series, episode 77, on the Fool Card. Since then, we've rambled
1:30.8	through the Empress, the Moon, the Tower, the Wheel of Fortune, the Star, Death, and the
1:36.9	chariot, following a path that marks where our heads were at each time we recorded one of these shows.
1:43.7	Why temperance for the new year?
1:46.5	For me, it has something to do with returning to the hurly-burly of academia.
1:51.4	Temperance means mixing things together, and after a year's sabbatical,
1:55.6	I'm looking for the right mixture of active and contemplative modes of life.
2:00.4	For JF, on the other hand, it has to do with
2:03.2	a new class he's teaching, art in the age of artificial intelligence, which it is not too late
2:09.3	to sign up for on neural learning. We've put a link in the notes to this show. Despite the fact that we
2:15.9	had widely different starting points, JF.F. and I ended up
2:19.7	converging improbably on the same topic, cybernetics. It might be helpful for me to introduce this topic.
2:28.4	Cybernetics is a science of automatic self-governing control systems. It originated in the 1940s, in the wartime research
2:37.0	of an MIT mathematician named Norbert Wiener. Weiner was working on improving the accuracy
2:43.0	of anti-aircraft guns and conceived a model where the behavior of an enemy pilot would be fed
	...

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