A 78-Card Geometric Mandala
“Devil inside, the devil inside
Every single one of us, the devil inside”
(From Devil Inside by Inxs)
AUTHOR’S NOTE: At the end of this essay is a numbering table I created several years ago for the sequence of 78 tarot cards that begins with the Fool as “1” and ends with the King of Pentacles as “78.” I use this regularly to reveal the third card that sits at the numerical midpoint between any two cards in the series. Today, while reading about the two halves of the I Ching’s 64-hexagram configuration in Ethan Indigo Smith’s The Tao of Thoth, I decided to turn my table into a form of geometric mandala that exhibits an expanding and contracting progression; it expands up to the 9 of Wands (31), then plateaus for 16 cards and begins contracting after the Page of Cups (47). (The line count runs 1–2–3–3–4–5–6–7–8–8–7–6–5–4–3–3–2–1.)
The sequence moves in a serpentine fashion from left to right and then back again in alternating rows from both of the single-card entry points. I struggled with getting it to come out even because it wanted to fall into a 72-card array instead of 78, so I had to double up on the three-card lines at the top and bottom. Because I started with the Fool as “1” (there is no zero in the numbering scheme), each trump card in the mandala slips down one notch from its customary numerical position, just as it did in the table. (For example, Trump XV [the Devil] appears as “16” here.)
The key design feature is the central arrangement of three columns that suggests six “diamonds;” three linked “hexagons;” and four “rectangles” in its structure. Some of the inferred polygons share numbers, so certain cards repeat in this architecture, with the Devil, the 6 of Wands, the Ace of Swords and the Queen of Swords standing out in particular. Two of the three hexagons and all four of the rectangles have a card inside, placing it in “high focus;” not surprisingly, these are the same four cards I mentioned above. (For what it’s worth, I attempted to draw connecting lines between the numbers in these figures but it was a mess; you’ll just have to see them in your mind’s eye.)
The core image reminds me of the vertebrae in the human backbone, and there are seven “nodes” that might (with a little imagination) be equated with the seven chakras. (This was completely accidental but it makes sense.) Interestingly, the middle hexagon (“G,” the more compact of the three that is empty at its center) would correspond to the heart chakra, while the one above it (“B-C”) subsumes the third-eye and throat chakras and the one below (“D-E”) captures the solar-plexus and sacral chakras. Of special note is that the Devil in the third-eye chakra corresponds to the Hebrew letter Ayin (“eye”) in the Qabalistic tarot.
I also shoehorned the model into the astrological directions, with South at the top, North at the bottom, East at the left and West at the right. I may do a “left brain (logic)/right brain (intuition)” exercise with it as well.
I don’t know whether this will be of any practical use, but as a graphic artist and esoteric explorer I like the concept. For starters, I think every time I perform a personal reading I will locate the cards on the number table and then transfer them to the mandala to see if there are any intriguing visual associations between them that might provide food for thought. As I see it, any practice is good practice.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on October 8, 2024.
