Bitcoin Tarot : Card Back
SLAYING THE DRAGONs
Out of all the illustration created, the card back was one of the most important. As it would be on all the cards!
I had a few requirements:
I wanted them to be symmetrical so that you do not know if cards would be up or down.
I wanted the illustration to be simple but powerful.
I wanted the Bitcoin symbol.
I wanted a reference to the blockchain.
I want the card back to resemble playing cards wavy drawings.
I started drawing an imaginary world, were each card would be a depiction like a photo of an instant in that world.
If you take The Judgment card you can see in the far distance, many of the prior Major Arcana illustrations. If you spend some more time, you will see that there is not one card that does not fit in that imaginary world.
Cafe Bitcoin, towers, bank building, dark city, ocean, rivers, lake, are a few of the world places that come back in different cards.
So I started drawing the cards from the Major Arcanas with The Initiate and then in order all the way to the world and then continued with the coin (Bitcoin and so on). The cards are actually in the box in the order of their creation.
Only way into the card creation did the image of the card back came to me. I did not want to force an illustration, but wanted my intuition to show me the image. And finally one morning here it was in my mind eyes! But that it was not so easy. Some of the cards got drawn in one go. The card back took more tries than any other cards. And once down, with black background. I realized that a dark blue background would be better. That is where you are happy to have a computer and scan the image in and use Photoshop, instead of starting from scratch again!
But what is the meaning of the snake? or snakes? or is it snakes or two dragons?
Since ancient mythology there has always been dragons needing to be slayed and snakes scaring us.
That the dragons maybe within us or represented by exterior fear. It is in our best interest to vanquish them.
Snakes have a tendency to scare people. It brings us back to our origin story of Adam and Even. The snake being the entity of temptation that corrupted Man from living in the garden of Eden. The snake having scales, cold blooded, swerving as it moves hissing and ready to strike with venom. The snake really represents all our fears. All that we do not know. The unknown. And that is what Bitcoin is for a lot of people on earth still. With only 64 million wallets in the world in 2021, it is fair to say that very little people know anything about it.
It is my experience that people that do not know Bitcoin fear it. A scam. Dark web used by bad people. A way to make quick buck or lose all your life savings. So decentralized that there is no one to hold our hands and help me! and so many more excuses....
It is time to change that identity.
It is time to face that snake, or snakes and gather knowledge. My three girls loved watching Australian snake adventurer, Steve Irwin and Austin Stevens. I have to say it is breathtaking. They look for them, grabs them, play with them, jumps back, and then gets in arm length and starts taking selfies. The things is that they know so much about snakes that they are not really doing anything dangerous. But to us spectators, it is as if we dare look at the TV set. Fearing for their imminent death. The lessons being doing our own research (DYOR), learning and then we can become immune to our fears and can dive into the world of Bitcoin.
But why have one snake when we could have two?
The ouroboros is an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail. The ouroboros entered Western tradition via ancient Egyptian iconography and the Greek magical tradition. It was adopted as a symbol in alchemy. The ouroboros is often interpreted as a symbol for eternal cyclic renewal or a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. The ouroboros resembling the infinite sign, forming a eternal 8.
The Bitcoin standard can be seen as an eternal circle of financial prosperity. Rather than printing money and devaluing people's wealth. Imagine all of earth's wealth contained within the 21 million Bitcoins. We all play on the same level and products would find their real free market value.
Someone said that peace is war and war is peace as if in our capitalistic system one cannot exist without the other. Creating fatal ups and downs, destroying civilizations and countries in order to survive. Imagine a world in peace. Where the people own the money, not the governments. That is the bitcoin standard!
So in the image we have the Bitcoin symbol, connected to the ouroboros which is the blockchain, born from the the flower of life.
It is all about our own personal development. We are the ones that should be answering, what is Bitcoin? Through enriching our knowledge we start walking in the footsteps of Satoshi Nakamoto.