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| An image of the Five of Pentacles card from The Tarot of the New Vision. A person sits on the floor inside a building. The person has one leg and is dressed in a tunic with the hood pulled up. They are holding a child in their arms. A crutch is leaned against the wall beside them. Above the person, light comes through a stained glass window. Five encircled pentacles are centered in the glass design. A square of light is illuminated on the ground, and the person sits in the shadows behind it. |
How does the way we pay attention to the world shape our relationship to structures of material safety in the world?
On April 20, 2024, the Sun moved into the first decan of Taurus. The beginning of Taurus season marks a shift from Fire to Earth, shifting a focus that was initiated by creative spirit into the realm of physical sustenance and tangible growth. The first decan of Taurus is ruled by Mercury, planet of communication, translation processes, and travel between that material/immaterial worlds. The card associated with this decan is the Five of Pentacles, pictured above.
My keywords for the Five of Pentacles and Mercury in Taurus are: the need to change our material reality, perceiving structures of exclusion, and shifting our perspective on social adversity.
The text I read and wrote on for this decan is The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera.
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| Cover image of The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera |
A common interpretation set of the Five of Pentacles is poverty, adversity, and misfortune in circumstances. This year, I’m thinking about how often my understanding of social adversity fixates on narratives about the individual, erasing awareness of the structural systems that allow and perpetuate the existence of adverse outcomes. Pentacles mark the suit of Earth (physical and material resources and matters), and this decan is ruled by Mercury (The Magician, trickster and change-worker) in Taurus (The Hierophant, gatekeeper of institutions). The image in the card above shows a disabled person and child sitting on the floor inside a stone building. This card reinterprets the traditional Rider Waite Smith illustration, which shows two people walking in the snow *past* a stone building (a church, possibly, as the stained-glass window might suggest). The RWS image shows two people whose marginalization is connected to their status as literal outsiders, denied access to the safety the stone building represents.
I love the ToTNV version of the Five of Pentacles because it suggests that individuals gaining access to institutions of privilege and wealth is not a solution to inequity. The people in the ToTNV card have made it inside the building, but they are still marginalized: sitting on the floor, relegated to the shadows, and providing care to each other in the absence of received care from the institution. What are the systemic belief systems, cultures of exploitation, and histories of violence that perpetuate inequities of care in and out of institutions? If the material reality in the card's scene is to be truly changed, the institution and its hierarchies must be questioned.
The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera is a novel that creates space for many more threads than the one above. The book weaves its images and ideas together with the unquantifiable sophistication of a root system. The themes of the first decan of Taurus are one of the meaningful paths this book helped me to reimagine with significant difference.
Vajra Chandrasekera is a writer from Colombo, Sri Lanka. The Saint of Bright Doors is his first novel, and his second novel Rakesfall is forthcoming in June 2024. He has published over 50 short stories (and other writing forms!), which you can learn more about here. You're welcome.
When you imagine a closed door, what are the first physical details about it that come to mind?
The Saint of Bright Doors is the story of a man named Fetter. It is also a fantasy novel set in a world in which otherworldly entities--many frightening, unsettling, or haunting to perceive--populate the streets of daily human life, refugees flee pogroms and seek refuge in a city governed by an overtly enforced caste system, and government committees are formed to study the phenomenon of the mysterious, closed doors around the city whose purpose no one has been able to identify. This is the kind of book where being told about these worldbuilding elements will not reveal the book's meaning--you have to go through and experience the story unfolding.
When you imagine opening the door, what do you expect you might encounter?
My favorite aspect of this book is its status as a coming-of-age story. We first meet Fetter as a young child, then the majority of the novel follows Fetter into/through adulthood. Fetter was raised as a young child to become an assassin targeting his father, a cult leader whose institution has dominated the land in which the story takes place. After surviving his childhood, Fetter rejects the destiny that was forced upon him, and on his journey of self-determination, he reckons with the wounds and awareness of the past. Fetter has to deal with a lot of family shit–his parents are both larger than life, iconic figures whose reputations threaten to eclipse his personal experience as their child. But this mythic set-up never gets in the way of how excruciating Chandrasekera allows things to get when Fetter has to navigate, for instance, an incoming phone call from an estranged parent.
When you imagine looking at the closed door, do you understand yourself to be on the outside or the inside of the door?
Chandrasekera blends the bildungsroman with the speculative literary genre, so that our journey through Luriat is shaped by learning and questioning, as is Fetter’s. Coming to understand how things work in the world of this novel is a process that is mirrored by the plot, and while the most obvious questions in the book are clearly answered at pace, there is plenty about this novel that prioritizes nuance and the ineffable. In the city Fetter has immigrated to (Luriat), he begins to attend a support group for the rejected children of divine cult leaders, and this wonderfully mundane world-piece is made weird by the fact that Fetter’s daily life is also filled with magic, though sometimes he is lonely in his acknowledgement of it, and sometimes the requirements of surviving in the city overshadow his magical experiences in a way that makes too much sense. This book gives a lot of love to both mundane and magical experiences, which creates an incredible experience for the reader: through this juxtaposition, we are constantly asked to notice what is seen, what is invisible, and what is visible but ignored.
When you imagine pressing your ear to the closed door, what do you hear?
In Luriat, citizens, refugees, bureaucrats, activists, prisoners, and scientists all have to navigate the institutions of immigration offices, prisons, quarantine camps, and housing tenements. They also have to live with the weird, liminal existence of the bright doors, and the secret that will be revealed of their existence. I can't say more because I'm committed to not spoiling anything, but want to wave my arms and shout about how impactful this book's worldbuilding was for me. The way this story works with themes of the institution and power and magic and secrets makes me want to shout from the rooftops!
When you imagine touching the closed door, what are you hoping to change on the other side?
Finally, I think it’s important that this book is a fantasy novel. The surreal is a language in which we can learn how to feel and think differently about what is real, material, urgent, now. And the world in TSoBD is completely special, wonderfully weird, kind of impossible to forget. This novel is important in lots of ways but one of those ways is that it has created a magical experience for a lot of people and experience is not that easy to find, I think, as opposed to content. You can’t just tell me something and expect that exchange to fundamentally move me–I have to go through something, move alongside or even against you, and meet you on the other side. This novel does that. It shares its griefs and concerns and aspirations and humor and tragedy with the world, and I am very thankful for the chance to be impacted and changed by this novel.
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Closing questions:
- What are five changes you would love to see in the world that you consider possible to achieve within this lifetime?
- What are five changes you would love to see in our world that you consider unlikely, or even impossible, to achieve within this lifetime?
- What are some of the similarities and differences between the two sets of answers?
- Set aside five minutes to reflect on your interactions with the world from the past month. What are some things you witnessed, participated in, or tried for the first time that remind you of your answers to Question #1?
- Set aside five minutes to reflect on your interactions with the world from the past month. What are some things you witnessed, participated in, or tried for the first time that remind you of your answers to Question #2?
- "Saintly Traces: Between the Cusp and the Slip": a blog post by Vajra Chandrasekera highlighting Sri Lankan writers of speculative fiction
- Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association
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