Card Two: Half Priced Hot Wings.

DEPICTED: against a densely radial black and white pattern-

two lovingly textured deep fried hot wings float compellingly against the hypnotic radial pattern of the background. At a brief glimpse, the wings are descending into a spiral well, floating in the abyss of desire and empty promises.

WHAT THIS SAYS TO ME:

What's better than one shitty thing that seems like a good idea in theory but will leave you heavy, filled with regret and buyers remorse; faintly nauseous and the end result of compounded misery and animal abuse? TWO SHITTY THINGS. HALF PRICE. That's what. AMERICA.

Wings are the part of the bird that are bony and filled with delicate tendons, febrile stretches of skin that once held flight feathers and the promise of the open sky. Except, of course, in the case of chickens who are rendered flightless and locked in tiny boxes or the crammed floor of a 'free range' chicken farm before surrendering their flesh unwillingly to the butcher's knife. Instead of the more muscular, tender and therefore desirable portions of the bird's corpse, the wings are essentially garbage, offal, waste. Until 1964.

The story goes that Frank Bellissimo, a bar owner in Buffalo NY, received the boney wings by mistake instead of another portion of chicken corpses and invented this dish to make the most of a bum deal. A slightly different story from his son states that Teressa, Frank's wife, whipped up the deep fried hot wings as a late night snack. Either way, the hot wing was born. Bastard child of confusion and late night drunken munchies; greasy, deep fried waste meat and future staple of bar food everywhere.

Wings are ordered as 'food' strictly in the presence of alcohol; the liquor cuts the grease and renders the stringy meat palatable. Wings are all about the sauce, the coating that disguises the paucity of real nutrition. Food at restaraunts is sold at half price to move something that is about to expire and become unfit for human consumption. Spices are often used in lower quality meats to disguise the taste of rot and to stimulate the human digestive system to allow it to adequately process the potentially poisonous flesh.

The best part of this card is that it depicts drumsticks, and not wings; the ultimate joke about mistaken fowl anatomy, floating compellingly like a drunkard's waking dream.

IN A READING:

The Half-Price Hot Wings are the card of things that seem too good to be true and will leave the querent paying in ways that have nothing to do with money. What seems to be too good to be true, is, in fact.

What the querent is being offered is a shitty deal wrapped in an appealing sauce to make it more appealing. Consume at your own peril. Whoever is peddling this soon-to-expire 'deal' is not to be trusted; trust instead the truth of your eyes and the unadorned facts- the wings are not wings, but legs.

The Emperor has no clothes, the American dream contains small bones that may choke you. Should you take the bait and swallow the 'deal' whole, you will end up with twice the amount of garbage for the same price, and likely will wake in the sober light of tomorrow full of regret and tangy indigestion.

Those wings are pretty hot. I suppose. 

Card One: Instinct.

DEPICTED:  against a plain white background-

a cockatrice of a medieval beast- stranger than anything that was imagined from the fevered dreams of a 13th century syphilitic monk. With the head and neck of a serpent, the feet of a bird (I presume chicken! are *you* chicken?) and the body of...an apparently human brain.

The snake stares out actively to catch the eye of the beholder- smiling and flicking it's tongue, no aloof reptilian creature here. The expression on it's face seems to draw the viewer into a secret joke, an unspoken cosmic prank reflected in it's very existence.

In other words, the human condition in a nutshell. (Nutshell not depicted).

WHAT THIS SAYS TO ME:

Evolution is the ultimate fucker to our ability to feel like we have any grasp on WHY we do anything. Our most basic actions are the result of hundreds of thousands of years of genetic programming, much of which is frankly irrelevant in the way that nature intended for most people trundling along in the industrialized world. This is, of course, why amusement parks and violent video games and even sports exist- to cater to our host of instincts that clamour for attention.

What we think of as our consciousness- a unified and rational self- is an illusion.

The chicken feet are, of course, the most basic instincts. Flee, scratch, perhaps fight. Those claws are sharp, after all. Instinct has legs- it is the primal motivating force for our actions, trumping logic without even having to get out of breath. Indeed, it *is* logic.

To balance the chicken feet, we have the snake head. It is tempting to say that the snake is the 'fight' part of the 'flight' of the feet, but that seems too pat. All living things, after all, embody both of these options, amongst many others. The snake is, of course, our desires and the twisting turns we stretch rationalization through in the process of attempting to convince ourselves that our instinctive decision has a logical origin. Being on top, it 'rules' the brain. It has the eyes, the mouth, the sensory organs. It alone is responsible for the input that the brain receives. Hilarious!

The brain is the body. This is the essence of the card's name, INSTINCT. The brain IS the body. The body knows what it wants, and has an intelligence all it's own that cannot be denied. It is for these reasons that out language includes the idea of a 'gut feeling', of having the heart be a sensory organ for emotions.

IN A READING:

The Instinct card addresses the unknown impulses within the querent. Depending on the surrounding cards, it can indicate that the querent is aware of their instincts and is comfortable trusting them, or is disconnected with their instincts. In the latter case, important messages are being lost. Your various parts of your self, especially your most primal drives, are being ignored or minimized. Instinct Reversed can indicate that the querent should set aside their instincts and attempt to use simple step by step thoughtful logic to work out the solution. It can also indicate that you are dealing with an unusually impulsive and primal personality; one who reacts and responds, rather than thinks and acts.

In a reading where this card comes up as the final solution or outcome, the querent is exhorted to trust their first instincts as to the solution- it will almost certainly be the right course of action, or the right decision about a person, place or thing rather than a situation- unless it is reversed. In that case, your instincts are steering you wrong in this situation. You are reacting to a situation that is not really there. Take a moment before engaging those chicken feet and sit and think!

Either way, this card is a call to remember that we are not really consciously in charge of our own drives, desires and impulses- and neither is anyone else.

Obey your Instincts, fool. 

THE PROCESS.

The Arcane Bullshit deck is different from other oracle decks in oh! so many ways. Besides the first and most obvious way, namely the iconically tongue-in-cheek names and natures of the menagerie depicted on the cards, is the fact that there seems to be little to no natural progression of the cards, such as is found in traditional Tarot.

Or is there?

The 50 cards can be sorted into four groups, based on the background design. Of course, these groups are uneven.

vortex- 7
plain white- 9
plain black-5 (six if you include Everything's Fine, which is split black/white)
stripes-28

Thanks to this magnificently uneven sorting, I take complete freedom in starting wherever the hell I want to in this process, and continuing forth from there. A card will be picked at random from the deck and expounded upon.

There will be no schedule to this process. This is for fun, not profit.

The journey begins soon. You have been warned.

INTRODUCTION

Welcome. If you are here, you have a taste for the esoteric, the ridiculous and the sublime. You are aware that the future is bullshit, and that coming events cast their shadows before them, allowing us to see, darkly, through the glass of possibility. You know that symbolism is the universal language, and revel in it's creative use.

You enjoy Arcane Bullshit.

This deck is one of the best fortune telling decks I have ever seen. I love that it doesn't come with a book or instructions. However, I have such a strong reaction and conversation with the individual cards that I began to make my own notes as to their meaning, depth and context.

I am sharing this with you, so you can get in on the fun.

I have no affiliation with Arcane Bullshit in any way other than having a deep love for the deck that they have birthed from their obviously fever-dream-riddled subconsciousnesses. Kudos, fellow travellers.