The Shadow Knows

Part 4 of the Digital Oracle Deck series

This series explores the symbols found on 42 oracle cards developed through co-creative play during the fall 2022 Image Word Mystery course. I’m taking a deep-dive into digital divination and meaning-making — sharing my work with you while I transform these cards into animated loops & audio tracks for a new kind of oracle deck.

To experience all of the original audio & animation and get invites to upcoming Image Word Mystery creative jams, consider a subscription of $6/month or $60/year. Thank you so much for supporting me & my work.

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

The original index oracle card next to my corresponding pages of notes & poetry.

I try to look at each of these cards with new eyes as I pull them from the deck one by one and attempt to decipher all of their hidden powers. How would I read this card if I had asked the deck a question and this was the answer it gave me? How would I look at this card if I pulled it from the deck when I was seeking clarity, or asking what to do next, or what I should look out for, or what to try in the coming days or any of the other myriad types of questions we might ask an oracle deck?

In other words: How does this symbol help me make meaning?

Then I flip back through my notebook from the Image Word Mystery class from which the cards sprang forth to see if I can find an origin point. The class was built around poetic sharing & note taking with the explicit intention that we share ideas, imagery and symbols— so tracing many of these back to the moment they made it onto an index card is tricky. But also because of this, it’s almost certain to appear in a number of classmates’ notebooks or decks. Question for those of you who participated in the fall class: Anyone else find this symbol or corresponding language in your book or deck? What’s your context?

I couldn’t find a trace of this card anywhere in my own notebook, interestingly, but felt a flood of correspondences once I started considering possible names & words associated with the image…

The Shadow. The Silhouette. The Tall Dark Stranger. High Noon Show Down. The Gunslinger, The Cowboy, The Law, The Lone Ranger. A Confrontation. Facing The Sun. What’s In The Light/What’s In Shadow?

A Prompt For You: What would you call this card?

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“Mars Man”, 1987 by John Murphy Jr.

Neon sees it right away.

“It’s got big Mars Man vibes.”

Ohhhhh, riiiiiiiight, I think… We both look up to where this painting sits above our kitchen cabinets as though we’re looking at it for the first time.

My dad painted Mars Man in 1987 - when I was six. I remember loving his studio tucked upstairs in that farmhouse- it smelled like turpentine and woody incense and was full of possibilities and little treasures. It was his sanctuary and mine by extension. He was prolific in that studio. And looking back now, this would’ve been a really hard time for him- his parents both falling ill and passing with cancer, a layoff that would precipitate years of instability. But the only thing I know about Mars Man is that my father called it a self-portrait.

What I love about this being a self-portrait is that it looks absolutely nothing like my dad and it is 100% obviously him. And, I mean, that title… I’ve had decades to stare into Mars Man’s eyes and consider who my father was to himself through this image. I see layers here through my own lenses of experience and knowledge. I see vigilance, the enneagram’s counter-phobic six. I see my dad, the sci-fi buff & the sheriff’s son. I see the myth of the cowboy in the myth of the Wild West. I see the corresponding myth of space settlement. I see a man alone in a fight. I see the Lone Ranger. So alone he is 220 million miles away.

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I see a moment that’s anticipatory. No guns yet drawn.

Neon says, “I mean, no one stands in the doorway for long”— he’s talking about this feeling too. The original card, with this bold silhouette in contrast— it’s like the figure just kicked in the saloon door, shocking the drunks with high-noon sunlight and is pausing for effect.

It’s a good correspondence… But then I start to think…hmm… the cowboy hat and boots are very leading in this card image…so I consider, what if it was just a silhouette without the western apparel?

I instantly think of the figure & the door from Spirit Ring Me Like A Bell, an experimental re-mix poem and (silent) digital animation I made in the early months of the pandemic. I was working a lot at the time with this silhouetted figure as a sort of short-hand, automatic expression of human form. With the contrast of light and dark I was exploring the sense of shock experienced in spirit encounter.

“I was born with shadow as my light.”

Darkness & light gets me thinking then about all my shadowy work over the years. “Holy Shadow: Eulogy for the Light at Winter Solstice” is an incantation I penned and performed live in 2021 for Krisztina Lazar’s Mythology Cafe hosted online by the wonderful Vision Train.

The “Holy Shadow” is one of those topics that the internet loosely references as being “a Sufi story” (and variously attributes identical storytelling language to OSHO and other dubiously trustworthy randos) but nevertheless the story goes roughly like this (allow me to be yet another internet rando):

There’s this really good person who’s just so good the angels ask God if they can give them the power of miracles. But God is like, “Well, go ask if that’s what they want.” So the angels go to this really good person and they’re like, “Listen, we want to give you the power of miracles and you have to pick one— Here’s a whole menu of miraculous things you could have, like the ability to heal people by touch! Wouldn’t that be amazing??” And the really good person was like, “Honestly, if I have to pick something, I just want to do good in this world without ever knowing it.” The angels are like, *sigh*, “Okay, if that’s what you really want…”. So they imbued the person’s shadow with miracles. And anywhere it fell behind them flowers would burst forth in bloom, sicknesses were cured, water sprang forth from dry creek beds… and they were known, behind their own back, as the Holy Shadow…

I love this story.

All this, and yet I’m still not sure how I would read this card as oracle…

So I ran the symbol through some rounds of poetry exploration. Here’s the pantoum that came through first: