Latest / Spirit Mind Energy – Dein Universum für moderne Spiritualität | Gespräche mit Petra Baum / 052 Deck Introduction: Tarot of the Crossed Destinies | with Andrea Aste (Advertising)
Transcript
- Petra: Hello together, my name is Petra from Spirit Mind Energy, and I'm very pleased to welcome Andrea as my guest of the today's show. And so, Andrea, you have created a brand new Tarot, just finishing the artwork, and I think it will be available in stores in a few months. And it has a really interesting name. It is the Tarot of the Cross Destiny. so welcome. And the first question What inspires you to develop this tarot? Andrea Aste: Thank you so much for the to have me here. Is is an is a is a great pleasure and is a great honor. For me, everything started from the things I like. And I love reading books. And there is one book, ⁓ specifically one author that is following me from my teenager years this now is Italo Calvino. Italo Calvino was at the time in the eighties and nineties one of the most the most translated Italian author. In the world, so it it was quite important. And he wrote a book called ⁓ The Castle of Cross Destinies. And the story is incredibly fascinating. Imagine imagine a group of people that don't know each other, they are as strangers. ⁓ traveling across a forest, they are lost. They get lost, they don't know where anywhere anywhere where they are, but they found refuge in a castle. The problem is as soon they enter into the castle. They lose the ability to talk. So you see other people in a room and you go to greeting them and say, Hi, I'm here, and you move them out and nothing go out. So everyone is a little bit scared. They look around, there is not the host there. Everyone is there, but they don't know why. But they they found then all of them they gather around a big table. And in the middle of the table, there is a deck of tarot cards. And not knowing what to do because you see everyone is dressed in a very elegant way, they are noble, they are rich, they are powerful, someone a little bit less, someone a little bit more. They started to show the cards. And then you see someone taking a card, raising, raising up the cards and looking at that, and then indicating to themselves because the cards is the portrait of them. So this person, one by one, everyone, one by one, started to lay down the cards in line. And Row narrating their own story using only tarot cards because they cannot talk. And so all the others have to gather to understand what happens just following the story. But the more fascinating point of the full book is that when a row, a l a line, yes, no, a row, a line, whatever, a line cross a row, I never remember which is a line, which is a row, they cross it. Is this the story of the true person cross and meet at that point? So every pair character meet almost all every other characters. So you ended up with a lot, a lot of stories that are interconnected. And they recognize everyone that met in the forest just narrating everything. Philosophically is an amazing, amazing and amusing. Book because he asks something how meaning is originated, how we create meaning, why tarot has meaning. Calvino was not interested in the divinatory meaning of taro. He wanted to see how something that is important, something that has a meaning, a concept can emerge from simple simple images, the images of the taro. And you use it and you create two books about it. One one using the Visconti's Forza and the other one using the Marseille deck. So one is the castle of Cross Destinies, the other one is the Tavern of Cross Destinies. So one day I was thinking about creating ⁓ my new taro deck and I wanted to use Calvino ideas. Calvin I loved it. And so I said, ⁓ my god, but Calvino never thought about the castle. What if the castle become the castle become the taro themselves? So I started to work out around the concept. The idea of transforming every single tarot in a room, in a home, in a corridor, in a dungeon, in a creepy place or in a fantastic place, a garden inside a castle. Then I said, okay, but how can I connect the cards together? Because I have another idea. Immediately I said, this has to be a miriorama. A miriorama from Mirio, Mirion, Greek, Ancient Greek Rama, so the panorama is a mix, is a formanteau words. So it's one of the cards when you we use in the Victorian era to create a different landscape, and you have just every card is just a single piece of a landscape, and you can shuffle in whatever way you want, and whatever line you create, all the cards are always connected, visually connected. So you create different landscape, almost infinite landscapes using the same cards. So I wanted to create something like that with Taro. It's incredibly challenging because you have to connect them in a deeper, deep way. There are other tarot decks that are Meteorama, but to achieve the Meteorama or storytelling cards, the authors, what they did, remove almost all the colors, work with three, four, because in this way all the colors can match, all the shape can match, the lines can match, and it's technically easier. I didn't want to give up to ⁓ all my colors, so I used all my colors and I started doing it. And I have to say it was incredibly challenging but incredibly beautiful. And then one thing that I immediately decide to do is to kill every human figure in the tarot. If there are no human figures, I'll tell you later what you find. But the idea is to have the tarot is pure architecture. Because as soon as I started to think, to conceptualize about the castle and the tarot as castle. Petra: ⁓ my god. Okay. Andrea Aste: A lot of met the metaphor exploded in my mind. There are many, many things at the different levels, but all at once. Because the castle started to be not just composed of runes. It started to be like the God of Taro, like taro making given taro like a person. The castle knows what you need to encounter. The the tarot is the castle, rearrange the rooms every night, every shuffle every time he reshuffle his room, creating the rooms that you have to I mean let you meet the rooms that you need to understand what you need to understand or to answer the question that you have. So it started to be like that. And so it's very important that you see cards where there are no others. They are the remains, the traces. of other people navigating the rooms. you are the only living person in the castle. The castle is a little bit tricky because you don't ever know what will happen. But the idea is that with the deck you can create infinite architecture of esoterica. And that for me was pivotal. Then we can talk why Mirama we can talk the metaphor of the castle. ⁓ So many many things to say, but I want just to show two random cards. So you can this is the ten of coins that is a beautiful window, and you sight you see from the window the outside of the castle. Apart the castle, I have to say. Petra: So I think it's a really important point. You never leave this castle. You see in the edges, you go to different rooms and you see out of the window, but you will still stay in the castle. Andrea Aste: No. You know, there is a way, the best way to enter into the castle is to narrate the story I did when I launched on Kickstarter the project. So there are moments in our life when we see we feel a little bit lost because the reality of every day is quite, let's say, unsavory. There is no magic anymore, it's a little bit strange. But I discovered that reading for I I I stumble in a strange book there was a collection of stories coming from different people and they say that they have seen a strange castle appearing from nowhere every time they needed the most, every time they fell lost, and so there are sailors that in the middle of the ocean immediately they saw a strange tempest, they saw a strange rock with perch on top of it a castle, they describe it. And everyone described ⁓ you find in the like a mirage in ⁓ in a desert, you find in the mid of the German forest, the dark forest, there is castle like almost Wagnerian. And they say they started to describe the castle, and this the castle is like a patchwork of different architectures of different times. You have a crusade castle with onion domes, so like Muslim art, classical art, and yeah, is the Renaissance. Building castle like the the Chatoir de la Loire, so something a little bit more ⁓ magnificent, more powerful, more beautiful. But then you have the dark middle-aged castle that is the fortress to guard you against the enemies. Everything is there. And then one day I was sad, I was depressed, I was needing something more. And I saw the castle too while I was walking. And I entered into the castle and I started to discover it. And I spent many days there, but I d I always remember the first night because they were just you know I felt like a little bit like Alice in Wonderland because I found little pieces of paper with notes for me, like welcome, ⁓ your bedroom is on the f second floor ⁓ on the right, after the staircase. And so I walked out, I went to the bedroom, the food is there, it is the kitchen, everything's prepared for you. Do like this was your home. ⁓ okay, but who is writing all these messages? I hope to find my my my host soon or later, but it was late and then I went to bed. In the morning, when I opened the door, instead of finding the corridor that led me to the room the day before, I found the kitchen. And then when I opened the door of the kitchen, I didn't find the corridor that I remember, but I found a dungeon. So I discovered that every night the castle shuffle itself. Petra: Okay. Andrea Aste: And every room is a big tech and can contain a full ocean, mountains. Petra: And every day you are in a new environment and in a new story, ⁓ Andrea Aste: Yes, Petra: Okay. Andrea Aste: There was not another person. I found a little bit of traces of other people that went into the castle, but I was the only alive person. I found ghosts and skeletons and gulls, and I discovered that that are the ecos of different times, the past and the future, because the castle is a is a liminal place. It never exists in one place only one time. He exists at the same moment everywhere and everywhere. So is is an intriguing place to discover. the most fascinating things what what happened is when I woke up in the morning, the first morning, I opened the door and the corridor I crossed the night before to go into the room was not there anymore. There was the kitchen. And when I opened the door of the kitchen, I found a dungeon that was not there the day before. So I discovered that the castor shuffled his room like a deck of cards and then I realized why the cards, the the ta the rooms were so familiar to me, because every room is a tarot card. And so the castle is answering your question, lining up the rooms that you enter in. So if you have a question and you think about it before opening the door, the castle will answer it or try to or will guide you toward the solution of your problem of intuition that you need at that moment. Petra: Okay. Andrea Aste: It is an intriguing discovery. And this is the moment when I started to draw every instead of creating the map of the castle, because it's impossible, how can you create a map of a building that's reshape every night is impossible? So I started to draw every single room as a tarot card. What I was seeing, I was drawing. And so it is the origin of the deck. How I ended up creating the deck. Petra: Wie lange hat dir geholfen, die Karten und die verschiedenen Räume zu verbinden? Es scheint Andrea Aste: I think from the moment I started to conceptualize and the moment then I work on it and to the first drawing and the experiment because not everything were I mean you do a lot of preparatory drawings and then you you trash almost everything, you keep just one shoe, one here. It's a long year of working. But I like it because for me it was like entering in another dimension and when I I started to leave the tarot like Storytelling machine or devices, that is an expression that Calvino used to use many, many times. And as Sheridan, people were completely attracted and fascinated by the castle, the idea of building architecture of esoterica, the idea of exploring a castle. Who doesn't like to explore a castle that is there and is mysterious, with strange things and objects, and you have to decode, and there are the mysteries, and there are recurring objects and symbology. And you have to crack. It's very deep. It's very layered. There are a layer of meaning, layer of intuition. So it's very interesting because if you want to use the tarot deck as I would say a normal tarot deck, like a riderweight or the Marseille deck, you can. You have the classical meanings, you have the meanings that the images help you to find the classical meanings. But then if you want to find the meanings that are hidden there. The they say the other meanings that I put in the cards are coming from all the studies that I've done in many many years about meaning, about how the cards started to get a meaning, how the symbology of the tarot evolved, the different way you're seeing it, so from psychology to history to occult to anthropology, then cross-referencing literature, culture, music. And so I did a lot of a lot of things there in the castle. And ⁓ it it was a fascinating process. It was started one long year. I have one year of material, studies that I share, drawings, ⁓ intuition, books, films that in and people love it. So when I went to Kickstarter, exploded. I founded a Kickstarter campaign after forty forty-five minutes. It never happened to me that fast. Usually I mean it can be days and you're happy, but minutes I never expected. So I'm incredibly happy. Now I'm excited because I created A community of people loving this idea of the castle, the taro as the castle. I mean the castle is like the god of taro, it's like the taro cre transforming an entity, a supernatural entity. And then I crack with them all the level the different levels of the metaphor. Because you can say, okay, it's nice to have a Mirorama, but why to create a Mirrorama? Because one thing is yes, it's is logic logically is nice if every room is connected to the other, because so is more fluid. But then there is another thing that is the real reason why I wanted to do it. I needed a Miriorama because I didn't want to have a tarot deck when every single card is like a bubble of meaning closed in itself without connections and it stays there. I wanted to because our ideas are not like that. Our way of thinking is not like that, it's fluid, it's a flow of consciousness. So I wanted the deck to replicate, to mirror our ⁓ stream of consciousness and the way our idea are evolving our mind and are originated. So there is a re a very deep psychological ⁓ motif, reason behind the graphic of the deck. And I like that. I mean, before doing it, I I work again with ⁓ friends of mine interrupt psychology sharing ideas. I mean I was lucky because I studied philosophy of language at university. And before that I studied in high school, I study ancient Greek and Latin. So literature, ancient literature and then modern one. And it was incredibly fascinating. So for me creating this deck li was like coming back to everything I love in my life. The music I like, the book I like, and the books I like. So I interco I reconnect with people and say, you know, I have this idea about the way Taro can be used in all design in to replicate his axiological function and then have reference of book to read before creating, go deep in creating the book. So it's very intellectual, but at the same way it's very easy. Or is as I say is always multi-layer. You decide which level you want to go. And I make an example. Everyone of knows I of us, I think, or knows, have read or knows ⁓ Alice in Wonderland. Aliens in Wonderling is a beautiful kid's story, is a children's book. But the author was a logician. And he created the book in such a way that even the most silly question, that what seems a silly question, has a very difficult philosophical meaning. I think about one thing that came immediately into my mind is through the mirror glass, when Alice enter for the first time. Cross through the mirror she asked a question she saw a bottle of milk there in in the room and she asked a question that is very funny and said, I wonder why in the mirror world the mirror milk is good to drink. The philosophy of this question is amazing. Think about matter and antimatter. Antimatter is just the mirror of our matter. We have ⁓ electrons that are charged negatively in our reality. In the antimatter, the the electrons are charged positively with a plus. So is is is mirror, is the core is negative and it is fascinating. So if you enter in a mirror world, what here you can drink and eat is not taken for granted that you can eat and drink. So that question. It was a question about the structure of reality in a mirror way, in a mirror world. So it's a logic question, it's an ontological question, is incredibly interesting, incredibly philosophical. And all through the books there are games of logic, interesting question, game that use the language to show how language is a defective tool, because there are different levels of meanings, different levels of Meaning in the same words, or double meaning, or it depends on the use, of the context and ambiguity, and use it in a logical philosophical way. So if you read Alice in Wonderland, in T's optic is an amazing, deep, incredibly tough book, and it's amazing. My ⁓ professor at university, the professor of ⁓ philosophy of languages was at the time one of the most important philosophy of language in Italy and one of the most important in the world. Use Alice in Wonderland to make us understand many logic problems. We studied the book, it was absolutely mind-blowing. I love it. I love it as a kid, and then when I have to study as a philosopher, I love it even more. So with this tarot, I wanted to replicate the same process. You can read Alice in Wonderland, enjoy in love, and it's okay, it's perfect. And you can use this tarot that the tarot that the tarot cross destiny is in the same way. But if you want to go into the rabbit hole, You can and you will have a lot, a lot of fun, because you discover a lot of things. Petra: Ich denke, dich ein bisschen zurück zu allem, was dir ist. Dein Studium, deine Erfahrung, dein Buch, liebst, zu sagen, dass wirklich deine eigene, komplett neue Version und Vision von Taro Das ist so faszinierend. Du hast mir dass du verschiedenen Niveau und sie alle zusammen Kannst du mir Beispiel Andrea Aste: Yeah. Petra: Was meinst damit? Andrea Aste: Yep, I show you something that is even more intriguing. To show what to answer your question, I wanted to show you what happened when I started to ask questions, when I was dre drawing the cards. My goal was to make people enter into the tarot. Enter with using the metaphor of the room. So because you know how to explore a room, how to move in a special in a space that is 3D. So I wanted to replicate the same mechanism. But then I ask a question, what happens if I change the perspective? Think about the tower. That is one of the most fear cards in the deck that I love. it's the collapse the collapsing of the illusion, if you want. It's the collapsing of the ego, that everything that you create, that it has to be destroyed to go to the next level. Usually what you see what you see, you see the tower there, distant, collapsing with the lightning. Strucking it and people falling. But if you are inside the castle, what if the tower is one of the rooms of the castle collapsing while you are there inside Petra: People falling out, yes. Andrea Aste: it? In this way, you feel the power of the lighting bolt, you feel the wall shaking and trembling, you see the lights falling down with the chain and the rumor of the chain. When I draw this card, I have a standal moment. For me, a syndrome of Zezdal, you know, when everything comes alive, I hear the sound of this room collapsing. I I was blinded by the lights of the lightning. It was a moment like an epiphany. It was a deep, deep moment, and I was drawing it. I was completely lost in drawing the card. And psychologically it was like wow. ⁓ I was really shaking, I was moved by the card and I loved it. Because it I mean for me it was really deep. Look at the card, I don't want to crack every single meaning. Because I said every time I draw something, the something is dead for a reason. So there is a reason why there is a lamp here with a fire flicking in. There is a reason for this staircase here. There is a reason why everything is collapsing in this way, why is the lightning is cracking the wall. Then there are two motifs here. There are ⁓ there are carving stone carved stone supporting the arch with something draw there there is a meaning there there is it everything is there for a purpose but every time this is was the second carton I also no it was the first carton I draw in the full deck was the first one and this was the one that made me go on a full speed with the deck because I really really love it and I show it to my friends and the feedback Petra: Wow. Andrea Aste: was incredibly amazing because they have very similar perception like I feel completely unsettled, everything is collapsing on my head too. is created ⁓ Petra: Ich finde es interessant, wenn du in der Tür bist und du siehst, was draußen passiert Es ist deine eigene Reflektion. Was macht es mit mir? Ich stehe stark, ich benutze den Staircase aus oder ich gehe aus der Tür. Andrea Aste: Excellent. Then Exactly, exactly. Exactly. Is the castle collapsing? Because at the end, if you put another card, you have an escape. And this is now a little bit difficult, sorry like that. As you see, all the cards collide. So the floor is always connecting, the walls is always connecting. And what is here? This is the five of coins, and usually we see baggars outside in the snow. Petra: Ja. Andrea Aste: I reverse the perspective. You are in a cozy inside. Exactly. And there are people outside. But again, there are not people, there are ghosts. And I think this is important. I want to see why ghosts and not people. I have to go back to one of the authors that I really loved. He's Jean-Paul Sartre, the writer and philosopher, the French philosopher. Petra: You are in the castle! Andrea Aste: In the the being and the nothing He was talking, say we're describing a situation. Let's say that you are walking in a in a park and you are alone. You are the center of the universe for one practical way. You see a bench. When you see the bench, you are your mind calculate you almost inconsciously the distance between you and the bench. You are the point, the focal point of what you see. You are there, there is the tree on the left, there is a pond on the right, a duck flying there or swimming, whatever. From the moment another person enters is still the scene. All the connections that you create with the landscape are changed. The poker po focus point. is not you anymore but is the other person. So now you think about the distance between the relationship between all the other elements of the landscape and that person. So now the bench is not distant taught from you, but a distant taught from him or her. In such a way. So he said the the people entering your space change the perception of the space. And this is one of the reasons why family says that Lanferl is on Les Auto. The L are the others. Because the others influence our way of thinking or living of the way we behave with our own consciousness. So this is what I wanted to do: creating ghosts. They are not person. They're important because they change and shift the relationship between you and the cards, because you immediately look at them. The first thing is you see the cards, of course, but then your attention goes to the living being there, and you ask why are there? You felt watched by them. But they are not living beings, they are ghosts. They are skeletons, they are dead people. And this is another thing that was really, really important for me. I wanted that you are the only living being, the only living explorer of the castle. No other living beings are in the castle. You find the bags, you find the personal object, what they left them for you, but never them directly. But you find ghosts and skeletons. They are there because for me they are like the ghost. They are the ecos of different times and space. They are the e the shadows of what you can be or what you were. Or the shadows of all the possible futures that you can be before choosing. It's like a mirror of the infinite possibility of the universe, but like a mirage in the desert. It's like a trick of the eyes in an illusion. And from the moment then you reach to them, They disappear. And this is the nature of ghost. They are there to talk with you, to communicate. They presence is the symbol. They presence is the meaning with what they are doing. Sometimes they are silent, sometimes they are talking, sometimes they are showing the way. This is one of the most intrinsic. ⁓ Pector and Ghost that you find the two of sorts. You see it is shadow and the first thing is you ask okay is coming down from this staircase where there are two doors on top, so two rooms that you can explore with a pendulum, a grandpa clock here, with a skull here instead of the pendulum, the classical round metallic pendulum, so time is fleeting. You have remembered to die. I mean memento mori, remember that you have to die, but not in a gruesome, stupid way. The memento mori means remember that you are here for a fleeting moment in the time of the universe. So use your time wisely. Because you can make all the money you want, maybe. You can do all the smile you want, you can waste everything. But when you waste your time you never really will will have it back. So it's the most important commodity. we have as human beings. When he's lost, he's lost forever. When he's gone, he's gone forever. So instead of thinking about money, we should talk about time. Time is far more important than money, because you cannot bring- I mean when it's over, he's over. And you cannot do anything with the rest. So the the meaning of this card is, I mean, there are different layers, different things, but this is one of the ghosts that is more spooky if you want or more interesting. The one that says Which direction you want to take in life? Are you going down? Are you, I mean, you stay down? Are you going up, left or right? And above all, why I'm here like that? Am I the one that didn't dare to choose? I am the one to spend his own life on the staircase, wondering which door to open? Do you want to come with me? Like me? Lost? But then there is another. There is another thing that I love in the Ninth's card. One of the American poets that I love the most, Robert Frost, in the ⁓ famous poet poem is called ⁓ The Road Not Taken. ⁓ one of the lines he said, one day in a yellow wood I found two roads, and I I took the less trodden by and that make all the difference. It's the idea of choosing something that less people choose that make you different from everyone else. So it's the responsibility of the choice of the decision to be what you really are. Of course, I was reading this poetry. In a very difficult moment of my my life because it's the time when I was a teenager, and I discovered with Alrote that while all my friends were falling in love with girls, ⁓ my best friend was my lover. My boy gay friend, I mean male. So when I found the poem the poem of Frost, of course I was I read it in a way that was incredibly related to me, because I have to choose in that very moment. I mean what I wanted to be in my life. If to walk the road that everyone walk and pretend to be heterosexual, of if I wanted to walk the road the very few walk and be honest and say it and take the difference. Take the I mean be a different and take the responsibility of that. So this card for me always talk about the responsibility of the choice. It's never true that we don't have choice. We always have choice, the choice to be. Petra: Yes. Andrea Aste: Honest with ourselves, with our true being, or betray ourselves. So as you see, I see Taro as a mirror of my own soul. I created this deck. I wanted that this deck can be the mirror for everyone's soul. During the Kid Starter campaign, it was amazing because I received many questions or many interpretations of the cards. I have a friend of mine that noticed that there are elements in the cards that are recurring. And she started to ask why. And I refused to answer. And I said, I want you to discover why. Because it's important that if you enter in a mysterious castle, you have no guide. You have, I can give you a little bit of a rough guide so you understand what happens. But maybe I can describe very deep one card. So you know exactly what's happening there and the magic and all the layers and everything. But all the rest of the work, you have to do it yourself. Because then you have to connect the cards with the music, the songs that you like, the poems that you like. I always do this kind of exercise when I teach ⁓ people how to read cards. I said when I explain my deck or other decks, historical decks, I said you have to ask, What is important for you? What the cards is telling to you, but not just a level of meaning, because the meaning is a strification of different things. We can talk for hours about that. I think about emotions. Every card connects with you with an emotion. And think about what happened to Proust. Was there one day in his own village, he was k sipping a coffee, and he has a pet a petit madlenti. It's not a cookies, like a brioche or something like that. And he was eating it and eating it having memories from his childhood. So is is very fascinating. We can do the same thing with every single card in the tarot deck. We can connect in a deeply way, not just intellectually, but emotionally, psychologically, mystically, and go deeper. And for me the way that I found easier is to create rooms because we leave our houses, we leave our cities, we live in a tri dimensional space that for us is granted, is taken for granted, we know exactly how to enter from one room into another. So mimicking Petra: Ich denke, haben auch Raum für unsere Emotionen. Andrea Aste: Exactly. When I started to talk about the tarot of Cross Destinies with my friends, with the people following on Kickstarter, I realized that the metaphor I created was incredibly more deeper than I thought. Because think about the secret room, the room of the things that we don't want to see. When you say get out of the closet or have a skeleton in the closet, there is always something, the rooms of the secret, or of the secret garden, or there are lots of things that are there. And I like that. The rooms are unlocked. You don't know how to unlock. And think I mean this is a metaphor of our our mind, because this is the way our flow of consciousness we said, but it's even a metaphor of our unconscious, with everything that is there, layer, secret, dark. And I like that. Petra: Es viel tiefer. Andrea Aste: I wanted to show things from different points of view, so give different answers to the same question. So the graphic novel answers a series of questions. The film gives different answers. The deck creates more problem solvers in mode answering. So I I wanted to challenge people. Things that are not challenging are boring, are dead. now the deck is out because is I mean is is being printed, so soon will be out. But I already started long ago to talk about it. So it's not my child anymore. It's there. I lost control of the narrative. So everyone will have the deck will start their own narrative. ⁓ This is what I love. I have already a request of people they want to play games with me with the taro. Exploring together, reading together, creating community of people, they want to explore together the castle and play games, tarot games with the castle. And I love that. I really, really love it. Petra: So, let me ask, what is your personal favorite car? Andrea Aste: ⁓ wow. My favorite card is again one of the most difficult or the most fascinating, the devil. Petra: Okay. ⁓ es in der gleichen Weise. Du kannst den Teufel Du bist in dem Kastel und kannst sehen. Andrea Aste: No, exactly. The castle the devil is a j an ajar door open to absolute darkness with just two bright eyes peeping and looking at you. You see the if you look at pay attention, you find here all the elements of the classical cards. You see the minions, the the loose chains, you see a lot of stuff there. There I mean there are symbols there, there are symbols on the walls, on the archway. Petra: Ja. Andrea Aste: But the most important thing for me was removing the figure of the devil. And this ⁓ is a decision that I made from different points of view. Think about Anna Harend and her book, The Origin of Evil. The devil, if you interpret the devil as the evil, where is coming from? This is the question that crack open and destroy religion and make many people to be atheists. in the Christian world because how can you justify evil? How can you justify sufferance? There is one ⁓ philosopher that he said, demonstrate that God doesn't exist. Because who is that God so cynic, so bastard To let an infant innocent cry and die? There is no God. It's better better to be, because if we'll be a God is quite a sadistic one. Now it ⁓ is a provocation, but it is a theological problem. The justification of evil. Is evil equal to the same power of good? They are the same ontological power, one derived from the other. So when I draw the devil, I didn't want it to show a face because I remember again another another ⁓ writer once says that the best trick Ted the Devil did to human race, to us as humans, is to convince that he doesn't exist. And things what is the most dangerous evil is the one that you don't see coming, is the one that you started to follow without knowing is evil. So you act thinking to do something good and you are actually following his footstep. So it's amazing. And psychologically speaking, if you think about Jung, the devil is always the cart of the unconscious, of the shadow work. So in the unconscious, is the darkest part of the unconscious, we are. Pushing back from our conscious mind everything we don't want to face. Everything is too scary. The most strongest sexual impulse, the things that we cannot share with in a polite society, the things we wanted to really do, but maybe we don't dare to do. Not just negative things. Maybe there there are taboos, maybe there are things that are repressed there because we were taught that no, you have to do something different. So it's not used to be something catastrophically evil or whatever, it's neutral. can be absolutely neutral. So every one of us has his own devil there. So the devil, like the symbol of the unconscious, the symbol even though Petra: Und nur du weißt, was dein Geist im Andrea Aste: exactly. And then again, a demon. I love the word demon. It comes from ancient Greek diamond. The diamond is an entity that possesses you, the diamond, the divon inside you, and it can be good and evil, but it is is like the jinn of the Islamic tradition. That the jinn can possess a human being. But the jinn usually is an evil entity or is borderline, it's quite quite peculiar. While the demon, I mean ⁓ Socrates as his demon, he was talking about his demon, with his demon. So it's very, very interesting. It's like the muse. The muse that he's talking to you. So is it's quite interesting that we still keep in a lot of I mean very ancient words changing a little bit the meaning sometimes, but if we go back to the roots of them, we can discover a lot of things. And so when we think about the devil the card's devil, my first question is who is the devil? Is Lucifer, the most beautiful angel ever created? And he was represented like a blonde, beautiful guy, blue eyes. I mean, whatever he wanted, he at that time was the standard of beauty, it was him. But then he started to be corrupted. Not I mean, the the his aspect started to reflect everything was associated with him. But if you think about the first bib biblical ⁓ description of the devil, the devil is just a judge there, he's the prosecutor. Is the one that has to accuse you of everything bad you have done in life before going to hell of paradise. But then he started to have a different role. He shifted more and more and more to become the opposite of God. If God is good, he the the Lucifer is evil. But it's very interesting that we can call still call Lucifer looks fairer, the bringer of the light to someone that doesn't bring light at all. So the question is, what if is bringing the light, So what if Lucifer is like a Prometheus? They wanted the Titan to stall the fire to give it to men. And it's very interesting because if you think about witch trials, one of the accusations of witchcraft was the f not just to have sex with the devil, but to have been corrupted by the devil, because devil was giving secret knowledge, the dark art of magic. So is the Prince of Darkness, is the Prince of Magic. So the devil started to represent everything that is forbidden, the forbidden knowledge, something that is below, something that is dangerous to use, knowledge that is dangerous to use. It's intriguing. But it's a very powerful metaphor. So see how many levels you can have. Then if you think about even a more intriguing way of reading the devil as a card, you can think about Milton, Paradise Lost, or even better, because I love it more, Faust. By Goethe. And is is I mean, I have to say that that book is the book that changed my life. the book that ⁓ changed my mind and allowed me to give the strength, to have the strength, to get out of the closet and be out as a gay guy when I was a teenager was the Faust by Goethe. Petra: Ja. Andrea Aste: Because we have to decide what is good for us, what we want. The devil in in Gute is the one that says no, because he wanted to be free, to look for his own ⁓ path. But there is a point of a specific passage that I absolute love. The devil changed himself in his appearance, and ⁓ at university he appears like a teacher. And he talked to a student, and he teaches him a lot of stuff. He teaches him how to seduce a woman, how to be himself, how to be flamboyant. But he's amazing. But in that teaching, there were lines so beautiful and so deep philosophically a poetry. Is a is poetically is enormous poetically. Petra: Und kleiner Sidekick, Ich denke, Andrea, wir können nicht nur uns wir können auch die Dienste darüber Und für diese Zeit Andrea Aste: I'm sorry, yes. Petra: Ich sage, vielen Dank, ich bin mehr Videos über eure Karten und eure Fantasie Ich denke, wenn wir alle lernen wenn ihr wirklich etwas wenn es aus euch wenn eurer ganzen Inspiration, der ganze Prozess, etwas Neues wird es so großartig und so tief, ⁓ es Andrea Aste: Whenever you want, I'm here. Petra: Verbinde dich mit all deinen Gefühlen in den verschiedenen Räumen der Kastle mit den verschiedenen Gefühlen und Emotionen, die dir gehören. Wir geben dir den Link, wie du kaufen Ich denke, ist im August, du hast es du kannst es Ich sage, Andrea, Andrea Aste: Yeah. Yeah. Petra: Danke vielmals. ⁓ Andrea Aste: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. Petra: Hahahaha