Major Arcana II - The Magician

Amazon boxes, packing paper, acrylic paint, 2025. 

About a week after the inauguration, I received a voicemail from someone I love very much. In it, she said "The world isn't real shiny right now, but it's what we've got."

The Magician-- and all magic, really -- is about what you do with what you've got. It's making dinner for the people you love out of the 4 disparate ingredients in the fridge and marching in the streets and writing letters to the Editor and Civil Disobedience and active listening and praying to angels you're not sure you believe in. Sometimes none of this magic works and sometimes you think it's not working, but it's only because you can't see that the sky-star arms of the Egyptian goddess Nuit are emerging from your head. Nuit’s arms are ready to embrace what you can't. Nuit’s arms are also ready to punch the bad guys while you're still quibbling over the ethics of all that. Nuit has invited scarabs (also known as Dung Beetles, sorry) to make their home all over you, because magic is creepy sometimes and because, to her, these creatures are sacred. The way they roll balls of dung reminds her of her own daily task of giving birth to the sun and rolling it across the sky.

This Magician is inspired by the work of Aleister Crowley, who was many, many things, but certainly not the "Wickedest Man in the World." The hands of Nuit could easily point a graceful finger toward several other public figures who may be worthy of the superlative.

This work is part of an ongoing series attempting to alchemize the ultimate symbol of modern materialism — the Amazon box - into larger-than-life spiritual talismans.