My dear friend, Jan, lent me a book by Katherine Follett called The Eight. It's a book wrapped around the game of chess and one very special chess set. But bottom line, it's about numbers...and everything in the universe is reduce-able to numbers. I knew I'd love it.

I was about mid-way through the book when I had one of those moments, as if a curtain has swept open in your mind, and you say to yourself, “How did I never see this???”

And the sudden enlightenment I received was about the ages old question around VIII and XI. Which is which? I've been reading tarot since 1964; that's a long darn time. And all that time I've been troubled because, while, yes, a person can take all kinds of liberties with tarot, it is at its foundation - was designed to be - a system...and I love systems because I love pattern because I love order. You can't follow a flow if there is no flow, and a flow requires many things going the same way. Tarot works because we're all part of a much larger order - a flow, as it were - of which it is also a part.

So one tarot artist can interpret the images used in one way while another sees the images in a completely different format...the system is the system is the system. I mean in my own deck, I've taken liberties even with the system...but I added to it, following, I hope, that flow. Time  institutes change, after all. But I didn't simply start inserting numbers where they weren't before, changing entire designations. And that's, in effect, what's gone on with VIII an XI for centuries...and I feel confident that I now know why: Power.

Those two cards, Strength and Justice, have been shifting designations forever in what I view, now, as an attempt to keep mystical information from the masses. Oh, la, Mystery Schools. Pooh. No better, in so many instances than politics. I'm sure there are and were good ones...but there are and were also ones, such as those the plot of The Eight is built on, whose real purpose was to know things that you and I don't know. Why? Because information is power. Simple.

VIII in most Tarot decks these days is Strength. And, if you look at the old Strength cards, Rider Waite, for example, the one with the woman and the lion, there’s always a lemniscate (the symbol for infinity) floating above her head, and that lemniscate is a thinly disguised clue to what VIII is supposed to be about: eternity. But the concept of Strength is not one of eternity; it's one of effortless control of situations, of having the power on your side already, much like a well trained martial artist whose mere presence quells the possibility of even needing to exercise his or her strength.

Strength is…strength. But Justice is about duality...and balance! Like Life and Death! Like two chains of DNA moving side by side. Physical life could not exist without balance. Strength may be a part of that but the balance itself is so much more...and the number "8" - the lemniscate itself - which is exactly what's been tugging at my brain lo these many years - contains strength but it contains so much more. You can see the duality within it, it is the duality that creates the strength...and the flow that allows it to go on and on and on.

That duality is why I chose to call the Sacred Earth Seven Element Justice card Karma instead - and not that old-fashioned concept of karma - the instant kind that the Beatles sang about. The Karma this deck refers to is Balance: This begets That. And that card, Karma, formerly XI is about to take it's rightful place in Sacred Earth Seven Element, as VIII.

Strength will move to where it belongs, XI.

  VIII Karma     XI Strength

And thanks to Jean Wilcox and to Julia Lehman of Vision Thirteen Photography for their beautiful and powerful images. I'm especially liking that reflection of the Taj both because it is a reflection and therefore "8"ish and because it is about a love which was eternal and love, so they say, makes the world go round.