Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics proves mathematically that any system can be stable if it has a generator, an absorber, and — attention please — a nonlinear referee component, someone who takes a side in the argument between king and queen andenters on a campaign of intrigue against the opponent.

Hermeticism holds just about the same position: the whole world consists of antonymous dyads balanced by a third element, the hermaphrodite.

Chapter 13. What the patience of Medici is, or hello and how do you do!

Let’s try to sum up everything we’ve covered so far and see whatthe PM is.

First of all, it’s worth remembering the history of the card deck.

Official records say that in Europe, both Tarot and standard card decks most likely appeared in the Middle Ages in royal and aristocratic families and spread fast to the common people later on.

The royalty and nobility learned of the card deck from the court doctors, scientists, and alchemists of the time, who gave advice and information on all kinds of matters, ranging from the gout and chiromancy to binary poisons and gold mining. Few know that those court sawboneses came up with many medicines, chemicals, and medical tools and devices. Their knowledge came, in turn, from dusty volumes written in a variety of languages, brought from their travels to half the world’s countries.

The putative father of the Patience of Medici is John Dee, a noted occult philosopher of that time. Apparently, it was he who taught the technique to some court nobility. Records say he belonged to a mystic organization of that time, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, famous for its focus on Tarot cards and the Hermetic Heritage.

The main reason why the PM found its way into the masses was the invention of book printing. The printing press made it possible to mass-produce fairly priced card decks.

In that period, card games gained popularity with various kinds of mercenaries, palace and city guards, and the like — anyone who had time to kill while on the job.

But, as the initial card design was too elaborate, both in pattern and in color, the initial appearance of the cards eventually came to look like the card deck we know today.

The twenty-two Major Arcana were cut off right from the start — even early on, they hadn’t made any sense to anyone except practicing mystics, who had at least rudimentary extrasensory perception. The lower classes had no use for those cards at all. Although Wikipedia does mention a card game that used the full Tarot deck (about seventy-six cards!), that game didn’t gain popularity. Its rules were quite complicated, taking a long time and a good head to learn. It was only natural that uneducated soldiers, who were often drunk to boot, cut the size of the deck any way they could.

At the same time, the fifty-two Minor Arcana made more or less sense to anyone; and once they were reduced to thirty-six cards printed in two cheap colors, the classic card deck we all know was born. With the difference that the “classic” cards are nowhere as old as Tarot, whose age is a number at least two figures larger.

Anyone with some logic would agree that modern decks of playing cards derive from Tarot cards. Although their symbols are somewhat different, both have four — precisely four — suits and are ranked by number the same way, so there’s no doubt at all as to which of the two is way older than the other.

The twenty-two Major Arcana pose no serious questions because millions of practicing Tarot card experts, both professional and nonprofessional, use them for fortune telling. The role of the Minor Arcana, however, isn’t as obvious. Oftentimes, they’re not even used in Tarot fortune telling at all.

The Gypsy fortune-telling school is interesting that way.Gypsies, conversely, used only the Minor Arcana, and as the standard playing card deck at that. The twenty-two Major Arcana cards weren’t used at all.

All this leads me to an interesting conclusion, but it lies outside the scope of this book. Suffice it to say that the practice of patience is characteristic of the Gypsy school.

From all this, a few indisputable facts follow:

• The modern playing card deck is nothing less than a stripped Tarot deck.

• Tarot cards are normally used to tell the past, the present, and the future. In other words, they open a way into Earth’s information field.

• Gypsies fortune-tell through the game of patience, using the regular playing card deck. Which — it bears repeating — are a stripped Tarot deck.

• The Tarot deck falls into two parts — the Major Arcana (twenty-two cards) and the Minor Arcana (fifty-six cards).

The principle that makes fortune telling possible and valid is pretty well known. It’s the symbolism principle from The Emerald Tablet by Hermes Trismegistus: “As above, so below…”

To put in differently, the fortune written up in Heaven reflects in the card deck on the Earth below.

But few remember the rest of the quote, “… as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul.” That is to say, as in the symbol, so in heaven.

The Emerald Tablet offers an unequivocal equilibrium that makes it possible to not only tell but to construct fortune.

So why is fortune constructing so rare as compared with fortune telling? Two reasons:

• What we call the “telling” of the future is often its hidden construction — after all, if you go to several Tarot card experts to find out about your future, you’ll more likely than not get different answers. Often, that doesn’t mean some of the experts are wrong; it’s just that there are different projects for your future, and the choice you make triggers one of them.

• Any project can or cannot be sound, to an extent. A project must adhere to certain design laws, and it can be