Nine of Swords: Cruelty
Postmarked May 17, 2002 (From , MA)
| Even before I started doing any of these postcards, much less the tarot ones, I knew this card was the "Nine Inch Nails" card. Or, at least, NIN as it was perceived at the time. Cruelty, usually to oneself, but, not always. A quick google found me this interpretation. Are you being mr. self destruct? The basic layout of this card is a combination of the Nine of Swords from the Thoth Tarot, and insert cover art from The Downward Spiral. The official websites do not show this art. I'm too old and impatient to wade through 10,000 amorphous fan sites to find the image. Fans will recognize it, though. Heck, even my folk-music fan roommate looked at my test-prints and inquired, "Nine Inch Nails?" The color, which was determined by the Thoth deck colors, is more like "Further Down the Spiral". If you care, you already knew that. The swords, in my version of this card, are expressed by "nails". Actually, railroad spikes. Actually, one spike that I scanned in for the original Infinite Halo pages. In fact, the entire background was made by copying that spike at various sizes and getting crazy with Photoshop's rubber stamp tool and randomly combining filters late into the night until it looked cool and was the appropriate color. (A newer copy of photoshop would probably save a record of exactly what I did. Heck, maybe my obsolete version does that already and i've just never needed that feature.) The astrological shorthand for this card is Mars in Gemini. The "swords" represent the Iron/Blood/Fire of Mars. The translucent sheet of perhaps paper, with chaotic line drawings on it, represents Thought/Intangible/Air of Gemini. (In the Thoth deck, the geometric patterns on all the swords cards are more ordered. Since this is a somewhat chaotic card, I made them a bit random and spastic to better match the NIN art.) This card assumes that Swords=Air, not Fire, (an eternal debate among Tarot snobs.) Although the presence of Mars makes this a rather fiery sword. |
Photography & Design: Julia C. Tenney |
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Updated: May 2002