Lindsey Scharmyn (Rogue Ways) | Analyzing the Transhuman Tarot & Archetypes of the Artificial Future
Lindsey Scharmyn (host of the powerful Rogue Ways podcast) joined me for an analysis of the revamped tarot card images hidden in the recent game Cyberpunk 2077. This is not a plot breakdown or game-related show, but instead a look at the synchromystic message from the archetypes contained in this "transhuman tarot." Overall, the episode makes for a great tutorial on the themes found in tarot, astrology, and the universal hero's journey.
This was a fascinating and fun, albeit dark, examination and Lindsey made an excellent commentator, thanks to her many years of experience with the major arcana. You'll want to watch the video version of this episode so you can follow along with the slide images we're looking at.
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In this episode
Core themes
Symbolic Literacy as Psychic Self-Defense
Chance opens by answering listeners who fear being programmed by dark imagery. In his experience, looking at the dark does not harm someone filled with light, because light is awareness, and bringing a culture's symbolic subtext into conscious view lets us choose what we accept and what we reject. He calls symbolic literacy psychic self-defense and suggests the game's artists may have meant their inverted cards as a warning as easily as a subversion. The framing sets the tone for reading the Rider Waite deck beside the Cyberpunk 2077 images, and it returns in his outro, where he wonders whether the original archetypes predate language and symbols altogether.
Archetypes, the Hero's Journey and the Sky Clock
Asked to define his terms, Lindsey breaks archetype into arch, a ruler or dominating force, and type, a theme, and she treats the major arcana as the ruling themes of a cyclical hero's journey that every life follows. She stresses that each of us is both unique and exactly the same as everyone else. Chance adds that the arch can also point to the starry dome of the zodiac, so the tarot cannot be separated from the sky clock, which describes the seasons as much as human development. In his outro he cautions that the mythic correspondences on the slides come from one book and stay subjective.
Transhumanism as Corrupted Archetypes
Lindsey reads transhuman as beyond human and calls the urge to get past being human a rotten seed. Drawing on Gnostic lectures, she argues that we do not leave humanity behind but eventually become fully human by accepting our dark potential. Chance defines transhumanism as replacing parts of human behavior or the body with technological improvements, and he claims its deeper aim is to separate people from nature, pointing to the stated goal of some leaders to map minds into a simulation. Lindsey adds that leaning on technology erodes inherent abilities she calls superpowers, which we are letting go.
Inverted Cards: Fool, Magician and High Priestess
The cyber Fool, Magician and High Priestess are read as deliberate reversals. Lindsey sees the Fool's carefree stance turned into a burdened march beside a dying dog, while Chance notes that an open posture of receiving has become one of reaching to take. Both treat the Magician's knives and masks as the opposite of aligning will with creation, with Lindsey describing four bodies held in balance and Chance linking the masks to a false persona. For the High Priestess, Lindsey sees a crown that wraps and strangles the throat, and Chance adds that the original's blue is missing, which he takes as deliberate.
Venus, Love and the Cyber Emperor
The Empress is the one card with some beauty left, and both hosts react emotionally. Lindsey sees a triumphant figure who paid dearly to return to a place of suffering, while Chance argues that love cannot be inverted and that nature will survive, even if the corpses of cyborg zombies end up feeding it. He casts Venus as the last holdout. The Emperor then reads to both as technocracy in a card, wired to cords that feed him energy and enthroned too high to reach, and Lindsey contrasts him with strong leaders who stay grounded.
Quotes
“Light is awareness, and bringing the symbolic subtext of our world into our conscious mind's awareness is precisely what allows us to choose what we take in and what we reject.”
“In a way we're absolutely unique and nothing will ever be exactly like us right here, right now. And another way, we're all exactly the same as everyone else.”
“We really don't come to truth without dealing with inversion or with lies.”
“You don't go beyond human. You become an actual human eventually.”
“The real evil genius scheme of transhumanism is to completely separate human from nature.”
“I really want to emphasize that we have superpowers. We just are letting go of them more and more in embracing of this complete inversion of nature.”
“Sometimes the best magic can happen because we don't have so many constrictions on our mind and our expectations of what might happen.”
Lindsey Scharmyn is an energy worker and host of the Rogue Ways/Rogue Soul podcast, offering spiritual healing services and psychological insight into psychopathy, malignant personalities, and psychic self-protection.
See all Lindsey episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
