The Minor Arcana
Follow along with your Liminal Space Tarot Cards (link to Etsy).
Cups
Number Cards
-
A nonsensically twisted spiral staircase climbs up to the ceiling into the dark, where a lamp in the middle of the ceiling is off. Barely visible in the dim light, you can see square tiles covering the walls and a small pool of crystal clear water, which you are wading in. There is possibly a narrow fountain streaming up from the pool, but it’s hard to tell.
-
A skylight beams down on this flooded office room. There are two strange pipes coming out of the wall and connecting to the floor. It looks like this place is meant to be flooded. The floor was built for it.
-
What appears to be three dark, wooden, too-narrow waterslides are coming out of the wall in this tiny room that looks nothing like a waterpark. That pool looks too small to keep sliders from hitting concrete on the other side. They could also be fountains.
-
Four large columns help support the heavy ceiling in this industrial pool room. Doesn’t look like the kind of pool meant for swimming in.
-
This rusted tunnel is decayed and flooded with filthy water, so… why are the lights still working? A large pipe lines the wall to our left along with a guardrail on each side, some sort of bar on the top right, and the lights on the top left. That makes five total strips, along with five visible sources of light.
-
Six pipes are suspended over another non-swimming pool in a room with pink lights. Their purpose is a mystery, just like most other things in liminal space.
-
This room looks like a modern re-creation of some antiquated Venetian or Egyptian indoor canal market. Seven doors lead into the shadows of unknown corridors. Decorative Shrubbery fills a nook beneath the ceiling.
-
This industrial-scale water reservoir room must have been photographed with an old digital camera, because it’s certainly not HD. The main room is lit by an invisible source of white light radiating from the air above the right and center window. There are four haphazardly arranged light fixtures on the right pillar, each with two bulbs, totaling eight. It looks like a stepping stool on the left of the floor-pipes and a streetlamp to their right. But in reality, the object’s identities are not truly understood.
-
Nine large shoe-shaped yellow objects line a well-buffed tile floor bordering a vast red carpet. Behind them is a darkly shaded warren of pipes and pillars. The objects appear to have no function.
-
This slippery floor of this underground reservoir is covered with well-maintained smooth ceramic tile. The pipes in the foreground could be diversion mechanisms to direct the water to different areas or manage individual valves, but something about that rightmost vertical bar/pipe doesn’t look right. There are ten total bars/pipes on the floor and rising to the ceiling, and there are ten total strips of shadow lining the pipes on the ceiling.
Court Cards
-
The Page of Cups is a bright forest of shiny, painted pipes with a barren steel pipework structure in the backdrop. The large clocks could be pressure gauges.
-
The Knight of Cups is a long, dark tunnel, possible under a wide stretch of road. What looks like an air duct emerges from the ground before you and travels along the floor in an insulated pipe, all the way to the end of the tunnel.
-
This scene looks unreal. Possibly computer animated. But the room is so simple, It’s hard to tell. It’s odd that the bright aquamarine light shining from the base of the fountain in the pool before us is causing the rest of the room to grow purple, with no other visible sources of light. On closer inspection, it’s probably the reflective properties and deep purple hue of the tiles surrounding us.
-
The King is the main pillar before us, in the midst of this industrial/commercial platform walkway. The pipe(s) on the floor could be functional and connected to the floor, but it’s hard to tell. Could just be impromptu pipe storage. Even the pillars could double as pipes. The place looks somewhat messy with the cloth on the right foreground. Though no water is visible, this building feels liquid/gas-related.
Pentacles
Number Cards
-
This lonely office space directs the Fool toward the only way out – through the too-narrow hallway and towards the golden light beyond.
-
These twin buildings look like something out of a city in Northern Siberia, taken on an Arctic winter day. It could be a bus or train station. Maybe the ticket booths are on the other side. Two brown burlap sacks are randomly piled next to each other on the gravel under the light.
-
This liminal suburb looks abandoned, yet everything is perfectly maintained. Three partially dormant trees frame our view of the street. It must be the end of winter – a transitional and liminal time of year.
-
It’s hard to tell, but I believe this is an airport, looking out of the windows between gates. Four “suitcases” are evenly piled into a symmetrical structure in front of us. The black one forming the large foundation appears sort of like a crate, while the brightly-colored suitcases on top look like children’s bags or tacky purses. Do your best to imagine what the advertisement on the LCD screen is about, because even I can’t even fathom what it could possibly be.
-
The five of pentacles resembles a middle eastern neighborhood. There may have been optimistic speculation about the economy in the past, which led to the construction of these buildings. But political instability led to the abandonment of the project just before it was finished. Seems like they fled the site in anticipation of a bombing. The three main strips of windows in the center have five windows visible from the bottom up.
-
This lunchroom has less light than you normally see in a room like this. It could be a mall, government building, prison, or insane asylum. This liminal space is hard to pinpoint. A pathway hugs the wall halfway up, and it’s lined by a railing. There are six tables and six dull yellow lamps lining the walls.
-
This uncanny courtyard could be a memorial or art piece, near to the entrance of a city park where a bright white streetlamp would be left running at a dangerous time of night. A still, green body of water borders the courtyard to our left like a silent beach. On the opposite bank of the water, wild shrubbery is barely visible, shrouded by the black void beyond. The seven of pentacles has seven columns visible on the statues in the courtyard.
-
This looks like another middle-eastern or American-southwestern neighborhood that was abandoned right before construction was completed. The eight rooftops of the ace of pentacles top buildings that look only recently left. The façade is complete, but not the landscaping or the interior. There are no lights in the windows of this residential neighborhood, even at this liminal time of dusk/dawn.
-
The nine of pentacles presents as an office courtyard, surrounded by the walls of the building. The grass looks so trimmed, it must be fake. Strange place to relax in and take lunch, if you ask me. In the bottom left corner, you will see a small part of the handrest of a plastic lawn-chair. There are nine randomly placed black horizontal lines across the walls. Four on the right and five on the left.
-
This looks like another desert apartment complex, only this one is far cleaner and more finished. The liminal time of night is broken by ten yellow lamps along the wall of the complex.
Court Cards
-
Let’s hope the page doesn’t trip when walking along this eroded, treacherous stone path toward the light the guides us through the door ahead. The shadows of the night exaggerate the uneven quality of the road.
-
This could be a sketchy neighborhood somewhere in Baghdad or Cairo in the dead of knight. The knight of pentacles certainly takes risks as he makes his way out of the golden glow of the light behind and into the shadows, toward the blue star-like light, which shines like a lighthouse at the other end. What the oddly striped object is, near the bottom left of the image, is anyone’s guess.
-
The Queen of Pentacles shows her abundance and material excess in the form of a fully-stocked grocery store, with no one else in it. The Fool can take anything he wants and it’s all free, if you can handle the endless, inadequately lit isles and long shadows that begin to make you jump with fright after a while.
-
The King of Pentacles shows stability and structure through what looks like a top-secret government building or underground bunker/prison of some sort. The Kings modest throne sits empty in the bottom right of our view, with no visible leg room between the chair and the tiny table. It faces the empty doorway and the towering columns and floors above. Each floor and hallway of this vast building is bathed in darkness, with the LED lights in the King’s central room casting only a small ray of light a few feet into each level.
Wands
Number Cards
-
This windowless playroom looks like a nursery in decay. The Ace of wands has only one lamp and one exit. The blue bars across the ceiling make little sense, and the shape of the shelf is off-putting.
-
A padded playroom with two clear pathways to the other side, where the light is. The plastic walkways look slippery, with what looks like water between them. It’s hard to tell what sort of black pillar is dividing the paths, vertically across the center. It appears close and far away at the same time.
-
A shadowy kids daycare room with three dim lights.
-
The ceiling of this dark liminal artroom chamber appears dozens of feet thick. There is no way out. Not even through the skylight. The cool white light casts down to illuminate 4 exquisite columns that almost look real, but not quite. You would think they would hold up the ceiling, but they seem to reach just below it. And their placement doesn’t quite make sense.
-
Five randomly arranged floor-levels ascend towards the garish desk chair. This looks like a scene out of a 1970s games show filming set.
-
Six red balls rest upon the floor of this abandoned, yet pristine, play area. The only light comes from a small one in the left corner behind the Fool. Stairs leading up to the wall make it look like you can climb through the dark hole they end at, but it could just be a black circle painted on. It’s also clear that the “slide” of this playroom is non-functional. Look closely and see what I mean.
-
Seven chairs are suspiciously arranged in a circle, just below the ghostly light of the only chandelier or lamp in this cavernous conference room. It may look like there is an eighth chair, directly across from the one at your center, but upon closer inspection, that is just an illusion. It’s also strange that the wall furthest in front of the Fool is so dark, even with light directly in front of it. Is this the dark spirit that arranged these chairs? I doubt humans have ever existed in liminal space.
-
This dim playroom has a very nostalgic vibe, as well as an uncanny one. This playhouse is well lit on the inside, with yellow walls accentuating its glow. The only problem is that the stairs on the right seem pointless because there doesn’t appear to be an entrance to the playhouse on that side. Also, I have no clue what that yellow globe is on the ground outside the playhouse. Overall, if you count each window and ceiling light, this room has eight sources of light.
-
If you count every column and include the rough-looking tiki head in the center, the total is nine. The shadows cast by these columns appear warped and almost have a mind of their own. In a way, they start to look like spilled petroleum on the ground. Could that be what the unknown yellow object is in the right foreground of the card?
-
This is the most unsettling, uncanny playroom in liminal space so far, with fake vegetation and grainy camera definition to bring out the digital horror. Ten is truly an extreme of the Fool’s journey through Wands. There are ten total columns and ropes in this playroom. The uncanniness is clear when you notice that most of these “play” structure pieces seem to be functionless. They look real from a glance, but it’s a mask. The “slide” on the left is too shallow and looks like steps. And the stairway to the right seems to lead to a dark hole in the ceiling. The rocker/swing near the center looks like it has a 2-D animated teddy bear or rabbit with a red shirt, lying on its stomach.
Court Cards
-
The Fool stands in the position of the Page of Wands, at the beginning of a long, unnerving pathway through a dark, unnatural playroom that looks like a Façade on top of something colder and more sinister. The only light comes from us, and from a small white lamp on a grey metallic wall at the far end of the tunnel. The Page’s pathway to growth.
-
This otherworldly liminal space artroom is CGI-horror (AKA “computer animation”) nightmare fuel. The three chairs in the distance look almost normal, except the one in the center is just a back-rest with three legs, while the other two chairs have too many legs. The chair nearest us is the most uncanny part of this AI-generated horror room. It’s clearly a knight, but merged with a chair? All living beings in liminal space appear to be statues, except the Fool. Or are we a statue too?
-
The oddly-placed fluorescent magenta lights give just enough light to see a bone-chilling indoor nursery-room hallway, ending in an empty cradle. The Queen of Wands must be a nurturing mother, but this is eerie nonetheless. The painting above the cradle looks like a ghoulish, childlike apparition. The positioning of the crooked painting and cradle in front of the door leads to confusion. That could mean the door is no longer in use, and the room on the other side could be forever sealed.
-
This is the most beautiful and pristine artroom I’ve seen in the liminal space of wands so far. There is something satisfying about the gently, lively colors that reflect the Fool’s light, with the contrast of a dimmer background in the unlit room. The man in the painting is the King of Wands, and even his face just seems wrong. Look closely and see. He looks like his head fused with a bronze helmet that became his crown.
Swords
Number Cards
-
This singular water tank sits upon a foot-deep, man-made, body of water that seems to edge up against the sky like the edge of the world in the movie, “The Truman Show”, where the horizon is just a wall. Alternatively, it could just be a well-shined, blue tile floor. It’s hard to tell where the Fool Stands. It could be on the deck of a strange boat or behind a purple wall on land.
-
Two doors in the backrooms that represent two different choices in the two of swords. Both go into mysterious darkness, and we don’t know if they even lead to different rooms, or just the same one.
-
Three “swings” are illuminated by a purple spotlight somewhere to our right. This place looks too abstract to be real. The purple deck we stand on ends at the edge of what looks like the endless light-time sky beyond, from a planet with a different-colored atmosphere. Even the swigs don’t make sense, because they have three chains attached to each swing, each in non-sensical places that would inhibit actual swinging. There is a pointless extra bar below the bar the swings are already hanging from. The ladder on the left doesn’t quite make sense either.
-
These for white domiciles look to be carved from single pieces of solid marble or granite. There seems to be sheer break in the ground where the flat street meets the water below the Fool. The water appears so still, that not even a single ripple hugs the shoreline, and it reflects colors of the sky that aren’t there. Could the colors be from minerals or pollutants perhaps? There is no visible landscape beyond, indicating either a vast flat expanse, or the edge of a plateau. The colors of a sunset are reflected off the marble from light behind us and to our right. There are no stars in the sky.
-
Five of swords show five oddly-arranged fluorescent lights guiding us down a dark hallway, lined by a faux wall. It’s a pit so dark that the bright light of florescent bulbs can’t even reach the floor ten feet below them. It’s as if the walls and floor absorb their light. Barely visible at the edge of light, some unidentified objects are piled up in the dark hallway.
-
The Fool is standing on a monumental abstract art exhibit at the top of a mountain, looking out toward the setting sun. The warm rays, open sky, soft shadows, and pink fluffy floor are comforting and inviting. It’s hard to tell what this pink material this is, or what sort of soft silky “seat” is in front of us. The six of swords has six unorthodox “pipes” emerging from the platform to the left of our silky seat.
-
This body of water looks like something in-between a pool and a pond. Whether it’s for industrial or civilian use is unclear. Seven tall fence-poles stand as steaks in the ground, framing the wire/bar fence that borders this pond. Dark, grassy hills rise from the left and the right of the pond, and we stand on a pink platform of fake deck-wood, looking out over the pool and towards the featureless concrete structure beyond. Other than that, all we can see is all-encompassing sky. The structure has no windows; only dark entrances.
-
The Fool seems to sit on the ground of this backrooms’ hotel hallway, lined by 8 lamps, and seven visible doors – one of them being the exit at the end of the hall. The ceiling reflects light like it’s made of something metallic or plastic in nature.
-
Nine of swords is the basement of the backroom offices, where everyone parks their non-existent cars. Or they would if the place wasn’t blocked by an endless array of que-line fencing. There are nine visible columns for the Fool to see, which seems like strangely few, considering how this liminal space parking garage appears to go on forever. The progressively brightening yellow light in the distance looks like we are approaching the fires of hell.
-
This eerie hallway is lined by ten artistic orange orb-lamps. These lamps hardly cast any light, and the dramatic hallway before us is lit by what seems like a series of skylights, bringing natural light from the liminal world outside of the backrooms.
Court Cards
-
The Page of swords stands in a place of childlike wonder. It’s in an expressionist painting. The Page looks out over a calm, bright, azure-blue sea under a turquoise sky. The cloud in the distance, hugging the surface of the sea, is merged with the unmistakable head of a polar bear. It has eyes and a nose, so there is no denying it. The Page stands on a flat platform, surrounded by an uncanny series of doors in various states of opening, and no visible ceiling. Or is the polar-bear-cloud the Page?
-
The Knight of swords has recklessly found himself in what looks like a modern-day dungeon, bunker, or underground facility of some sort. The greenish industrial ceiling lamp guides us to what looks like a caged gate. The kind intended to protect something important or keep away unauthorized personnel. The Knight is determined to find the secrets of this underground liminal space. But the strange arching wall seems to converge behind the gate, so it’s hard to say if the gate leads anywhere at all, or is just pointless insanity like so much of the rest of the backrooms.
-
The Queen of swords takes the form of an abstract statue of a hooded figure with a flowing robe, gripping a thick, carved post with a wide base. She stands on a pedestal, facing partially toward the fool. Behind her, a vast violet sea stretches out into the distance, into the twilight of a dying cotton-candy sunset. To our left, an uncannily blue pool sits as still as glass. There appears to be a strange dark streak overlaying the right-most quarter of our view. It shows what could be a distorted reflection of the left side of the image. But the main problem is that the streak doesn’t follow the ground, like a mirror would. It appears to overlay our vision instead of being part of the landscape. The “reflection” could also simply an opaque view the rest of this strange, white-brick platform.
-
The King of Swords is a towering pillar that reaches toward the sky from the midst of the stone courtyard of an empty, liminal castle. What looks like identical (possibly fake?) flowers line up in flower beds on top of the castle walls, and the wall of the black pit in the center of the courtyard. The contrast between the shadow to the right of the King, and the light to the left, is staggering. You can feel the change in temperature as you walk from dark to light, and through those featureless openings and doorways in the castle wall, and into it’s dark, blank interior.