Weekend Sketchbook

viii. Justice 

A short break from the In Search of the Miraculous series (more of that on Monday). Here, six more pieces of line art from the Chariot Tarot, straight from the sketchbook. 

In Search of the Miraculous #2: The Lonely Death of PD Ouspensky

Where I got the title for this series from.

In Search of the Miraculous was the defining work of Peter Ouspensky. As Ouspensky goes, he was certainly a lot more principled and honest than a lot of the New Age thinkers.

Lemurian bodies

Pren

They tower even over the Rmoahals, a full seven cubits high, broad shouldered, narrow-hipped, their long arms and short, bandy legs, neither of which ever fully straighten giving them an immediately recognisable profile. Atlanteans find it hard to tell them apart. Male, female, and the dual-sexed third gender that constitutes a good quarter of Lemurian society, all look very similar to the smaller peoples, with their shallow jaws and flat, wide-mouthed faces and their golden-brown or deep yellow skin. The Lemurians can tell. It amuses them that other peoples can't, and have you heard a Lemurian laugh? It is like huge stones grinding.

Small, sharp, widely spaced eyes in black, deep blue or violet stare out from under a heavy, fleshy brow. Coarse brown or sometimes white hair sits on the tops of their head, but doesn't grow over the back, where, in those Lemurians who are exceptionally talented psychically, there sits a third eye. Draped in skins dyed in bright shades of red, blue and green, carrying wooden or stone spears, the Lemurians have not taken on the technologies of the younger races. And why should they? They sing the Akâsha. It gives them all they need. Lemurian songs aid in the hunt, calm beasts, heal wounds, and lift and and move colossal stones.

The beasts they herd, the earth reptiles and the mammoths, serve as riding beasts, beasts of burden, and sources of food, clothing, ropes, bone bows and arrows, dyes and paints; no part of them goes to waste. 

Teeth made for chewing eat barely cooked steaks; huge gnarled hands work on intricate weaving projects and finely pulled thongs. 

They smell of blood and earth and the sweat of beasts. They rarely speak, but often sing in voices so deep and rich that a choir of Lemurians can stop a charging army in its tracks, no exagerration. Once, a few thousand years ago, an army of the White Sun with its land chariots and sky chariots came to take the City of Conical Stones. The Lemurians sang the army to stillness, and sang the flying monoliths that yet fill the skies of the South East down on their heads, and all were destroyed, and the stones serve as their graveyard still. 

Rmoahal Bodies

Ghenim

So large, and yet so ignored, so silent. The shackled giants who stand in the corners and alcoves of every Atlantean city, who toil in the fields, mines and factories, who fight in the slave battalions, who huddle in the shanty towns that the Atlanteans insist so hard do not exist.

Muvian Bodies

Page of Cups

They look like Atlanteans, the Muvians; at least at first glance.

Illustrating Tarot Cards

 Tarot update: 39 cards finished out of 78, although I may add a couple of cheeky extra cards. I'm varying in how close I get to Rider Waite, and the symbolism in some places, which is personal to me, may in some places seem off or even broken to a more adept reader (images after the cut, one of which is NSFW).

Tlavatli Bodies

Queen of Wands

The Atlanteans are, although they would deny it openly, always somewhat afraid of the Tlavatlis. Part of that must be because of their size which, unlike the generally cowed Rmoahals, couples itself with a restless energy.