prosewitch
Hi all--I'm curious about the particular symbolism of this card, but also about how people come to attribute personal symbols to the cards in general. When I first saw the Princess of Disks, I was utterly captivated. I got a Scandinavian feel from her, particularly Finnish--which really made me identify with her, as I'm a quarter Finnish and a quarter Danish.
I made an immediate connection not only with the card, but also with the disk she holds. To me, it's the Sampo: a magical object forged by Ilmarinen the smith in the Finnish national epic _The Kalevala_. The Sampo was supposed to be a three-sided mill, one side grinding out grain, one salt, and one money. Its lid is multicolored and even though it is eventually destroyed by Louhi, mistress of the North Farm whose daughter Ilmarinen courts, its fragments take root and continue to produce and symbolize prosperity. It makes perfect sense for the Princess of Disks, the earth of earth, to be holding the Sampo (who knows, perhaps she is the daughter Ilmarinen had been seeking to wed, born of witch-blood and proper bearer of the Sampo).
Now, I made this connection because I study folklore, hence I've read _The Kalevala_ and some of the scholarship on Finnish national identity and so on, and I'm not saying that Crowley or Harris necessarily knew about the role of the Sampo in Finnish epic poems (although _The Kalevala_ was originally published in the mid-1800s)... but the connection is there for me, and it's not any less meaningful even though I doubt it was intended by the creators. I also don't believe in a collective unconscious system of universal symbolism, so I'm not trying to push that explanation here so much as wonder about how symbols come to mean in the first place.
So I guess I'm asking two things in this post: which symbols and meanings do people see in the Princess of Disks (am I the only Sampo seer?), and what the process of symbol attachment looks like for others.
I made an immediate connection not only with the card, but also with the disk she holds. To me, it's the Sampo: a magical object forged by Ilmarinen the smith in the Finnish national epic _The Kalevala_. The Sampo was supposed to be a three-sided mill, one side grinding out grain, one salt, and one money. Its lid is multicolored and even though it is eventually destroyed by Louhi, mistress of the North Farm whose daughter Ilmarinen courts, its fragments take root and continue to produce and symbolize prosperity. It makes perfect sense for the Princess of Disks, the earth of earth, to be holding the Sampo (who knows, perhaps she is the daughter Ilmarinen had been seeking to wed, born of witch-blood and proper bearer of the Sampo).
Now, I made this connection because I study folklore, hence I've read _The Kalevala_ and some of the scholarship on Finnish national identity and so on, and I'm not saying that Crowley or Harris necessarily knew about the role of the Sampo in Finnish epic poems (although _The Kalevala_ was originally published in the mid-1800s)... but the connection is there for me, and it's not any less meaningful even though I doubt it was intended by the creators. I also don't believe in a collective unconscious system of universal symbolism, so I'm not trying to push that explanation here so much as wonder about how symbols come to mean in the first place.
So I guess I'm asking two things in this post: which symbols and meanings do people see in the Princess of Disks (am I the only Sampo seer?), and what the process of symbol attachment looks like for others.